I doubted they’d make it the 2 months until the nectar flow began without starving. Two other hives that had been so-so in the fall were doing quite well but were low on honey stores. When a hive is robbed, the robbers tear the wax away, leaving ragged edges and chewed-up litter behind. When the bees in a hive eat their own honey, they do it neatly and systematically. I could tell they’d been robbed out by the massive amount of chewed up wax discarded on the bottom boards. The few remaining bees had starved and frozen. The cluster had been too small to survive the winter, and nearby, stronger hives had robbed them out on warm days. In each of them, I found only a fistful of bees, their heads stuck inside empty honey cells. These hives had never completely recovered and had not produced any honey in 2013. ![]() Last year was a bad year for me and for most everyone else in beekeeping. I did find one dead hive in each apiary, but I was not surprised. I was happy to see the late winter vigor of most of the hives. If temperatures dip quickly as they are likely to this time of year, the brood would be susceptible to chilling. Doing so would have split the cluster area and any brood that the queen had laid. One hive had bees in both chambers, so I did not reverse this hive. I momentarily set asked the top shallow super of honey while I reversed the 2 deep chambers, so that the bees would have room to expand upward this spring. In all but one hive, I found that the bees had moved up into the 2nd deep brood chamber. It has been my habit to run 2 deep chambers topped by 1 shallow super of honey all year. I was careful not disturb the brood chambers, where the bees cluster in cold weather and where the queen was beginning to lay brood, but I did manipulate the boxes. On the first day of the warmup, I visited my 3 apiaries and each of their hives. ![]() (See “ End-of-Summer Hive Inspection” at .) I had not opened a hive since last fall, when I’d inspected and prepared them for winter. Our spring bloom is still 2 months away, but this was a great opportunity to check on the bees. ![]() This was the break in the weather that I had been waiting for. The weather service predicted a few warm days before winter returned. Assessing Beehivesīy the next day, the bees were bringing in light tan pollen. On February 18th, the Sandhill cranes flew over my middle Tennessee home on their migration north, the mercury on the front porch hit 68 degrees, and the honeybees broke their cluster, flying and madly about the farm.
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