We ended up having a good splitting season. Winter loss was considerable, but the surviving bees came through strong enough to start a lot more hives. We will be safely north fo six hundred colonies this year.

In the images below, I am shaking the bees off three frames of brood and putting them in a third deep box--then we set the third box over an excluder to allow the bees to come up but keep the queen down. Then we can take that third box, give it a new queen and end up with a new hive for the season. This hive had a lot of bees.

This picture is from a hive that I split into four different colonies--it had 12 frames of brood and a ton of bees!

And for the fun picture of the spring--Alex discovered an old plastic queen cup that got turned horizontal, and the bees used it to raise a drone! I like this picture

I hope your splitting went well also!

It has been a busy month since we dealt with package bee orders. I'll try to put up a few entries in short order to cover everything that has been going on. At the moment we are in the very last stages of splitting the overwintered colonies to make new hives, but most of them are building up for the much awaited honey flow. I've seen quite a bit of nectar coming into the broodnests right now, and black locust is having a strong bloom this year.

But for today I want to look back at some apple pollination pictures. We delivered bees to two orchards on the first Sunday in May. Alex and I did one load in the morning, relaxed for a few hours in the afternoon and then delivered another load at twilight. It made for a long day but everything went smoothly. All the bees came out of the orchards looking much stronger than when they were set in the trees.

Pulling orchard bees

Bees in the orchard

A bee at work in the apples

Here I'm hauling the hives out of a Pella orchard.

Lifting them up onto the truck

And away we go!