Julia and I stopped at the Blue Heron to feed our hives and get a feel for how they are doing. Her hive is still questionable, but we added food to the hive top feeder that still had a good bit of food left from our previous visit. We worried that the food was below the duct tape line but it was not. We did see (and I took pictures of) bees inside the mesh to drink the syrup.
My hive was full of bees and they had emptied the baggie, but not the Boardman jar. I replaced both the baggie with a new full one and the jar with a full one. The hive was quite heavy and I am hopeful that they are using the most recent box I added for syrup storage. I did not pull up a frame to see, but will the next time I am there because there's no point in leaving an empty box on through the winter.
Here's the slide show of what we saw at Blue Heron. Remember you can click on the slide show to see the captions, to change the speed of the picture changes, and to see it full sized:
I live in Virginia, and I am seeing a lot of "opportunistic" yellow jackets lately, too. What do yellow jackets do in the winter?
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