Year two: The fence is up to protect beehives from bear

It's April 2, 2013.  It's my second year at beekeeping.  The large hive made it through the winter although the number of bees has lessened.  I scraped out a lot of dead bees from the bottom of the hive last week, but I'm told that's to be expected.  I'm just glad they overwintered at all.

If you recall earlier posts, here's how I winterized the hives:

• surrounded my hives with bales of hay. 
• wrapped roofing paper around hives for insulation leaving about 6 inch gap between hive and hay
• added a piece of 1 inch insulation to the top of the hive, under the top cover 
• Topped it all with a piece of plywood
• Lastly, added rocks and bricks to top of plywood, as added precaution

2012-2013 winterized beehives before adding the plywood which covered half of the bales of hay and all of the hive, for further protection

The small hive, the Nuc, didn't winter over at all.  I've seen no life there for months.  I think the hive was too small.  I had added two frames to the Nuc in the fall and hoped to build a new hive to start off the spring.  But that isn't going to happen.

New hive plan

Since I can't start off with my Nuc, as I had hoped, my plan is to take some bees out of my existing hive and do exactly what I did before....if there are enough bees to take from the existing hive.  If not, I'll wait until the hive is large enough to take some of the bees for the new hive...hopefully later this spring. 

Then I'll take a few frames, add them to the Nuc, and move the nuc to somewhere about 5 miles away for two weeks.  By then, they should have made a new queen and then I'll have a new hive, ready to go. 

I'll then bring the nuc back home.  At that point, I'd like to move them into a new hive I have bought and painted for them (photo to come).  I want to get them into the new hive and let the colony expand well before winter so that they'll survive it.