Everyone is ready for spring adventures, including my trusty bee yard companion, Olive who wonders, "Will daddy let me come out to play while he does bee stuff?" Yes, yes he did. Good daddy, good!

The weekend mornings started nice and brisk. After snapping this photo, I put my weather sensor on a hive body and in 15 minutes it was 83 degrees! My wife Yvonne was convinced that the bees inside the hive boxes influenced the reading. So I moved the sensor.

I put it on a non-reflective empty nuc box just in front of the hives to get an accurate non hive-influenced reading. I couldn't seem to move my finger out of the way, either.

And Y was right, sort of ... the bee boxes do give off heat. But since bees heat only the cluster and not the interior of the hive I suspect the heat is reflected from the light yellow paint on the hives onto the sensor plate. No matter, this shows what you can do even when it's in the 30's in the shade here in the Piedmont of North Carolina. With hives in a sunny spot, it's a different ballgame altogether. Time to get to work.

The finishing touches were put on my queen castle by adding a lip underneath all four sides of each compartment's lid. This allows for bee space on the top bars, so bees can patrol them if they want or need to and munch on a pollen patty if they want. It also made for a sturdier compartment lid all around.

Once we got in the hives Sunday, we discovered all were beginning to BOOM! Tight brood patterns and lots of drones are being made. Above you can see a fabulous frame from my first over-wintered nucleus colony, or "nuc", from last year. It was wings to legs bees, bees, BEES top to bottom. This lovely tight brood pattern greeted me and my mentees on our first inspection on Sunday. On the right of this frame there is a lot of drone brood as well. So this nuc will need to be convinced to not swarm out on me in the very near future. This same nuc was suffering from a high mite-load last fall, until I gave it and the hives three rounds of oxalic acid vapor (OAV). It has rebounded wonderfully. I am now a believer in OAV, right action and strategic feeding inside the hive during winter.

We saw this beauty, my two-year-old white dot queen, laying away and growing her nuc. She was put in a box and ignored all summer long, her and a little frame of bees. Now they're almost ready to move into larger quarters, or to make up more splits! I want more of her genetics. Of the 4 queen-right colonies currently in the yard, she's given me three. I hope to make up another 4 from her this year.

Here is a beautiful queen cell, just capped. Last week my mentees and I took my largest hive, which descended from a swarm I collected in 2014, and removed its queen and a contingent to a nuc box. This week we found 8 queen cells on the queenless hive, most had just been capped. One queen cell (QC) was destroyed when we separated the boxes and another slightly damaged. We left at least two beautiful QC's behind on the parent hive. There could've been more, but we verified two were left on adjacent frames. Mentee Chris Odom and I then moved a frame of food (pollen and nectar) and a queen cell frame into a compartment of the queen castle, and repeated the procedure into the adjoining compartment. I then shook extra bees from 4 or 5 frames into the compartments from the parent hive. In the course of all this, the mentor (me) dropped a frame to my utter shame. But, I took a deep breath, laughed about it, and slowly finished the job. No stings were gathered in this operation, though I certainly deserved at least two or three! These bees are so calm and gentle, even a week after being made queenless and a clumsy beekeeper, yet another reason to promote these wonderful genetics!

I made sure to outfit each entrance for each of the queen castle's 4 compartments with a bit of screen to prevent robbing. Each entrance also got a unique dot and/or dash configuration. These unique marks will help the queens orient and find their way back home once they start flying and mating.

Last week I gave the 2015 Q-D nuc a piece of broken comb. I rubber banded and jute-strung it into place. The nuc is doing wonderful, and the beautiful queen was spotted and laying. The girls have almost chewed through one of the jute strings, and maneuvered the comb down on the right and fastened it to the bottom, and re-attached the top left to the top. In a couple of days I should probably remove at least that jute to give them a break. But for now we put it back. They don't seem to mind it one bit. Bees are industrious and really amazing. They take a little something and turn it into a lot of something great. I try to do the same, make the most out of everything.

Here Chris inspects a beautiful frame of tight capped brood and honey from my white dot queen. We went through all 6 colonies and made 2 more, Lord willin'. Not bad for a beautiful late February Sunday afternoon.

Mentee Mary Fabian got into the bees, too, and was happy to dispense more 1:1 syrup and pollen patties. The apiary is beginning to boom. Fingers and toes are crossed the new splits we made up will yield strong new colonies, more new healthy, happy honey bees in 2016. Time will tell. Soon it will be time to make up more splits for this spring. Happy flying, girls!

This month's Calendar girl is Queen D of 2015, the last that was mated and came online last October. The last time I saw her she was limping on one of her legs but laying a really tight brood pattern. Her limp healed as she survived battle with two black Carniolan queens I released without realizing she was in there, three oxalic acid treatments and winter. She is descended from a swarm rescued from abandoned equipment in Huntersville two years ago, a prolific little swarm that survived winter, yielded a fine honey harvest in 2015 and gave me this queen. That was the first hive of bees I ever fell in love with, but definitely not my last. They are gentle, prolific and enduring.

