Bees bringing in pollen

It was a very mild day today (about 12.5 deg C) and the weather was dry and fairly bright so I took the opportunity to have a quick look at my bees. I'm pleased to say that I saw bees flying from all my hives and saw some bees bringing in pollen, which is a good sign that all is well with a colony. On each hive I lifted the roof off and had a quick look through the clear plastic crown boards.

The photo above shows hive number one. There's still some fondant left on the top bars of the hive and there seems to be a good many bees on the tops of the frames. I had to requeen this hive in July last year after the queen had mysteriously disappeared and the new queen the bees raised turned out to be a drone layer. This colony did not take the syrup down as well as I would have liked last autumn, which is why I gave it some fondant in October and again in December.

The photo above shows hive number two. I'm very worried about this one! There seems to be very few bees although the bees from this hive were flying well today and bringing in pollen. This colony was my best last year and yielded 30 lbs of lovely honey.

Looking back at my records I see that the queen in this colony is now entering her third season, but she was possibly superceded last August. I had found queen cells in this colony which were later sealed, but when I inspected the colony just before the new queens were due to emerge there was no sign of the queen cells and I found eggs in the colony. I don't think they swarmed, so either they superceded (or tried to anyway), or they were going to swarm and changed their minds! Unfortunately there's no way to know for certain because the original queen was not marked.

This colony remained very strong into the autumn last year, but after the suspected supercedure I never saw the queen, and there were not very many eggs in the colony towards the end of the season. There really should be more bees in this colony now and I suspect that either the original queen is still in residence and is not laying well, or that the new queen has a problem. I definitely need to have a closer look at this colony as soon as I can, but the weather is just not warm enough yet for a full inspection. I "hefted" the hive and it is still very heavy, so there's plenty of stores, but the cluster of bees has moved into the front right corner of the hive so may have become separated from the stores.

The photo above shows hive number three. Last August I damaged the original queen whilst marking her and the bees failed to rear a new queen. My first attempt at requeening in September failed and I tried again in October to introduce a new queen. However after introducing the new queen I was not able to verify that she had been accepted and  I never observed any eggs or larvae in this colony because it was so late in the season and it was too cold to do a full inspection. Therefore I can't be certain that this colony went into the winter in a queenright state, although the fact that the colony is still alive and reasonably strong would suggest that there must be a queen in residence. I need to have a closer look at this colony as soon as I can when the weather improves.

The photo above shows a nuc that I overwintered. After my various manipulations towards the end of last year I ended up with three or four frames of bees that I could not find a home for, so I put them in this nuc and introduced a queen. That was last September and before winter closed in I was able to verify that the queen had been accepted and I observed eggs and larvae. My reasoning was that if I could successfully bring this nuc through the winter then I would have a "spare" colony which I could unite with one of my other colonies if necessary or build up into a full colony in the spring. I'm pleased that this nuc has made it this far, but I will know more when I do a proper inspection.