Late winter hive strength

[Kelbee]

My first year, I'm planning my first thorough post-winter hive inspections in March, 3+ months before the main flow in mid-June here. My hives are wintered in 3 mediums. I believe 1 or 2 hives may have come through the winter significantly weaker than the others.

Question: How many medium frames of bees should a healthy colony have this time of year? At what point would I need to reduce them to 2 boxes or 1 box or a nuc?

Thanks in advance.

[Chef Isaac]

I would wait until april or even may to do any full blown inspections. Your run the risk of chilling the brood. What you need to do, in my opinion, is start feeding in march sugar syrup to encourage brood build up.

you can save a weak colony by doing emergency feeding, depending on how weak they reall are. I have some week nucs that I fed last week.

Your question about how many frames the bees occupie this time of year is hard to answer because each race (italians, carnolians, etc) are different and require a different amount of cluster size.

Just identafy which colonies are light and stores and feed feed feed.

If the population is REALLY low, than you have nother problem... mites or something else.

I would just avoid a full blown inspection as early as march.

[wade]

Kelbee,

There was a thread on here recently, talking about cluster size depending on the race. I think the title is "Russian vs Italian Clusters" or something. I think your weakest hive is Italian if its the one with the CA queen that got replaced late last Summer. Next chance you have, take a look at the workers. Italians are orange with black stripes. The others are Russian or Carniolan, dark with light stripes. I know the bees I saw flying last time I was there were at least partially the dark bees.

[wade]

Er..I meant the last bees I saw, none were flying the other week.