February feeding

[capt44]

Every year around the 15th of February I start feeding my bees 1-1 sugar syrup with Pro Health and Protein Patties.
It was cool yesterday but today was a lot warmer and the bees were flying.
I start them on sugar syrup and protein patties trying to stimulate the queen into laying.
The past few years around the beginning of March the Population of the hives would be booming ready to explode.
I would have drones crawling around on the foundation.
Around the 1st week or so in March on a warm day I will go into my hives and do my splitting of hives and checker boarding the brood boxes.
I've been watching the folks on this forum from south Louisana and Georgia talk about their bee hives and inspecting them.
We're usually 2 to 3 weeks behind them.
I have 2 open feeders here in this bee yard and they were covered up with bees today.
I'm biting at the bits ready to start raising queens.
In March I will set up my Timing Box so I'll know exactly how old my larva are in a particular frame.
By all indications this is going to be a busy year for raising queens.
I'm getting several calls everyday looking for queens in April.
A couple of months back I put a frame of drone cell foundation in several of my hives to have a pretty large drone population.

[AGM]

Capt thanks for the info. I'm going to try my hand at raising a few queens this year and it's nice to hear the timing of it from someone close.

[10framer]

i've decided to back up my queen rearing a few weeks.  there is a great drone population right now and the bees are drawing comb but the big flows are a week or so off still.  when clover is in i'll graft and when tulip poplar starts opening i'll set up my mating nucs and time it so i have another round of cells ready to drop in as soon as i pull those queens.