On the left is when Chantal and I put the bees in the hive last spring, and the right is a picture I took a few Thursdays ago, when it was about 60F out, and the bees were flying around cleaning their hive and looking for nectar, which wasn't really there yet. Both hives survived the winter, probably because they didn't swarm during the summer, we treated them for varroa mites this fall, and the winter was relatively mild.

At least one of the hives has started making new bees, which is kind of a bad idea, since there isn't much for the new bees to do other than eat up their honey. Because of this, when Alice went to check them yesterday, the hive above was almost completely empty of honey. The other hive still had honey in it, so I imagine they're following a more conservative worker production strategy. We fed both hives with sugar syrup. This will keep the quickly reproducing hive alive, and will likely convince the other hive that nectar flows are arriving, and spur worker production there. This will make us feed that hive even more, but it will also mean there will be a nice large population of bees to harvest the dandelions once they come out in a few weeks.