I finally was able to move my first colony into their new home today. It was so hot I had to wait until the evening to do anything outside, the part I like the least about beekeeping is the suit especially when it's above 30 degrees in the sun.

To make the conversion I rigged up some clips that slide into holes drilled into the sides of my frames. This pins comb inside each new frame, since I have never tried this before I hope they hold up. I don't like changing hive formates because I end up having to remove most of their stores simply because honeycomb is to soft and heavy to attach to a frame if it doesn't reach all the way to the bottom.

What you see in the picture is two of my warre hives, the blond one has a feeder above the single box, warre hives are square whereas langstroth are rectangular, I built my warre boxes a bit deeper then warre calls for so that their dimensions are closer to cubes, the beauty of a modular system is that if these taller boxes are troublesome for me in some unforeseen way I can just make shorter ones.

Well this week I was finally able to get into my remaining hives for a spring inspection. I checked the first two, small but alive, it looked like a portion of the colony died separated from the rest during the winter, I had heard of this problem with top bar hives before, I was trying an idea I had called a queen discourager it was meant to act like a queen excluder that only discourages the queen from moving into the brood section instead of preventing said moment.
Long story short I thought this might have caused a cluster split mid winter. I closed up both hives and left for the day. The following day I inspected the next two hives, both of them had bees but no queen, the same split was observed, either the queen didn't choose the winning side or she wasn't mated properly the previous year. What surprised me was hive activity, what bees were left were raising a few drones making the hive appear alive from the outside. The last two I inspected also had no queen but this time there was no queen discourager. This leaves me with three living hives out of ten, needless to say I was disappointed, at least though I know the cause, mid winter cluster split.
All of this evidence leads me to the conclusion that at least this design of Top Bar Hive is not viable for our climate, I surmise that bees can and will move horizontally as shown in many feral colonies, what I missed was the direction the comb was oriented. It seems bees will often build along the longest axis, so in a horizontal hive they would often choose to build comb along the hive instead of across it, this makes sense since during winter the queen must move towards the honey stores this means she must travel to the coldest part of the hive "the walls" to move towards her stores, and she must do this many times with axially perpendicular comb arrangement, whereas with axially parallel comb arrangement she can stay nearly centered in the hive while moving towards her stores. In virtical hives this is a natural arrangement since comb is always drawn plumb, and especially in a warre hive since the dimensions are so close to an average cluster size and square. At least this year I won't be starting from scratch like last year, needless to say I will be moving all my reaming hives into warre systems, I do not feel like this was a total loss since I learned something from it.

Its late so I will just post a quick update, today I saw a couple drones flying around a few hive entrances, this is important because it indicates breeding viability, I could probably make some "splits" now since it takes about thirty days for a new queen to be raised mated and start laying this would put it in July. I don't like forcing nature by doing splits or feeding outside of natural rhythms, eg. spliting before swarm season or re-queening as a matter of routine to name some.
The apple trees are finally blooming, so my bees have plenty of forage if the weather cooperates.
I'm almost finished building all my warre hives for this year, I can't wait to get some bees into them.

The weather finally broke somewhat today, it became nice and warm. With all this rain the dandelions are really pushing hard, I could even smell them when I was standing in the right spot, smells sweet. We need a few weeks of warm sunny weather too make up for lost time, or at least no more rain for a while. The bees certainly have no lack of forage as long as the weather permits.

This is turning into a nightmare of a year for beekeeping, all of April and now most of May have been cold and wet, last year the apple trees were almost done blooming by now, this year they haven't even started yet, we are probably two to three weeks behind the seasonal norm. I decided to start feeding my bees so yesterday I installed and filled all of their feeders, hopefully I'm not to late, I probably should have done this on the last week of April.

I have been using the extra time to build more warre hives, hopefully I will get a chance to use them this year, I know the swarm season will be short if we even get one, it will probably not start until the middle of June at the earliest. So I have a bit more time to get ready.

On the right is a picture of my new workspace, I modified a table I had for use as a work table it measures four feet square, I bolted my drill press onto one corner, it's nice to not keep hauling that thing up onto a tiny workbench. You can see the crown jewel of my workshop under a pile of 6mm frame slates, a delta contractors 10 inch table saw with a cast iron top. I really like having the wide solid table to cut things on, the fence system is nice. I bought a nice freud ripping blade for it, quality blades are always worth the money, now I can get about +-0.05mm accuracy with a nice pine board very nice! I also built a zero clearance insert out of 1/2 inch mdf, this makes ripping slates a breeze, worlds safer too.

A tower of seventy + frames all assembled

Well our dandelion flow finally started, It has been raining for weeks in a lot of places including ours, I figure the dandelions are about two weeks late this year. Our willow trees are in bloom as well, I spent the extra time setting up my workshop for building hives, I bought a nice table saw, since I am building so many hives I figured it would be worthwhile to buy some nice tools. My three favourite tools would have to be the table saw, drill press and drill (for screws). I will have to write an entry about my tools some time.
This week I will be able to start spring inspections. Basically I just check stores, quickly inspect and add some empty bars next to the broodnest for progressive comb renewal. Another couple weeks and I should have all my bait hives in place, hopefully.