Spring is just around the corner! That is easy to say for me since the temperatures are climbing into the upper forties and fifties this week. Let the sun shine and the bees fly! It has put me in the mood to update www.ebertqueens.com and list nucs and singles for May 2018 pick-up. I'm hearing a lot of reports of bad winter loss in our area, so I suspect bees will be in demand. Queen ordering won't list on the website until very late April. This year we're going to offer Complete Single Hive units. Packages and nucs got extremely expensive over the past several years, so we figured we might as well maximize our combination of bees and equipment to offer a solution that offers a little more bang for the buck--at least for folks that want more equipment rather than only to reoccupy their existing equipment. Nucs are listed as usual too. Folks who want to be in on the package party in mid-April, on the other hand, should contact Ebert Honey at the Lynnville branch to place your order. In the meanwhile, I'm going around assessing the wintering results. We're not out of the woods yet, but the warm-up lets me see our current status and probability of the survivors making it through the next couple of months. The deep freeze temperatures a few weeks ago wiped out a number of smaller clusters for certain. Today and tomorrow I'll figure out more about how it all turned out on balance. Here is one that proved very resilient that I visited just before dusk yesterday: The melted snow also revealed one of my beloved hive tools that apparently dropped out of my pocket when climbing into the truck last fall. Look at the lower left corner--it's hard to see but that's the point....I started buying stainless steel tools several years ago because I see them on the ground (as long as they're not covered in propolis). The economy tools work just as well for their actual job, but they get very dark and hard to see when dropped: