Yup bees poop too thing is during the winter they hold it in for months, on the 29th (day before yesterday) I noticed hive #2 was really hoping. It looked like a mad rush for the bathroom. When it was all over, the scraps of snow around the hive were covered in little brown dots. I was worried because this hive was the only one out, I thought maybe this was a sign that they were going to die. Then the next day hives #8, #4, #1, #3, #9 and #2 were doing the exact same thing, #5 was the only exception they might be smaller then the others. I was very pleased to see that Lazarus (#1) had survived even though its daughter didn't.
I think because of the longer days and warmer nights the colonies are slowly coming out of hibernation, I didn't see this during the winter when it warmed up to almost +10c, smart little girls!

I have been doing some research into warre hive design, this design looks interesting since I will be building my own frames I'm not locked into using langstroth standards, warre doesn't use frames, it uses top bars and manipulate boxs instead of individual comb. This is problematic for me since our laws (Canada) requires one to have movable comb. An easy fix for this is to make warre frames, same thing as langstroth but different shape, I will make the warre boxs 1" wider on the one dimension to accommodate the extra wood from a frame and a bit taller. Using all boxs the same size is very useful since I'm planing to employ the warre style of comb renewal. This wouldn't be possible with two deeps and four shallows because they are not the same size, shallows are too shallow to use as brood boxs and deeps are too heavy for supers, I think a nice balance is using a smaller taller box, this is what warre boxs are like (although I will be building them 2" taller)

A warre system adds one new box below the broodnest at the bottom of the hive every year, the bees then build down and inhabit this new space filling the old space with honey. I think this is a neat idea because one doesn't have to loose frames from the broodnest to renew comb. In my TBH I will be adding new bars at the entrance side and moving all the bars over to accomplish the same thing with more work. I feel that comb renewal is absolutely essential to a healthy hive, most often wild bees fail after several years because they don't have any more space to add new comb and all their brood comb is so dark it becomes unusable, there is also evidence that pesticides and many diseases are more concentrated in old dark comb.

So that's what's going on, more info on the new hive construction when I have it.

I can't wait, really I can't, now where did I put my blow torch...

All kidding aside it won't be long now, today I saw several robins and some bugs that must have thawed out to continue on their journey as if nothing happened.

As near as I can tell I have eight hives still alive, 12 and 11 didn't make it, this is still eight out of ten, 80% wintering rate is very good. I don't know what kind of shape they are in of course, the way I found out was by listening on a really quite day at the entrance (ear right up to it) you can hear something that sounds similar to what you hear when listening to sea shells, for some of the hives others were to quite so I taped the side a couple time. Now I wonder how much honey they used over the winter?

Honestly where did I put my blowtorch? There is still snow to melt!