Spring Maintenance

It's spring and time to work on the bees!  At first glance in March, it looked like all four hives made it through the winter.  I did a quick check on the sugar candy one warm day and they all had some left.  After some discussion with Jeannine, we decided to move the bees for the summer.  They have been on the southeast side of our shed for years, but it makes it hard to mow and do other things in that area sometimes when the bees are really active.  So I moved them across the yard to a more isolated location.  I did it in mid-April one evening by securing the hives with ratcheting straps and carrying them the 100 or so feet across the yard.  I put some netting and brush in front of the hives in their new location so that any field bees would hopefully reorient themselves before heading out and I left a nuc with some drawn comb in the old location to catch any field bees that might return there.  For a couple days, I would empty any bees in the nuc into one of the hives.  Still looks like four hives were going at this point, but some were obviously stronger than others.  I also unwrapped them.

May 2 - With the slightly warmer weather, we decided to start feeding some 1:1 syrup.  We're using our half gallon quail waterers and an extra hive body on top.  They don't seem to be taking it down too fast yet.

May 4 - We really got into the hives today since it was a nice warm day.  Our hive names are currently A, B, C and D (from left to right).  The good news was that all the hives had bees.  The bad news is that hive D didn't have any eggs or brood and had a pretty small number of bees.  Hive A, B and C were all going great with lots of eggs, brood and capped cells.  So well in fact that we decided to use one frame from hive A and two from hive B to try to jump start hive D.  The frames we took had a lot of eggs, brood and capped cells (along with a lot of nurse bees), but it looked like A and B could spare the frames.  We're hoping hive D will be able to raise a queen from one of the eggs in the frames we added.  We're not in a hurry, so it doesn't matter that it will take a while and D still had plenty of honey and pollen to keep it going.  We reversed hive bodies on C and D, but A and B both had brood split across the two deeps, so those didn't get reversed.  I happened to accidentally find the unmarked queen in B and was able to mark her.  One other thing that we noted was the large amount of mold present on some of the frames.  I noticed it most in hive D, but other hives had some to a smaller degree.

With the rate A, B and C are going, I wouldn't be surprised if we got some swarms soon.  We need to move our swarm trap from the shed to a tree closer to the new hive location.  We also need to prepare some new frames with foundation to rotate out some of our old comb (and maybe some of that moldy comb if it doesn't get cleaned up).