We?ve been finally been able to go through our hive from overwintering. Had one left yesterday. These aren?t major inspections, just a go through, clean up and reverse boxes when necessary etc.
This one did confuse me a bit as there seemed to be a good population but there was a ton of honey still and quite a few dead bees from what looked to me like starvation. A very small patch of brood....maybe a hundred or so on a total of a couple frames. Wasn?t so sure if maybe we had recently lost the queen.
As we were removing old frames and doing a clean up, we started putting good frames and boxes back in place. I really figured if a queen was in there she should be somewhere around the brood. My partner, Alain known as my wife was grabbing some frames on the ground to use elsewhere and noticed a small cluster on one. She said maybe the queen was in there. I said ?naw, she shouldn?t be on a honey frame?... I looked anyway and sure enough there she was. By this time we had the hive boxes back in place so we unstraped it removed a frame an put her back where she belongs.
I hear a lot of these type of stories about a queen being somewhere you wouldn?t expect her to be in. Lesson learned...listen to your partner.
Still not sure what the trouble might be with this hive.... if any. She was a slow starter last year so we might just be seeing the same thing this year.
Aroc, if you can over winter bees in your area of Mt you are a pro: high altitude, snow, insane wind, cold but oh my at the beautiful Country with knap weed honey. If I understand you correctly, you are recommending listening to your wife and to the unpredictability of queens. Both are good advice.
Quote from: van from Arkansas on April 20, 2019, 08:08:27 PM
Aroc, if you can over winter bees in your area of Mt you are a pro: high altitude, snow, insane wind, cold but oh my at the beautiful Country with knap weed honey.
Well I wouldn?t go so far as to say pro...we managed 11 hives overwinter with one loss. I actually am fairly proud of that. One thing is we do a lot of stuff people believe are unnecessary or in some cases detrimental, but it seems to work.