2018 will go down in the books as one of the longer winters I think. We never had an extraordinary amount of snow accumulation, but winter has been hard pressed to let us go. The picture above was taken this morning (April 19) with the rising sun glistening off of the fresh snow and 3 new bee hives that we set up two days ago.

The winter reminds me of the Laura Ingalls Wilder book…but we don’t have to fight each day for food and survival.  However, the bees do. On Sunday, here is what that same hive site looked like after I took apart the latest hive where the colony had died.

That is a lot of dead bees (thousands). And it is a similar story in hive after hive. We lost several of the weaker ones early in the winter when we had an extended cold snap. Here though, the colony had pulled through into March and started raising it’s first round of brood for this year. However, they didn’t quite have the bees left and/or resources to pull it off. In the next photo, you can see where they had their brood nest and where the final cluster died. Three weeks is a long cycle to have to sit in one place when the weather does not warm up consistently enough in March like one might sometimes be able to expect.

Well, they almost made it. Some of the adult bees hatched out. Some were in the process of hatching out when they froze.  The cells all around the brood nest are empty. They had eaten everything and there weren’t any honey stores close by. Looking at the brood cappings here, I can tell they were hard pressed to come up with much pollen either. They don’t have the right color so I can tell they were doing the best they could, but it was not ideal. There was a bunch of honey in the outside frames and that is where the majority of the bees died. They were trying to get honey, but were not able to cluster back together over the brood when it counted, evidently.

On a more positive note though, it looks like we still have four colonies left alive, whereas we only had two left at this same time last year (2017). I need to wait for a calm warm day before I can inspect them deep enough to see if they have a laying queen. Hopefully they do, but even so, it will be a slow start to the season because of the cooler temps we have been experiencing.

Also, we had our first set of new bee packages come from California. We got 3 packages with the SEMBA club (SouthEast MN Beekeepers Association) order and on Tuesday, when it was in the mid 30s, we hived them with the help of my dad and Evan & Sadie getting in on the action a little bit for the first time.

We got one more child’s suit this spring and that was a treat having them both there and suited up 🙂

Snow or no snow, it’s a fun experience. We just had to work fast when the bees were outside because you don’t want the queen to get “chilled”. Then she won’t lay very well. And a good-laying queen is vitally important for population build-up of the colony. So we make a little space in the frames, dump in the two pounds of bees, pop the cork out of the queen cage and watch her walk out onto the mass of crawling worker bees. Then we put in the rest of the frames, pop on a top feeder, and close up the hive. If we’re fortunate, the workers, who have traveled with the queen, will accept her, cluster around her, and she will start laying soon.

We’ll check in under a week how things are going. And we hope to hive some additional 3 lb packages in Iowa within a few weeks. Happy spring from all of us!