HIVE INSPECTION
The bees experienced a complete late summer, fall, and early winter experience in Northern Illinois. During this process, the queen stops laying eggs and the bees hunker down into their winter cluster. Here they generate enough heat to keep the queen at 94.5 F. In early November we moved the bees to warm sunny Florida. They arrived at a time Florida was transitioning from their growing season to a dearth period. There wasn't an expectation to see new blooms until late December. We were told not to expect any of the queens to begin laying eggs until then.
To our surprise, on the return visit in December, we discovered all of the colonies had begun raising new bees (brood). They began as soon as they were set up in November. Our area feeding technique mimicked a continuous nectar flow period prompting them to think it was spring again. In spring the bees re-populate their colonies in earnest to have enough hive mates to take advantage of the summer nectar flows so that they can store adequate honey for winter.
The emerging brood was very good news. It was our Florida goal to build up each colony and have them ready for the February and March almond pollination in California. The orchards require at least 8 full frames of honey bees with brood and resources per hive. Orchard managers will reject small colonies and sometimes that means they'll reject the entire pallet of 4 hives since it's not practical for them to check each hive in their orchard. Over 2 million bee hives travel to California almond orchards during this time. It's hard to describe the frenzied activities during this time.
It was a welcome site to see how each hive had responded beautifully to the warm sunny weather. We saw brood in each colony like displayed in the pictures below.
We saw frames like this in each hive. Big smiles under that bee suit.
Beautiful brood frame. Look at all that honey on top. You cant see it so much but the pollen layer is in between the honey and capped brood
Heading to Illinois with more work before summer.
So far we've traveled 4 times to Florida to care for the Bee Buddy Hives and will travel again for a total of 5 trips in all this winter. The picture below shows us during one trip where we replaced some of the boxes that were unpainted and in need of repair.