First day of beekeeping season 2015

On April 4th, it was finally warm enough to open up our hives for the first time this season. I was so nervous to see if any of our 3 hives survived. At the first hive, I didn’t see any bees flying in and out of the hive. This is always a bad sign.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 4, 2015 at 10:27am PDT

I unwrapped the hives only to find frame after frame of dead bees. The whole hive of frames had mold. And on this frame you can see all the bees clustered together trying to stay warm. Moisture and mold killed these bees. I feel so sad. All these frames along with the honey went into the garbage. I don’t want to reuse frames that have mold on them. It might be diseased as well and I don’t want our new bees getting sick from it.

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 4, 2015 at 11:48am PDT

We decided that we were going to purchase a new package of bees to install into this hive. Then I went to our other beehive location. I saw bees flying around and already knew that this was a good sign. One of the two hives in this location had survived the winter! What a relief!!

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 4, 2015 at 3:20pm PDT

I was smiling, grinning actually from ear to ear. This makes me sooooo happy! We had a really harsh winter with lots of cold days and snow. So to know that this hive survived is pretty amazing! Here is another video of a closeup of the hive.

A video posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 4, 2015 at 5:50pm PDT

I moved the hive back to it’s original location and removed all the tar paper wrapping. So happy to see the bees flying around!

A photo posted by Mimi (@meemsnyc) on Apr 5, 2015 at 7:07am PDT