We took advantage of a decent Tuesday afternoon to take a look at our hives and see how they are doing and if they needed any feed. It was a sunny afternoon with a slight wind and a temperature of about 48 degrees. Seemed like a good day to look inside the hives. When we checked our first hive, we got a very pleasant surprise. Not only were they doing OK, they were flying! And not just flying, flying and bringing back pollen! Here is a video of the girls bringing in the pollen.

This was very exciting to know that things are starting to ramp up in this hive. We will have to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t burn through their stores before the nectar comes on.

We then checked on our other hives, we found them also flying and bringing in pollen. The activity at these hives wasn’t as high as the one in the video, but they did show life and they still have plenty of food stores for the time being.

Our one hive has officially been given a new name. It is now called the Lazarus hive. This hive should never have made it past Christmas. When we checked our hives in November before the weather turned, this hive was a disaster. There was maybe about two pounds of bees in the hive but they had not put in hardly any stores. We even fed them hoping to get them to put away something before winter but they just would not take anything. At the November check I could easily lift their box with little effort. I know, we probably should have tried to combine them with one of the other hives. We figured they were either going to make it our not, most likely not, but since these were some of our Russian hybrid stock we wanted to see. Russians are notoriously frugal and tend to have a smaller cluster so maybe this was OK. When we checked this hive about a month and a half ago (middle of January), low and behold there were still bees in it. We put on a mountain camp feeder with sugar cake in it and buttoned them back up. On Tuesday they weren’t flying a whole lot but they were buzzing away on the inside. If they continue to make it into Spring, I just may have to graft some queens off this hive.