Today was over 70 degrees. Not bad for the middle of February. Yesterday I figured that today would be a good day to open and inspect the hive. As you can see from the pictures below the hive looks plenty healthy and there is no reason to open it up yet.
Lots of “cleansing” today.
The plan is to purchase another queen and split this hive in April. Hopefully when we do open it for an inspection next month it will be strong enough to split. We also plan to purchase another package and start the year off with 3 hives. Our source plans to have the first Italian and Carniolan packages ($145) and Italian queens ($32) available on April 15th.