We are about halfway through the winter right now. I haven't looked into any of the hives lately to make sure they are still alive. The next warm day we will and probably put a pollen patty in their to start them raising brood again. Here in Utah where we are located there wont be much pollen before the middle of March. Once we look in we can see if they still have food stored up or if we need to feed them. If they have made it this far, we don't want to lose them.
It is also time to start preparing for spring. Right now you can find many people advertising on KSL to sell their package bees. Prices are ranging from $69 per package to $90 per package. I am not sure why the discrepancy in price, they all get their packages from California and most of them come from two main breeders Olivarez and CF Koehnen. I have also seen some advertised to have Wooten or Pendall queens, but I am not sure if they sell packages or just queens. I have purchased from CF Koehnen and was really impressed. I don't think I would purchase anything smaller than a 3 pound package because it took all they had to get the hive started. I also don't think I wouldn't spend the extra money on a 4 pound package because the 3 worked out so well.
The other way we are going to try to increase is with our own splits. I have made about 8 nuc boxes. These are small versions of a hive that will hold 5 frames instead of 10. This is where their is quite a bit of uncertainty as I don't know how the hives are looking and how many splits I will be able to make. I also don't know when to have to queens arrive because I will need a nice day to make the splits and another decent day to put the queens in. I am going to try and order the queens from Strachan Apiaries. http://strachanbees.com/about_us.html I have been wanting to try their queens for a while. I have been really impressed with the carniolan queens. They seem to manage the hive well and have less problems with verroa mites. I think I will try to have them delivered close to the first or second week in April. Hopefully that is early enough to get the nucs going well enough to get a good honey crop, but late enough to have good enough weather to work with the bees.
The next project is making all the boxes for the hives. I will post some pictures of the process later.
