The Old Switcheroo

Today was a balmy winter day with temps in the high sixties and little fluffy clouds drifting across the sky. How many people, or bees for that matter, are lucky enough to say that in the 'dead of winter?' In the Bay Area we are lucky with the weather, but it also means that we get an early spring and early swarms. So, we wanted to take advantage of the weather to make some swarm precautions. We checked out our hive at the local nursery to see how they were progressing and then decided to swap the bottom and top boxes. The bottom box was pretty much empty, and we wanted to encourage the bees to move up by letting them know that there was lots of empty comb up top just waiting to be filled with food and babies.

The colony seems to be doing pretty well overall. The mites have taken a toll, but we haven't seen any wingless wonders or nosema. We didn't feed either of our colonies this winter, which seems to have been a good move because both still have some small stores, which I think will get them through to spring. I've already started to see some blossoming trees here and there.

The queen in this colony has consistently been a good layer--the brood combs are absolutely solid with capped brood when she's laying, and the bees brought in a fair amount of honey last year when you consider their location for the majority of the nectar flow--they were up in the Fremont hills, where for most of the summer, they were surrounded for miles by dry grass and not much else. Now that the bees are at the nursery and have loads of drawn out comb from last year, I'm hoping that they will be really good producers. We will see.