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2018/01/22

Winter Check of Bees in Pittsburgh

Filed under: Beekeeping,Pittsburgh — jet @ 23:53

Surprise 64F day today so we checked the hives. The nuc with the $$$ queen has bees, but I’m not sure enough to survive the rest of the winter. We rearranged all the fondant in the hives so they could continue to “eat up” in the fondant over the next few freezing days; we’ll check them again this Saturday.

Last year we got blindsided by the strange Winter and early Spring and the hives swarmed before we expected. We think our frames were honey bound, they had enough fondant that they didn’t eat the honey then the
queen had no place to lay. This year we’ll check weekly (if possible) and switch from fondant to syrup as soon as possible.

Another thing we’ll try is flipping the top and bottom deeps and frames. We can pull any honey leftover and extract it then replace those frames with built frames so the queen has plenty of room to lay. If they’re getting syrup until the first pollen hits we should have lots more eggs and fresh bees at the start then Spring honey.

Fingers crossed, thumbs held.

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