It is mid February, and the bees have been moved down south in order to take advantage of the earlier warmth and great weather in order to allow them to start building up faster. We are continuing to work with our friend, the commercial beekeeper that has been so great with us.
Today we headed out at 3 am in order to get down to where the bees are wintering, and our goal is to change them over to a spring feeding configuration to help prompt them to build up quickly.
The colonies were split among 3 yards, each with between 40 and 70 hives each. We would go to each hive and do an assessment as to their general strength and health. We then added an additional hive body with frames to the stronger ones to give them room to grow, and placed a syrup feeder on all of them. to keep them going until the nectar flow kicked in.
Hives with top feeders
It was a long day, we started in the first yard at about 6 am, and by the time we got through the last yard and packed up our gear, it was closing in on 8 pm. We hit the local restaurant and had the smoked pork chops (great stuff) and called it a night.