Saturday, February 20, 2010

3 Alive so far...

Checked the hives today, in the low 50s - bees were flying from all three hives. I even saw some of the bees bringing in pollen. Not much of the sugar water had been taken, perhaps they are finding stuff outside (seems awful early).

I had taken the top box off of Hive #3 back in the late fall because it was empty and the one below it was only partially full. This hive was brimming with bees out of the inner cover so I am going to put another box back on it tomorrow. I took the box I had in the garage on some para-moth crystals and set it outside to air out before putting it back on the hive. I am assuming one day af airing out will be enough(?)

It was really glad to see the bees had made it to this point in the winter, probabaly still some cold days ahead, but good news.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Cold weather feeding

I went back to the hives on Sunday to check on the feeders - they were all empty. This is a good news bad news thing - it tells me the bees are eating, but then I worry they may be running low on stores in this coooold weather.

I also replaced the box and feeder on hive #2 as I saw some activity at the entrance - hope stays alive!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Uh Oh

So, during the storm last week, my wife said - "Does that box belong on the ground?" Well, no. I went out and found out that the feeder box had blown off of hive#2 and taken the inner cover with it. This means that the hive was exposed to the nice snowfall we had :( So, I just closed it up and will look into it when it warms up - but I am not hopeful.