So the sun came out today, the wind died off, and the thermometer hit 25 degrees. A nice day like this triggers activity all over the place, the most noticeable of which is in the lawn. Dandelions opening up yellow flowers all over the place today. Altho we saw the first dandelion flower a couple weeks back, today is the real start of the dandelion bloom, not just a lonely flower, but the lawn has dozens of them open today. For the first time this spring, it’s warm enough to pull out brood frames and have a good look at what’s going on in the wintered hives. I was quite anxious to see how the combine worked out where I put the dinky little queenright colony and the laying worker colony together into a single stack of boxes. It seems that worked for us this time, I found a frame half full of worker brood capped, with lots of eggs and open larvae surrounding the capped workers. The real surprise tho was what I saw in the frames just outside of the eggs, fresh nectar, and not just a little bit. The yellow pollen at the entrance is a bit of a give-away, they have found producing maples. Some of the other wintered colonies were looking better than last time I took a quick look. I was considering reversing some boxes, but, turns out it’s to late for that, the brood nest has spilled over into the top half of the bottom box on all but one of them. Rarely do the bees do what we want, I had expected them to continue expanding to fill the top box before moving down, it’s what they did last year. But that’s not what happened, with 5 frames of bees in the top box, they expanded down into the bottom box this year, not just one of them, all of them. I really cant say why, but it means we wont be reversing this year. Maple pollen coming in, and fresh nectar in the hives, bee season has really started now.