Im with gww, I don't know what they are doing either. But my bees were very active today. (Warmed up to 72!) and sun shine...
First time they have been so active in quite a while because of cool weather. Freezing and frost nights here lately and not very warm. I just figured my bees were taking advantage of the day, out and about.. lol. If you have other hives than pictured might be a good idea to check as gww suggested just to be safe.... If you do have other hives, what are they doing?
I was in the shop earlier (which happens to the the place where I store my empty combs). They can't get to them but they know they are there and would like too. Many bees trying...
Phillip
It should be warm again tomorrow, so I will just peek in through the moisture quilts to see what everyone looks like. I have four hives right now. Two are a bit smaller in population, the tree hive on the left in the picture is one of them, and I don't see as much activity from them on warm days, which would be expected. The second stronger hive just had maybe 10-15 bees on the porch, coming and going when the afternoon was warmest, nothing like this hive. Once it got dark all the bees went back inside. I guess we'll just see if they do the same thing again tomorrow.
Now there is one other thing which was new yesterday and today which I neglected to mention, and that is that I put some old honey frames out for the bees to clean on the other side of the property. I fairly certain they are far enough away to not cause any robbing.
Wait, I just realized something I may have been misunderstanding. I thought gww meant that this hive was BEING ROBBED, but, gww, did you mean this hive was ROBBING OUT the tree hive? There wasn't any heavy traffic at the tree hive while this hive was "bearding". And the tree hive isn't extremely tiny, I feel like I'd have seen some resistance from them. I don't know, do robbing hives display this kind of bearding behavior?