🐝Bee check and feeding

bushkill(57)

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It is still pretty cold out and not an ideal day to be checking on the bees, but sometimes you don't have much choice. They are busy brooding away and this is the time of the year they can starve to death if they run out of food. Since I will be heading down for BeeFest this week, it would be at least two weeks before I could check on them. So I picked the better (least worse 😜) of the 2 days this weekend. It was about 38F and wind gusts of 15mph so I got in quick and took care of business and closed them back up. We still have some snow on the ground as well.

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I ended up checking 29 hives between 3 different bee yards. All in all I was quite pleased and they are building up quite nice. I don't have a lot of photos, but did take a few of the full sized hives. I didn't want to waste too much time with the 5 frame nuc open.

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I gave them all a healthy portion of pollen substitute so they have the protein needed to raise copious amounts of healthy bees. This is most important on the 5 frame nucs that did not have the field force to collect a lot of pollen in the fall. I put out almost 50lbs of substitute between the 29 hives and nucs.

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Hopefully by the time I get back from Florida we will have some warmer weather and I can start getting them ready for the spring nectar flows and start preparation for queen rearing.

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