Hi Sally/Shelly....

Sadly, my one hive did not make it through the winter.

Around December 3, I found the queen dead outside the hive in front of it.
I'll never know what happened, since there has been no sign of disease of any kind, not excessive mites. No indication of CCD either.
Apparently after the queen's death, the hive slowly dwindled and was not able to raise brood to replace the older workers.
Last week I finally disassembled the hive and still could not find any clues as to what went wrong (aside from, obviously, the queen's death). I am forging ahead after my winter mourning period.

Many pounds of wonderful honey and pollen remained stored up and untouched in the frames of the two deeps, so i took that out and wrapped and stored it in my basement so it wouldn't get robbed.
I had the good sense to order two new packages back in January, so I'll have two new colonies to start up the first week of May. I also have an excellent local source of non-treated mite-resistant queens near me, so I'll likely split or do some requeening during the summer. My goal is to have 3 or 4 vigorous hives going into next fall. The odds are not so favorable for winter when you only have one hive.

I have also set up a swarm lure box for the year to do a little feral bee 'fishing'- you never know! Took an old wreck of a deep and baited it with old brood comb frames and lemongrass oil. There are honeybees from *somewhere* checking it out already for the past couple of days, going in and out and and cleaning out any remaining grains of sugar and old honey residue. With some luck I will catch a swarm eventually.

Meanwhile, I've been putting up nesting boxes for the little native bee pollinators too, our local wild blue orchard mason bees:
http://forums.teamestrogen.com/showp...&postcount=381
So it looks like there will indeed be bees flying here this summer, one way or another.