3/22/2024

I have always been leery about calling the first bit of warm weather spring. Especially since I’ve seen 18 in snows in mid-April. Nevertheless is does appear this warm weather will continue a bit longer, so I guess I’ll concede and call it spring.

This time of year every beekeeper is anxious to open up their hives and see what has happened. Some will see that some of their colonies have lived through the winter and others will find their colonies have died. At the same time, the bees maybe using the last of their honey, meaning this a hazardous time of year for the bees since there might be any flowers in bloom.

I am happy to say that the swarm we caught pretty late in the season last year has survived and is doing well. I haven’t cracked the propolis yet to look at every frame but by moving back the divider board and peeking in I can see they are busy.

I did give them a frame feeder full of sugar water a couple of weeks when a cold snap was forecasted to occur. They devoured it pretty quickly. Yesterday, I added a couple of frames that already had comb on it because it looked like most of the existing frames were getting full.

We have noticed a lot of bee activity in the yard. Several were sucking on mud for water and others were in the various flower gardens, even though no flowers were in bloom.

I was wrong about no flowers. I checked the next day and found that under the leaves there was some dandelions and purple ground cover. I tried to get a picture of the bees but couldn’t. They are pretty fast.

I did get a pretty good picture of what the bees were landing on.

My plan is to let the colony get larger and then start making artificial splits. The basic idea is to force the colony to produce a new queen and take the old queen and some resources to make a new colony. I hope it works out.

In other activities, we have started building swarm boxes. Two have been completed with two more to go. And we have started to freshen the bait in the existing swarm traps. We hope to swap at least two out next week.

The next post will have the details.

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