You need to get out in your hives the first chance you get and reverse hive bodies or add supers to give them more room or your hives will soon be looking like this.

I manage to visit three of my yards this evening after work and most had a lot of activity in the top box.   The hives have lots of drone brood and honey plastered up against the inner cover in many of the hives.  I didn’t have time to do much so instead of rotating brood boxes I just added supers.   It was faster, and it let me hit more than one yard, but it does mean I’ll have to go back later when I have time and rotate boxes if they need it.  But when you have more than a few hives you need to make these trade offs.   Super all the hives, or rotate a few and chase the swarms from those you didn’t have time to rotate.

With the use of an incubator to keep the brood warm, I probably will start grafting early this week, but what is of bigger concern is the extended forecast. Accuweather.com puts it in the 50′s to low 60′s through April 25th currently which may make it a real challenge to populate the mating nucs in a couple weeks when the queen cells are ready, and even a bigger challenge for queens to mate.

The hives are raising plenty of drones however, so we’ll start and cross our fingers.

The good news….  The bees are in great shape.   Pollen patties went in last week.   I really didn’t need them this year, but they were already made up so I went ahead and put them on anyways.   A few hives are a bit light, but overall they are looking good and loss currently stands at around 5%.

The bad news…. ticks are already out, so are flies, mosquitoes (pests for the beekeeper not the bees), and small hive beetles look to be as strong as I normally see in fall already in some hives.   Normally this hasn’t been a concern in our area, but we will have to keep a close eye on them.   It’s quite possible we’ll have to do something about them this year.

So what does this mean?   The weather and the bees are telling me I should be out grafting and getting ready to split hives (I see a heavy swarm season this year).  But the calendar tells me the my earliest graft should be nearly 2 weeks away, and 3-4 weeks until I start splitting hives for mating nucs.  For now I’m waiting because I’m worried this weather will pass and if we have a normal April mating could be a problem if I start too soon.

Later in the day, activity at the pollen substitute had increased somewhat, but was not the thick cloud they would have been if no real pollen was available.   I though the picture below was pretty cool as it caught most bees in flight as they had just flew up in response to my breath while I was taking the picture:

The source of most the the real pollen, probably a few maple trees that had started blooming.   I did find one on my property that was humming, but not all of them.  I’m hoping the others hold out till we have another warm day next week.   This is the earliest I recall silver maples blooming in recent memory.  In past years it has been mid to late March when the maples bloom.  Normally I start putting pollen patties in the hives the first week of March, a week or two before the maples begin to bloom.

Nearly every hive in my yard had activity today,  Including most of the nucs I am attempting to overwinter this year.   I put most of them in groups of 4 to help provide a windbreak for each other.  It will be interesting to see which ones did well when it gets a bit closer to spring.

Still, activity at the hive was not always a good sign.  This following hive had a lot of activity.  But it had no pollen gathering and the activity was more frantic and disorganized.  It also had the waxy residue near the top fo the white box that is a sign of robbing.  I’m not 100% certain, but my experience tells me this particular hive didn’t make it and had a lot of unprotected honey.

I’m not sure what this incredibly early start means for the bee season this year.  It looks quite promising with a lot of live hives.   But it’s still very early and we’ve been fooled before.   At this point I’m most worried about starvation.

In addition to looking great and the long list of features and benefits the manufacturer claims, I’m betting it will help with skunks by making them bare their underbelly and should be easy to trim around with the weed wacker.  It’s perfect for the hobbyist with a few hives in their garden.  I’m looking forward to the warm weather and trying it on our queen cell builders.  The extra height should make them easier on the back to work with.

While the bees are doing well, I’m beginning to become concerned that the bees will use their winter stores up too quickly and starvation will be a real issue come March.   It’s still too early to worry too much, but come March 1st I’ll have to make a point to check hive weights, and recheck them every couple weeks.

The forecast for the next 10 is much the same with highs in the 30s, except of course for Saturday and Sunday when I don’t have to work the day job and planned on working in the unheated garage.  Isn’t that always the case?

The past 3 days have been unseasonably warm with temperatures around 50 degrees.  The bees have been flying heavily and only one inactive hive was seen at the house.  It’s still much to early to tell how well the bees faired over the winter, we still should have a good 2 months of cold weather.   Time will tell.

Typically we would have nearly half our mating nucs out in the field and would be on our 3rd grafting cycle.  But we are only on our first cycle and if it stays too cold or wet this weekend it may be a complete bust.  Interestingly this was the first time I’ve every had customers call and ask if we could delay package bees because of the cold weather.

I just hope this cycle breaks soon…

This does mean however that if you also sell honey, bees and supplies you can safely link to the state associations website swarm removal page without redirecting your clients to a potential competitor.  Though honestly if anyone considers me a competitor I’m flattered,  I don’t have enough time in the day to compete with anyone and my queens, nucs and honey sell out well before the demand runs out.  Frequently this means I’m searching for other reliable sources I can refer my potential customers to because I don’t have the stock or inventory to help them.

My daughter would love these suits (she’s a style freak).  But for myself, I’ll stick to my jeans and boring white jacket, if a wear a suit at all.