April 2026 Newsletter

As usual, our Minnesota spring includes just about every weather condition possible, but hopefully our bees are less stressed out about it than we are!

If your colony died, you should gently knock out any dead bees (don’t worry about the ones in cells) and scrape the bottom board away from your apiary.  You can seal up and store the equipment for use later as long as there is no dead brood or old (5+ year-old) comb.

For your overwintered colonies, you can continue to feed pollen patties, place them close to the cluster and replace them if they get moldy or dried out. Remember, pollen stimulates the nurse bees to produce brood food, so it’s important for them to have an adequate supply.  Only feed sugar if your colony really needs it, a few frames of honey can last a while, and the bees will break cluster on warmer days to access honey on the outer frames.

You can leave your winter covers on through April, cooling down on warm days is much easier than heating the cluster on cold days, so err on the side of leaving it on late than taking it off early.

Pollen has been coming in pretty steadily. I saw willow pollen being brought in on March 9th(!), so plan to keep an eye on your colony's growth this month as they can grow pretty quickly. You should inspect every 7-10 days weather permitting.  Be prepared to make a divide when they have about 8 frames of brood. Have your divide plan and equipment ready in advance. With the early pollen I can’t help but think about swarm prevention.

We have been seeing more hive beetles so keep an eye out for those buggers when you open the lid. They run from the light so check out the top bars and inner cover quickly in the beginning of your hive inspections.  If you do see any, only give a small pollen patty, or what they will eat in 7-10 days as SHB (small hive beetle) can lay eggs in the patty and the larvae will eat it and move on to damage the colony.

If it is above 50 degrees, you can scrape your bottom board, don’t forget to put the entrance reducer back (with the large hole facing down) in when putting the colony back together.  If you have 4 or more frames of brood in the top box, you can do a partial reversal but only do this if the brood nest does not straddle between boxes, it is too cold to break up the brood nest.  A partial reversal is reversing the position of the top two boxes to give the bees space to move up into.

If you are hiving packages and want some guidance, then see the “Beekeeping in Northern

Climates'' (https://beelab.umn.edu/manuals ) manual or the poster 157b (https://beelab.umn.edu/posters) on the Bee Lab website.

As always, you can send us any questions at: The Bee Squad

Happy Beekeeping!
Jenny