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I saw several drone cells yesterday, so swarm season is approaching rapidly.

Inspected 8 of my hives in the home yard yesterday. Saw a sealed and unsealed drone brood. A some drone that had already emerged.

Without doing a full inspection yesterday, I saw the same in my hives as Donna found in hers. The burr comb in the sugar block shim was built in a week as there was still a little of the block in there last weekend...quite a surprise!

I had the same thing happen in my best hive last year...it swarmed on March 22 and a couple after swarms. It never successfully requeened it self. But I got three more new hives from the swarms.

My hives at the house are doing orientation flights now. One hive has drones flying. I haven't seen drones returning to any of the other hives yet. I'll be happy when warm, sunny and not too windy weather comes so I can do some serious inspections.

Helped Sally check her hive late this afternoon. Her hive came from the big hive I had last year that swarmed on March 22nd and then the hive we started with the swarm, swarmed again on May 14th. Her hive is a 8 frame set-up with a deep and two medium supers. They had built a lot of drone brood between the two supers and had a lot of drone already emerged. They were also building comb in the spacer she had on for the winter sugar block. All three boxes were full of bees. The deep brood box had 7 frames of brood getting ready to emerge. Because of what happened last year, we went a head and pulled three capped brood frames and put it in a five frame deep nuc box, added a medium super to the nuc box. Shook extra nurse bees in and then pulled one medium frame with brood, larva and queen cups, capped honey frames and put in the nuc box. There was no way to find the queen because of the number of bees in the hive and having to wait until late in the day to check the hive. Will check the nuc box next weekend for capped queen cells.

I noticed a number of drones today (3/25) as well. I can tell that burr comb is rapidly being build in the candy spacer at the top. The weather has not been warm enough to go in for a full inspection or removal of the spacers.

I have a feeling that over the next two weeks, we're going to be seeing some swarms.

I inspected two of the hives today and noticed many drone cell (no queen cells) throughout the brood chambers. There are a lot of boys walking around and flying today! I'm very excited about this year.

Donna,
Your hive looks a lot like mine today. Weather was "permitting" to venture into this one hive. Needless to say, there is some cleanup to do.