Resurrection Sunday is right around the corner, and the signs of spring have been all around us for some time now. We made our last batch of ice cream using snow a few weeks ago (sweetened with honey, of course), the grass is greening up from all the moisture we have been receiving, and our little butterfly here is feeling the urge to stretch her wings 🙂

Hurling rocks is also a long running spring-time tradition…well, actually any time and place where rocks and water are in proximity!

And that means the bees are flying too! The 2016-2017 winter season was a rough one on our honeybee colonies. Even though we took more precautions and treated the bees more than in 2015, we lost a significantly higher percentage of hives through the winter. The mite counts spiked in October and by then it is too late to react since the hatching “winter bees” are already compromised due to the mites reproducing in their capped brood cells and damaging the pupae.

Did you know that the honey bees hatching in the fall are a little different from those hatching in the spring? Also, since brood rearing is “shutting down”, they eat a lot of pollen themselves rather than having to feed it to the larvae. They develop large concentrations of fat bodies in their systems that contain a lot of an important substance called vitellogenin, effectively allowing them to live longer and overwinter in a cluster.

But an unhealthy colony doesn’t have enough of these bulked-up “winter bees”, and they don’t maintain their critical cluster mass needed through the cold snaps of winter. That’s what happened to a number of our colonies. We only had two that came through the winter intact. But we are very thankful for those two! On the days that allow it, they have been out gathering pollen and what nectar they can find.

And in just over a week, we have new bee packages coming! The new season is about to begin…I can almost taste it 🙂 We will hive the new packages and if the overwintered colonies continue to do OK, I’ll make a couple splits. And then it’s off-to-the-races as they work to build up their populations.

And for us at Our Bright Acres, it will be garden planting time soon after the bees are set up in their new digs.

God bless your Springtime!