Opening up the beehives
March is a nerve-wracking month in the northern beekeeping calendar. Have our hives successfully survived the winter or not.
On a sunny and over 50 degree day you can see the first answer to that question, because the bees leave the hive to stretch their wings.
But you eventually have to crack open the boxes to see what is going on inside. This is the hard part. All of the training and information does not mean that you will necessarily be able to decode the actual health of the hive.
Bottom line is that both hives survived. Which is amazing in the case of the right-hand hive, which was the weakest and strangest hive we have ever had. But that hive also had evidence of mite damage n the bottom box, so we removed it.
The other hive had a LOT of bees. But we did not find a queen in either hive, though we weren’t deeply looking. We added food to each because they were very low on resources.
And we saw tons of bees coming in with pollen in their legs, so who knows - maybe the hives will survive. This is what makes it all so exhausting. Beekeeping is not for the faint of heart. But it is so irrisistably fascinating, none-the-less!
As we inspected the hives we were reminded of the clever adaptation Montana came up with last fall. There are two sizes to be boxes, one a little deeper than the other. The deep boxes are called “brood boxes”, because they are the foundation of the hive and are where the queen lives and lays the eggs. The shallower boxes are called “honey supers”, because you add them on top of the brood boxes and they are solely for the purposes of bees storing honey. The bottom brood boxes contain a combination of brood and honey, because that is what the bees eat while they are waiting inside the hive throughout the winter.
We found ourselves with fewer deep frames than we needed as we were closing things up in the fall. So Montana took some super frames and added a piece of foam insulation to make them the perfect size. We are honestly not sure if this perhaps caused or added to the mite problem we found in the box below or whether it might have helped get what was a very weak colony of bees through the winter. But I thought it was a very clever solution to a temporary problem!
If you look closely you can see the little balls of yellow pollen on the back legs of some of the returning bees.
A few of my students stopped by the see how it all works!
This shows some of the supplemental feed - the top part is a new sugar patty (just calories) and the bottom gooier mess is some of the leftover pollen patty (includes protein for raising eggs). You actually aren’t supposed to put pollen patties out in the winter, so that was my mistake. Not sure if or how this might have confused things in the hive!
