It has been almost a year since I added a post to this blog. A terrible family tragedy in early May left me many of my usual avocations for much of last year. My bees were completely neglected from April to September. I did manage to give them a treatment for mites late in October and get the hives winterized, with roofing felt wrapping, straw bales on the west and north sides and 16 pounds of sugar and quilt boxes in each hive.
The temperature got up in to the mid-50s today and all the hives were active. Overall its been a fairly mild winter though we have had some bitter cold and some ice.
Here are some bees hovering around the top entrance of the north hive.
The bottom entrance was even more busy with bees in the air and clustered around the entrance. I did forget to mention that I also put mouse guards on the front of each hive as can be seen here. I also did not take any honey off of these hives last year and just left it on for the winter, so all of the hives should have lots of stores.
Here are bees around the top entrance of the middle hive. This hive seemed to be the strongest through most of last summer and fall from my occasional observations of the outside. This hive frequently had large numbers of bees on the outside of the hive. However, I noticed what appeared to be a sudden drop in the number of bees on the outside of the hive late in October and fear that they may have swarmed very late in the season -- too late to properly re-queen due to the shortage of drones for mating at that time of year. They do seem to be strong, so perhaps I was wrong. Time will tell.
The bottom entrance of the middle hive was very busy with bees -- the most busy of the three hives.
Here is the bottom entrance of the south hive with lots of bees in the air and on the entrance. I did not take a picture of the top entrance because there was no activity there. As I recall, they never did use the top entrance of this hive last winter either.
I did notice several bees hovering over a pile of rotting straw that was about 30 feet behind the hives, with several bees crawling around on it. I don't know what the attraction was, but they seemed to find something interesting there.
I did manage to put in a garden last year, with a large tomato bed, successful melon, pumpkin and watermelon patches and, for the first time, a full flower garden. Here it lies dormant waiting for the coming Spring.
This is my tomato patch from last summer. I don't usually clear the garden until March or April so the cages are still up.
The grapes were something that was completely ignored last year, with no pruning and little care. The critters got all of the grapes as in years past. I hope this year to work more on finding ways to preserve my crops from the animals.
