I know my bees have been doing well, as I have checked the hive a few time through the winter, but it's only been an open the top cover and peer in, kind of thing. Today I did a thorough inspection of both deep boxes, and could not be happier with my girls.
In the top box, I found the queen, looking great and very healthy. I also found lots of capped brood, which means everyone has been busy! The bottom box was also jammed full of bees, with 6 frames of capped honey on the outsides, and 4 frames of capped brood in the middle. I saw only a very small amount of drone cells and possibly the beginning of a swarm cell in the top box.
So, in order to give them some more room, I reversed the deep boxes, so the honey frames were on the top of the hive. I also added a medium super to the top with foundation in 10 frames, and 4 of those frames contained some honey I had taken off last fall, and I froze the frames over the winter.
Mark and I have just taken a class about swarm management and how to control it by making splits. The bees natural instinct is to swarm in the spring, and the only way to head them off is to recognize the signs that they are preparing for a swarm, and split the hive, creating an "artificial" swarm for them. They are not upset with that because they were planning to do it anyway, and we just save them the trouble of glomming onto a tree somewhere and scouting a new place to live. It's a win win for all, because I get a whole new colony of bees and more bees equals more honey! We have a swarm trap which we will mount in a nearby tree, just in case we miss the warning signs and they swarm before we have a chance to make the split. This way, we catch them either way.
Spring is an exciting time to be a beekeeper! Stay tuned!
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