February 10th was unseasonably warm again. It was just over 55 degrees.  I opened up the one hive that had already died and I found it had several frames of honey left.  So they did not starve.  There were not as many dead bees as I would normally expect to see, so I think the problem was there were not enough bees to survive the cold.  They were in there and buzzing in late December, but we had a mild winter up to that time.

The good new is I can use the frames of honey in my other hives to make sure they all have enough to get through to spring.  I peeked into the other 4 hives and found that only one of them really needed any honey.  This is good news also.

It does not happen too often that you can check your hives in February.  And it is not real often they have plenty of honey left this late in the winter.  This could be a good beekeeping year.

The next issue to watch is this week of warm weather cumming now.  If it is too warm for too long, the bees will start to raise young bees and then when it gets cold again they could exhaust themselves trying to keep the young bees warm.

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