I've been wondering if I should feed 1:1 syrup like Glock does, from a poultry waterer. I'd have to open feed because I still have quilt boxes on top.
I also have some Lauri's bricks still in the feeding rim and added some Global pollen patties late last month (still waiting on Randy Oliver's promised results from his over-winter pollen-sub trials, so I went with the Global patties as that was what I could get locally.)
My bees are slurping down around a liter of water per day from my close-in watering dish. I think they must be using it to liquify honey, right? They have access to a half acre pond about 350 feet away, too.
My daytime temps are in the 40 to barely high 50's range, night time lows in the twenties. No fresh pollen or nectar for at least another week, I think. We still have two feet of frost in the ground and some snow.
But the bees are actively flying every day. At least one the hives had foragers out 1000 feet this afternoon, but I think they found nothing (I was out in the same area and I saw nothing promising.) This Spring is extremely late; my sister's birthday was yesterday and many years I Fed-Ex her some near-to-blooming daffodils that I brought up here to NY from our Mother's VA farm. This year they haven't even appeared, yet. The ground around them is still frozen solid.
I've looked in the tops of the hives and I have 7, 6, and 5 bursting seams of bees (pretty much every seam except the farthest outer one in my reduced-sized hives.) Over the last few days they have apparently moved down into the bottom boxes if the noise there is any indication. Previously there was no noise in the lower boxes, much in the upper deeps/medium. Not it's in the whole stack.
I have no clue what the state of stores is. The boxes seemed heavy before winter. They still seem heavy; I'm a poor judge of that apparently, which is why I fed them sugar bricks all winter.
I'm not a honey collector, so I don't care if they store some syrup if it pleases them.
There's a 50-50 chance we may hit 60 F on Thursday, so I can go down in the hives and see what's what then. But should I be feeding some syrup until then? I am only coming into my first early spring with them, and if they felt like drawing out some more comb, that would be useful as I have no surplus. They weren't particularly comb-minded last summer.
I figure if I go in to town to the feed store and buy a chicken waterer then, for sure, I'll see them bringing in pollen and nectar the next day!
Thanks for your suggestions!
Enj.