Getting ready for the beekeeping season

After a quiet bee winter, I always get a little excited about the pending season.

I make plans and goals for the season ahead and try and education myself further about how to go about achieving those goals.

With bees you can never learn enough as there is always more to learn, and books can only teach you so much.

So this year I intend to try queen rearing by grafting. It will take a few years to get comfortable and with good success rates but I will give it a go. 

I ordered extra bees supplies this week and made up the grafting frame yesterday and painted three poly nucs. Today I will paint two new poly national hives.

The weather is cool and damp with daytime temperatures at about fourteen degrees. Too cool yet but that is promised to change over the next few weeks.

I have three good hives after the winter. I lost a full strong hive. And when I checked them when there was just a handful of bees left, I found no queen.

She was a new 2014 queen and somehow failed or got lost/died and the hive slowly died out over the winter.