New bees installed

Bought two bee packages from Virginia bee supply, installed 4/23/2016. Set up one hive box for each, installed bottom boards, entrance reducers, and boardman feeders. Put the rest of the corn syrup from the package feeders into the boardmans. Checked Monday 4/25, found queens were released. Starting to fill stores from boardman - clear liquid in some cells. Did not see queens, which are unmarked. bought sugar and refilled boardmans. Here we go again, best of luck to our new girls.

The hives survived the winter!

Temperatures got to 56 today, so we had a mini hive inspection. The hive 1 has the cluster up in the top box, hive 2 seems to still be in the bottom box. Neither has touched the candy boards. Lots of honey still in the boxes, we may have been very conservative in not taking any from them last fall but better safe than sorry. We did not lift the super off; we will probably wait for 60 to do a full inspection. Happy times in bee land!