I expected to go into Spring with the bee hives having only gone through half the honey in the 2 boxes I had for them. It's about 1/3rd and I speculate that as I didn't weigh the boxes, but do know that the bees had very heavy honey boxes going into winter. I did a tremendous amount of feeding trying to get the bees built up with comb and the numbers healthy in 2015. We had a drought and it was so severe that we didn't even have a nector flow meaning very little flowers bloomed in the fall. I remember going in to parts of the end of summer and feeding and I didn't feel as though I had to. I am glad that I did because I didn't even know what to have for winter time.
Since mid January I have fed a bottle of 1:1 sugar water a week. Sometimes it was 2. I opened the bee hives in Mid January and did see capped brood. Spotty brood pattern, but none the less it was the opportunity for the colony to generate some bees for the spring time. Upon closing up the bee hive I noted that a lot of bees were dead on the ground over the next 2 days. No panic, it's just the stress of going into the bee hive. Warmer days above 50 the bees could be seen flying about. I knew what was going on. Old bees I stressed them and they died.
That last question is something to address. If I can not find the queens then what? I get to have 2 Nuc boxes with new queens and in a later date I will search until I can find the queen. Bee hive 1 qn goes into a Nuc Box and Queen in bee hive 2 goes into a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Of coarse I am going to remain confident that I can infact find the queens. I will pull the queens on Sunday with help. Here is to good weather that week.
We do have a few trees/plants and shrubs flowering, so the bees are bringing in pollen. What is pollen for bees? They put pollen in the baskets on the legs. 2 pouches. I don't know how they do it, I suppose rubbing the legs 1 on the other as they walk on the flowers. Bees use the pollen to feed to the larvae as protein. No pollen no brood can grow from what I have researched. So, bees that are brining in pollen means the queen is probably laying gang busters.
Mid Feb I did a split into a Nuc Box. I did this to have them draw out comb on drone frames that I purchased. They did not draw out drone comb though. I need drawn out drone comb for when my queens arrive I plan to graft queen cells.
Today I wanted to see how the Nuc Box was doing. I wanted to put a frame of brood inside it too from beehive 1. So I removed the honey box and pulled a few frames and found 1 frame. I put it in the Nuc Box and looked at the frames inside to see if the Nuc frames were being drawn out. No they were not. Just before I closed everything up I wanted to look at the honey stores in the 1st bee hive. I opened the inner cover and it had a full drawn comb where I had removed a frame previously for the Nuc Box and did not replace that space with an empty frame. This meant that I had to get a frame and attach it to a frame and put it back. The comb wouldn't fit in a medium frame, so I had to then get a Super frame. I have medium frames for honey though, so this meant that I would have to take the honey box off to place it in the deep brood box. Replace the honey box and then add another box for honey since they're drawing wax comb. Now, thinking back I should have just placed the deep frame into the Nuc Box cause it's a deep. I will open up the brood box next week and see how they attached the comb to the frame and straighten it out. Probably will just put it in the Nuc Box.
It's looking great for 2016 outlook.
Zak
Liberty Hill Tx
