03/02/2026
It’s not even March and the 2026 beekeeping season has begun!
On the few warm (above 45F) days we’ve had, I’ve seen my bees flying about, so I knew they were making it through winter. But there is not much to eat available right now, and the queens likely started laying small quantities of eggs several weeks ago. The pressure on the workers to find food is high and winter stores are at the lowest. Good beekeepers will check on their hives. If the cluster is high in the hive, an emergency feeding is called for. Since we had nice weather on Saturday, I went out to do some quick checks on them and evaluate them for emergency feeding.
The fact that my two main hives survived winter isn’t surprising. They had great stores and were well-prepared in the fall. I have always focused on survivor queens to head the hives. But what was surprising was the bustling colony I found in a nuc! This was actually two nucs I combined into one in the fall. I also gave them frames of honey that I had stored. But, notoriously, the small size of a nuc doesn’t bode well for winter survival in Pennsylvania, and this winter was brutal by all measures. We had weeks of temperatures well below normal, below freezing, and sometims days below zero. But these girls not only survived, they thrived! I did find them at the top of the frames in the uppermost box. A sure sign that winter stores had run low! I found the same in the main hives, too. They were all given some pollen and dry sugar on parchment as emergency food. Later in spring, I will use this nuc for splitting to raise new queens for their excellent winter survival genes!!
Hives will be checked in 1-2 weeks as the weather avails to see if they need more food. There is a bunch of warm weather in the forecast so I may do some early inspections to make sure each has a laying queen. However based on their dulcid temperaments when I cracked each of them open and the number of bees observed, I infer they are all queenright.
