Survived winter…now on to spring!

We had a successful winter this season and all our hives made it through. While the bees were gathered in their bee ball, keeping warm, Kevin was busy building three new hive boxes and performing maintenance on the honey supers, which are the shorter frames where bees store their honey. Since these get spun out when we extract the honey, they sometimes need repairing after harvest. He also built three complete hives, so we can add to the number of colonies in the beeyard. We increase our colonies by splitting our existing hives and/or catching swarms.

We left a sufficient amount of honey in the hives last fall, so the bees had enough to survive the winter. We only fed them a little bit when it started to get warmer to give them a boost in the spring. Starting in February, we fed them pollen substitute to stimulate brood production. This way, there will be plenty of bees in the hive once the spring honey flow starts.

Right now the spring bloom is getting under way, so the bees are bringing in a lot of pollen. We pulled the feeders since the bees are now able to support themselves. We also took off the entrance reducer, which was put on to keep rodents and other potential thieves from stealing the honey in the hive. Now that the number of bees has increased enough to provide protection (and there are more and more bees coming and going), the reducer is more of a hinderance.

In the hive, there are plenty of brood being produced and hatching. We are observing orientation flights, and all of the hives population are increasing as we had hoped. Orientation flights are when new bees come out of the hives for the first time and face the hive. They fly up and down in a zig zag pattern until they have fully oriented themselves with where their hive is located. From that time on, they can fly anywhere up to a 2-3 mile radius from the hive and be able to return to it using their internal “GPS”.