Today the weather just nudged 60*F for a brief period, warm enough for the bees to be out flying and for me to take a peek under the cover to see how things were doing.



Not knowing what kind of mood the bees would be in, I figured I ought to get the smoker going. My trusty smoker manager (read: pyrotechnic) wanted to help pump the bellows on the smoker to ensure it was going.



I started with the Blue and Purple hive, and found they had eaten almost their entire block of candy, despite having plenty of capped honey in their hive.



I had an extra block of candy ready, so I broke it up and gave it to them. Below is a picture of how I left them.



Onto the Phoenix hive. Oh boy were these guys in trouble!

They had consumed a bit of their candy block, mostly from the under side where you can't see in this picture.



What was alarming, though, was when I looked down through their frames I couldn't see any remaining frames of capped honey.

I pulled a frame, and it was empty. Bone dry. I pulled another, and another and another.

Of all the frames in this hive, only one had honey left and it was less than a quarter of a frame.

These guys were going to be in serious trouble without any stores for them to use, especially if a couple of really cold days came along and they couldn't break cluster to go and eat the sugar candy.

I pulled a few frames of capped honey out of storage from the white hive that had died a few weeks ago.

Maybe a silver lining of losing that hive is having frames of honey as emergency food supplies?



I switched out three empty frames for the three fully capped ones and gave them more sugar candy.



I'll go back in a week or two and see how they're doing.