We have three hives left after the winter losses but we are not out of the woods yet. March and April can be very hard on bees, especially those that may be weak both in health and in numbers, and those who have burned through their food stores. We put sugar bricks on in January and these three seem to be hanging in there. Unfortunately we have had another dilemma to deal with. When we check on our hives two weeks ago, we noticed that one of the nucs was active but very noisy. This was not a good sign and immediately got us thinking about whether or not the queen was still alive. Bees become aware that they are queenless in a short amount of time. They will get noisy until they know there is either another queen in the hive or they have another queen being raised. We felt it was too cold to open the hive up so we let it go for another week and checked on them again. Again, they were active and noisy so a couple of days later when the weather was in the 50s, we went into the hive looking for the queen. There were maybe a pound or so of bees in the hive and they were loosely clustered. We went through each frame that had bees on it and could not find a queen, no eggs, no brood, basically no sign that this hive had a viable queen in it. We made the decision to combine that with the other nuc (Lazurus) to give them more bodies. So now we are down to two hives. Very disappointing to think about losing 6 out of the 8 hives we went into winter with (75% losses) but since we are hearing of people losing all (100%) of their hives, we don’t feel quite so bad but will be looking at what we can do different this year to bring that number down.