This weekend I went out to check on the bees. The weather was in the mid 60s, the sun was shining and the bees were flying.

Do you remember this picture from April of last year?


Well they did it again this year, only a month earlier. The shim I had on to feed candy board allowed them, once they ate all the candy, to draw lots of burr comb which they promptly stuffed with brood and honey.

There was quite a bit of honey actually.

I scraped the wax off, smashed the honey out of the wax across the top of the frames for the bees to reclaim and melted down the wax.



Each of the hives had 6-7 full frames of fresh nectar in them already! I couldn't believe how much fresh nectar they were finding already, although we've had several weekends of 70*F weather in February, so that probably jump-started a few of our early nectar producing sources around here.

The bottom boxes were completely empty, no brood, no pollen, no nectar, so I reversed each of the bottom boxed with the top boxes to encourage the colony to expand.

Each has at least 10-11 full frames of bees right now, and they all seem about equal in strength.