On Sunday, April 12, 2026, we performed our first colony inspection of the season. I was able to unwrap all of the hives and do a pretty thorough inspection of 17 of 24 colonies. As of this post, I still need to check 7 colonies but the weather has been less than cooperative. We’ve sustained something like 3-4″ rain in 3 days which flooded our field where the hives reside.
I went into winter with 30 colonies. While it is not fun to clean out a dead-out, an 80% survival rate is a success in my book.
During our inspection, we noticed a lot of unmarked queens. This seemed odd as we were queen marking machines last year. The only explanation is if we had supercedures or swarms last fall and didn’t know it. Or, we simply didn’t mark all the queens and lost track. We also observed a lot of unique colors of pollen going in. Normally we see oranges and yellows, but we were observing greens and pinks. And the best part of all was seeing nectar starting to fill the cells. There isn’t much blooming but there are a few trees, shrubs and wild weed flowers popping up. Dandelions sprung up after the rain too.
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