To get your hives through the Winter, you should ideally make sure they have enough stores to get them through until new nectar is available in the Spring. This doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate. Sometimes the bees eat too much of the feed they are supposed to put away for winter. Sometimes they eat through their stores before Winter is over. Going into Winter last year, we went around and checked our hives to see how they were doing. We had been feeding them, since the Fall flow was very lousy in our area. and most of them seemed to have enough food. But we had one hive that just wasn’t getting the memo. This was a nuc that just wouldn’t put away any stores. We were feeding but they weren’t taking. Towards the end of November when we checked this hive, it seemed doomed. There was about two handfuls of bees in the hive and barely any stores. In many cases this was a hive that should have been combined with another hive. But since these were descendants of our Russian hybrid bees, I wanted to see what they would do, so we let them go.

Fast forward to January of this year, on a warm day we decided to check on our hives. We found a number of the hives dead, but not the light nuc. Those bees were still alive. I was surprised but we still had a lot of winter to go yet. When we got to the early part of March and were able to go into the hives to check them better, this nuc was doing fine. I would probably have bet you back when we checked them in November that this hive would be done for within a couple of weeks time. Now it seemed miraculous, like Lazarus back from the dead. This hive that had barely any bodies and next to no reserves, had somehow come through winter fine, even when seemingly better hives had not. It seemed fitting that this hive should now get renamed Lazarus at that point. As April came, Lazarus started to build up and so far this year has turned into one of the strongest hives we have. They say that Russian bees can over winter with small clusters and are very frugal with their stores. Lazarus is living proof of these statements. This year we are definitely going to get some grafts off of this queen. Lazarus is the kind of survivor stock we are looking for.