This is a picture taken from mid winter when it was cold! You can see frost forming around their entrances, it doesn't do this with the two dead hives I have so I know this frost is related to living bees, last week on a nice warm day (+10c) I went outside to check on my hives, I couldn't see anything outside so I put my ear right up to the entrance and gave a solid rap to the hive body, the result was a satisfying "Wrrr" sound. From what I can tell I have about nine hives still alive I knew I lost two in the fall from general hive weakness I also knew I might loose another since it was refusing to take a queen, so if I don't loose any more due to starvation then I will be in great shape.

I finally got myself a domain name SamsWildBees so you can use this now, there are still some issues with it, eventually the original url will redirect you to my new one but for now it wont.

This year I will be building some langstroth hives to use with my feral bees, the only real difference is in the box, I still wont use any foundation, my preliminary research indicates they are cheaper to build by almost half if you cut-out and build all of your own frames, also the comb isn't as tricky to handle, and they are much more portable. This is important since I hope to set up an out-yard this year too. The only thing I will have to watch is how much lifting is involved, there are some things I can do to minimise this, one is frequent harvests instead of waiting until the end of the season and dealing with huge stacks of supers all at once.