​Queen D and a contingent court was removed to create the artificial swarm for T's Bees in 2016, thereby creating future splits with the now queenless and growing colony from which she came. Mentee MJ took this photo of her Feb. 21, 2016. Queen D is an amber beauty. These are the genetics I want in my apiary, so the first round of spring increases are coming from this calendar girl.

Pollen is flooding in! Yesterday was in the low '70s and was very blustery, but that didn't stop the pollen celebration my bees were having. I quickly discovered that on the 4 of 5 hives where I didn't use shims my bees couldn't get to the pollen patties I gave them. The new recipe I tried (a soy flour, apple cider vinegar, water, sugar, lemongrass oil combo) still made for moist patties a week later! So I added shims to the 4 colonies that needed it, including this double-nuc, and in so doing I took away what had obviously become a second entrance for them, the large gaps at the top. So the bees loaded with mostly bright yellow, a vivid green and a few dark orange pollen deliveries were a bit confused. I hope they found the true, proper entrance down below. Here you can see them buzzing in, looking for a place to land and off-load.

Our Oregon Grape Holly was first to bloom, with its bright green berry balls that open into little horns of flowers. Our bees LOVE the Oregon Grape Holly. I know what it is thanks to a gardener extraordinaire in our local bee club. She tells me its an invasive species here, but the bees LOOOVE this plant. They were buzzing around the buds before they bloomed a couple of weeks when it was warm enough. And you can't kill this thing. Yvonne cut this thing back to hardly anything a few years back and it's hung in there. Awfully pokey and hurts like the Dickens, that's for sure, but I'll keep it around for my bees. It's always the first thing to bloom in late winter and a sure sign spring is right around the corner. This was shot a week ago.

Dandelion and Dead Nettle are now blooming, more signs of spring. I found this bunch in our mint patch. It's wonderful to see new life exploding. The red maples are threatening to open any day now but the one in my front yard hasn't just yet. Henbit also is exploding. I should know, as I tend to keep a lot of those "weeds" in my berry patch (and all over).

Yellow bells are showing off their blooms in full force. I love these plants. They seem to bloom flowers first, and then leaves. This is from my neighbor's house just down the street, and he tells me this is the CUT-BACK version of this bush. He seemed quite willing to let me take as much of it as I want. Apparently, yellow bells will have their way with your yard.

Another sign of spring, mentees coming over to another open bee yard. This past week we had a smoker contest between Mary Jo and son  Chris. They initiated their smoker and got aquainted with lighting it, keeping it lit, learning how easy it is to use up fuel, how to pack it, and few other smoker tips their mentor showed them. I gave Chris a jakey old smoker I had, which he improved upon with a piece of tape. It took longer to start and is a smaller variety than their honking big new one, but as it turns out Chris's stayed lit the longest. MJ's was the first to go out (well, it would've had her mentor not intervened with some gum balls and cedar shavings), so Chris won the bragging rights this week.

Here MJ gets some hands-on learning, discovering differences between workers and a drone. We saw a few of the male bees, another sign of spring. We also saw a glorious amber queen, in hive 2015 Q-D. She was the last of the queens to be mated last fall, and outlasted two black Carniolan queens I mistakenly put in her colony while she was being raised and mated. That hive is now BOOMING, as the early jumpstart with 1:1 sugar syrup and pollen patties a few weeks ago is paying off. So we made our first artificial swarm of the season as well, moving her and a few frames of bees to an empty chamber on a double-nuc set-up. We gave her a honey frame, a pollen frame which I think contained eggs, another frame with food and room to lay, and a half-drawn deep frame of worker comb that broke on me in storage over winter due to inept handling. So I rubber-banded and jute-strung that comb back into position so she could start laying in there right away while the workers repair and keep drawing it out. When we go back next week to the colony from which she came I hope to find many queen cells to make up several new queens with. Fingers crossed. Another sign of spring, drones beginning to fly, drone brood starting to be laid in all the hives, and a hive strong enough to make an artificial swarm with.

I switched my record-keeping this year to Hive Tracks, an online inspection/notes/inventory system. I definitely love it. So I had to name my hives to match up to their records. My system uses year first, then the queens and their color if they have it (so 2014WDQ is the 2014 White Dot Queen), followed by a letter. I labeled some correx and keep this underneath the brick on each hive, instead of affixing a mark to any particular box. I tend to change boxes and hive configurations and locations throughout the season so this seemed most adaptable. So here's an overhead shot of the growing apiary. I removed the 2015 Q-D queen from what has now become the 2016 Q-A colony. I won't have to worry about 2016 Q-A swarming out on me, as they are now put in an emergency queen-rearing operation. I also took this overhead view so I can refer back to it later and not get mixed up on which colony is where.

And here is my humble apiary, real-life view, with the new 2016 Q-A group at far right. An artificial swarm, new queen cells, pollen flooding in and plants beginning to bloom are signs of spring that make me smile and wonder.