State of colonies this spring

[Jon]

May be a bit early to ask but what is everyone finding?
I have very few losses, just a couple of nucs I did not expect to overwinter anyway.
That's the upside. The downside is that colonies are smaller than I would like for the time of year.
I have lots on 3-4 frames of bees and very few on 6+ which would be ideal for March.
My nucs in particular are a lot smaller than I would like.
Only one drone layer out of 35 checked which is good and the rest all have some brood.
I would expect most of these colonies to be built up to decent strength by mid May.
No oil seed rape that I know of in the area this year so the sycamore late May is usually the first decent nectar flow.

My colonies had high mite levels early on last summer so I imagine this is a knock on effect from that.
I treated with Thymol/Apiguard in August, and Oxalic mid December.
Mite levels were high in mid July when I sampled colonies.

[prakel]

Quite similar here. I know for sure that our queens started laying later than I've seen in previous years -quite different from what I've been reading on the net about other's colonies which didn't have a brood break at all... We had solid slabs of capped drone brood (in good colonies) in early April last year; nowhere near that this time around as far as I can see.

But then, last year, those early drones combined with the bullish approach of some others persuaded me to start queen rearing before the end of April (something I wouldn't normally do) and we paid the price with a very poor show when, as normal, the weather went downhill in May.

Seems to me that there's been a bit of inhouse compensation going on at the end of what's been a rather odd winter. Interestingly we're seeing the best conditions for an early start that our coastal colonies have had for years with the Alexanders in full flower a month early.

Overall I'm pleased with the uniformity that I'm seeing.

[mbc]

Some weak colonies I was expecting to die have made it, some nucs are looking close to needing bigger boxes, most mini plus colonies will probably make it, production colonies are mostly a week or two away from needing supers and overall I'm very pleased with how things are looking.
Dandelions, willow and blackthorn are flowering, osr coming on quick in the last few days, still ankle height but once it starts you can watch the stuff grow, and we're only really waiting for the weather to start warming to kick off the best season in history.
My optimism gnome is in overdrive.

[Emma]

All alive & kicking here, raiding smelly water in the neighbour's garden and flowers everywhere. No info on brood areas yet... not until we've had a few consecutive days without gales or hail!

[madasafish]

Six traditional , one TBH hives and one Lang nuc with very low mite drops, OA vapourised December..(still low drops<40/hive) except TBH.

All in rude health = feeding fondant to two nationals (no supers availbale to house liquid feeders) and lang nuc., 1:1 sugar the rest. Weather is typically lousy ..no inspections planned before mid April.

[Lancs Lad]

Based on the Lancashire coast, not opened any hives yet, but checked all hives 30+ on Friday and all were flying well and bringing in lots of pollen, included are eight five frame nucs.
My varroa treatment was 8gms of Thymol crystals on two consecutive weeks in late August and oxalic vapourisation in late December. I also converted 12 hives to the Ian Craig method of 8 frames over 8 as a test and all appear to be strong. All stocks are AMM.

[Bumble]

I had three colonies flying a week ago in one apiary, the other colony elsewhere is also still alive, but haven't been able to get near them since because the weather has been so poor. Hailstorms today, and torrential gales.

[fatshark]

All colonies flying well on the warmest part of warm days ... those in the bee shed are looking particularly good. Went through one of the latter last Friday and it has ~5 frames of brood. All still have fondant but are bringing in bags of pollen and water from the nearby stream. Varroa levels look pretty good with the two indoors each dropping 1 mite in the last month. I know that mite drop is spectacularly inaccurate but have reasonable faith in these as the floors were built by Pete L. (so are a darned sight better made than mine) and have a sealed tray that is more-or-less critter proof. Colonies outside have a higher mite drop, but still perfectly acceptable. I won't be inspecting these for 2-3 weeks. Only Varroa treatment they've had is by vaporisation - late August/early September and midwinter.

OSR is still only calf-high (and, frankly, I'm using the calf of a vertically-challenged person to make it sound better than it is) so there's a chance some of these colonies may be strong enough to exploit it if the weather behaves.

[gavin]

OSR is still only calf-high (and, frankly, I'm using the calf of a vertically-challenged person to make it sound better than it is) so there's a chance some of these colonies may be strong enough to exploit it if the weather behaves.

Colonies looking good here too. Losses look like being low but I shouldn't mention figures until I've had a proper look inside in a couple of weeks. I'm doing more crownboard feeling than before and haven't found any that feel too cold to be brood rearing. There could be drone layers of course.

Colony strength varies. There are fewer spectacularly good colonies compared to some years and the average strength of the Paynes nucs is a bit lower than I had hoped. One site - the one with most colonies - had colonies shedding bees at various times since late summer. I'm suspecting CBPV there. Some of these converted from strong to weak colonies but most have survived.

That last site, near Forgandenny, has an OSR field half a mile west which is almost knee high and looks like flowering quite soon.

[mbc]

Good point, I think the unit of measurement should be called a gavin, iirc up past my ankle is roughly 1/4 of an almost knee height gavin.