🙈 Inspection - No Supers, Yet

Mike Tyson beekeeping again¹. We had planned on putting the honey supers on today to take advantage of any early nectar flow. We even went so far as to stage all the boxes and to make sure they had properly drawn out comb. After inspecting (2) hives it became painfully obvious that these gals are light. With populations getting to almost critical levels (I'm looking at you Hive 008/25), we decided that it was too much of a risk that these hives would starve out. So we scrapped the supering plan, continued to cycle the brood above the excluder, and put some additional weak syrup on them (with spirulina). We'll reassess, next weekend. It looks like last week's freeze set the Holly Bushes back. All the blooms are now black, so we'll wait on those. Plus our Dogwood hasn't started blooming in earnest yet.

We did find a few swarm cells in Hive 008/25. We did a cut-down split starting a 5 frame nuc with the queen (008). We left one good-looking cell with the parent colony but will have to go through them again next week to knock down any additional ones. We do not want any virgin lead swarms to head off to the trees.

The full inspection report is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18UTsC-YO1kKz8Oz6XcR3_uS0y5oIw8Zx/view?usp=sharing

1. When Mike Tyson was asked by a reporter whether he was worried about Evander Holyfield and his fight plan he answered; “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”