Feeding Time

Had a look in the hives at last. Still a degree or so on the cool side to be pulling out frames but I've lifted the crownboards to see what's happening. As soon as I removed the roofs I could see both hives had finished their boxes of fondant and Hive2 had actually started building comb in theirs and there was bee larvae visible in it -shame I had to remove this really. I think that was a pretty clear sign that this one very strong colony. It also tells me they may be a bit crowded and may even be getting a little swarmy so I need to think about expansion.

Comb in the empty fondant box

Looking between the frames of Hive1 there were bees in about half the frames. So still some room in there for them to build up numbers and I don't think any particular danger of them swarming at the moment. Having had such a half arsed winter I think far more bees survived than would be expected normally.

This year I hope to expand to three colonies (two hives and a nucleus) so I'm going to need some drawn deep comb for this so I've added a second brood box to Hive2 -one of the ones I'd made last summer. The bees in Hive2 should now start drawing out the foundation in there. At the moment I've got a queen excluder in place as I'm not yet certain which queen I want to breed from. Last week my neighbours told me they saw a swarm in June or July which I think must've come from Hive2 so it may be that the queen of Hive1 will be a better option to raise a small colony in nucleus hive. For now that seccond deep box on Hive2 is effectively a super although I later plan to swap drawn comb from this box with comb containing brood and eggs from the box below so the queen has more cells to lay in and let the colony increase numbers but under my control. Because the bees are going to be drawing a lot of foundation they're going to need feeding.

Whilst no beekeepers ever actually agree, on anything, at all, ever, quite a few people feed their bees in spring to build up their colonies faster than would probably happen if left to nature. I gave both hives contact feeders full of thin syrup , 1ml water to 1g sugar, with some  Vitafeed Gold, a supplement which is suposed to encourage expansion of a colony, prevent nosema and cure dysentery -yep bees can get dysentery and we don't want that.. I've also removed the mouseguards at last.

One with two deep, both with feeders