Roland,
I'm going to try to answer your questions best I can based on memory, because I didnt' keep accurate written records of individual hive performance, weather, plant blooming, etc.
I started all ten 3 lb. packages of Italians in early May. I use all medium boxes for brood and surplus honey, also used foundationless frames because I wanted the bees to build all natural comb and go treatment free. I fed the bees syrup for the first few weeks only because there was a fairly strong nectar/pollen flow going from the first day of installation in the hives. As you remember, last spring was way ahead of itself, so installing packages in May was way too late, at least for last year, they missed out on alot of the early flowering trees, most of the dandelion and other early flowers that would have provided nectar and pollen for buildup. However, the weather was exceptionally nice for that time of spring and there was still much nectar and pollen coming in. The dutch lawn clover was starting to bloom within a week or so of installing the packages.
I didn't have any drawn comb to give them from the start, so having to build all their own comb in the foundationless frames and rear brood required alot of resources, including both the syrup I provided and some of the nectar coming in. One thing I would do differently would have been to continue the syrup feeding longer than what I did. All the colonies eventually drew out three boxes of frames each, about half the hives even did a fourth box. All queens were accepted and began laying, all had nice solid worker patterns, did seem to get alot of drone comb too, but that can happen when you go foundationless. Supercedure occured in a few colonies I believe in the summer, but all occured successfully as they had laying queens again eventually in late summer/early fall. I would say that as of Sept. 1 all hives had at least 10 frames of brood, but that's just rough.
I got no honey crop overall out of the 10 hives, which really was not surprising to me considering all the comb building they had to do plus raise a season's worth of brood. We had really good weather for foraging, warmth, sun, and rain when we needed it into the summer period, but we did get a drought in late summer/early fall which diminished the incoming resources somewhat. The weather for the goldenrod/aster flow was pleasant but cooler than what I would have liked, I don't really think they did that well nectar-wise, lots of pollen came in though throughout their bloom period. But, I didn't see much gain in hive weights from the fall flow, actually, that's about the time I started seeing upon inspection a decrease in the amount of uncapped nectar they had stored previously, so I figured they were starting to use up stores to continue brood rearing. That's about the time I started to feed 2:1 syrup and I continued that until about the time it got too cold and the bees stopped taking the syrup, there was even snowflakes in the air. At that point they were on their own, I did have some concern about how they would winter just like any beekeeper would. I figured if they could make it till late winter I could always start emergency feeding of some type. Well, they didn't make it that far, all hives still had capped honey though, but it was just out of reach of the clusters. A few hives even had a couple frames of scattered sealed worker brood left, those Italians sure like to rear late brood. That's about it. John