Mid-winter hive inspection.

I have been feeding my bees since Thanksgiving. This past weekend I went in to see how they were doing being it was so nice and warm.
They seem to have stored up some sugar water. I found the queen in all hives and they all had some brood in them. Not much put she has started to laying again.
Make sure your brood box has room for her to lay eggs in.

How many hives do you have and how long have you been keeping bees?

I have had out dry pollen sub during the warm weather and they've been carrying it in fairly steadily. I have not fed any syrup since fall. I will put some out during our next warm spell. Mine needed pollen and had enough syrup honey to last quite a while.

I got caught with my pants down in the drought last fall and didn't feed soon enough. I won't make that mistake again.

Like you said about making sure the queen has room to lay, they'll dang sure plug a brood nest with syrup in a hurry this time of year.

I'm running 12 hives. Helping two other with their hives. One has 25 and the other has 150+.Had bees bout 5 years now and I'm the president of Northeast Alabama Beekeepers Ass.
We went a few hives that we had to take frames out and replace with drawn comb to give the queen somewhere to lay.

Don't forget the convention Feb. 4 2017 in Clanton Al.

Very interesting. We'll have to hook up sometime. I won't be able to show you how to do anything right, but I can show you how to screw up bad. The guy that you help with 150 hives doesn't by chance live up above Noccalula Falls and sell package bees and hives does he?

What do you use for mite control? I started out bound and determined to be treatment free and got some good treatment free stock from up in Valley Head. I could pull it off if I could keep my queens pure to the stock that I bought, but I can't. My bees cross with bees from about 4 miles away that are fed every medication on the planet. I've been vaporizing Oxalic Acid and it's worked pretty well, although it's time consuming. Considering trying MAQS this year.

We only had one hive but lost it to mites. I guess we did something wrong. We are going to get 4 hives in the spring. Maybe put together what we learned and can have a few make it a full year next year.

The man I'm helping is Jack Chapman. He's in Weaver. That is David Kelton with Lookout Mountain Bees.
I used Apivar this year. I want to try Mite-away quick strips next year.
I'm planning on splitting some hive in the spring. Maybe that will cut down on the swarms.
Maybe we can meet up sometime.

Shed my FIL and I try to attend the Beekeeper meetings. We had a few hives we lost during the drought. Going to get back at it in the spring.
We are out in Jacksonville, Pleasant Valley area.

Splitting definitely helps reduce swarming but if you wait til you see swarm cells they'll swarm regardless of how hard you split them. Have you ever read About checkerboarding to reduce swarming? Walt Wright wrote a lot about it. I haven't lost a confirmed swarm in 2 years

Prior to the rain yesterday mine were bringing in a pale yellow pollen. First natural pollen of the season

Dustin I live in Weaver. I would be glad to come look at your hives sometime if you want.
Our meetings are in Anniston the 2nd thur of each month @ 17th noble in the building where you get your tag. At 6:30pm

I have been feeding syrup to my hive at the house and they are pretty slow to consume right now. I have a 3 gallon top feeder. I flipped a top feeder over on the hive at the farm and filled up one side with sugar last week when it was warm. I wanted to get in and out as quick as possible so I didn't even smoke them. Dang things covered me up pretty quick, but no issues on my end. I put wax paper on half the hive and filled it with a few pounds of sugar. I didn't want to cover all the frames with wax paper and stop ventilation. I did notice they are starting to take the paper out the front. The farm hive had a lot of yellow pollen going in last weekend. House hive had minimal pollen coming in. Planning to build supers and swarm traps as soon as deer season goes out.

I'd never put dry sugar in a hive until this past week. I put some syrup on a really light, small cluster hive while it was warm a couple weeks ago and they took less than a quart. I have 4 hives that got down real small this winter and I put sugar on top of the brood chamber the day before the weather cooled off this week. I put down a couple sheets of paper, then put sugar on it, spread it out and misted it down with water. If you look that up it's called the "Mountain Camp" method. I've read that they will carry dry sugar out of the hive if it's not moistened with water enough that the top of it crusts over.

If I had it to do over again, I would have mixed some dry pollen sub into the sugar first.

Fur,

Yea, I was doing the "In a hurry gotta go hunting Mtn. Camp" method. I checked it Friday and they have eaten about 3/4ths of the sugar. I am going to re-supply the sugar this weekend. The cluster looked to be in the top middle so they are probably light on honey and I'm going to try and get them more food until March. It looked like the sugar was crusted over pretty good from the normal hive moisture. There was none on the ground at the entrance.

Good idea on the pollen substitute mixing.

That's good to know Wade. If we get a warm day this week, I'll check mine and see how they are doing with the sugar. I don't have any kind of rim on the hive so I couldn't get much sugar in between the hive body and super.