Interestingly, I was writing a post this morning and even had it saved as a draft when the kids came in all excited that "the bees are swarming!". So, here's the text of this post as it was this afternoon:
Well, everything survived the winter, which given NC weather isn't too extreme. We luckily didn't suffer an Easter freeze and so everything seems set. I have yet to go and check them thoroughly and reverse the boxes, but the weather is turning nice now after a week of grey and rain so should be able to soon. I have checked on them a couple of times briefly in the winter and everything looked good and all the signs are we should be building up nicely.So apparently the bees had their own idea of when I should be paying attention to them. There's been a lot of discussion on the Chatham Beekeepers mailing list about swarms in the area and so it was a definite possibility, but looking out of the window on the way down there was certainly a lot of bees on the front but not that many. So, just in case, I dug out my nuc, grabbed my stuff and headed down. Even before I got there things had calmed down so I assumed it was the warm day (we hit mid 70's here) and the fact that the last week had been cold, wet and overcast.
So I decided to take the plunge and go through the hive and give it a good check. I had on my usual hat and shirtsleeves but the tone of the hive soon had me decide that perhaps a veil was a better idea. There was a lot of angry flying about, in the end nothing too aggressive but better safe than stung. I took away the top feeder which is clearly not necessary now as all the three boxes on there were nicely in use. I rotated the boxes, the top two were well stuck together with burr comb which I removed the best I could. The bottom box was clearly less used but certainly not empty and I noticed new healthy looking brood on a number of frames.
My smoker played up again, so the whole thing took longer than I would have liked and so I didn't go through each frame (would have been good to check for swarm signs just in case) but maybe next time.
Was nice to be back among them, even on their more "busy" days it's still fun to be surrounded by them.
