Looking back at my pics from spring 2018, I see a few that caught my attention when I was out in the field.  As I mentioned in the last post, there were some tiny, tiny clusters this spring after the long winter. This one had twenty bees and a queen.  It is remarkable that they raised any brood at all with such a nominal number of heat generators in the nursery. I think this queen got transplanted into a queenless colony where she gained more support.

After the dandelions came along, the brood picture got uniformly more encouraging:

Very quickly–within about a month–we went from a chilly dearth to the possibility of cells

And here is one of the fun sights I get to spot once or twice a year: two queens coexisting during supersedure.  One of the queens here is harder to spy, so there is a little bit of “Where’s Waldo” challenge in this one.  Good luck!