Comb replacement

Put frames with starter strips either side of frames with brood, mixed 4kg with 4 lts, started feeding with up and over feeders. The monitoring boards will help to keep the colony warm, maybe if the colonies appear to have plenty of stores I should replace boards earlier than I did. This would help kick start brood rearing.

Colony active

This last week the weather has warmed up 10 degrees plus, frogspawn has arrived. Both colonies were very active today, there were a cup full of dead bees on the floor of each hive and both have plenty of stores. I have removed the empty super from under the brood, put monitoring boards in and entrance blocks in. They were both bringing in plenty of pollen, two colours?

Exact Weights

Measuring the colonies by weighing each side is very inaccurate! (1 or 2 KG out).
So I measured all the seperate items from the deceased colony in KG.
Crown .96
Super box 3.68
Brood box 3.26
Mesh floor & block 1.4
Frame & comb, no stores, approx .25
Homemade roof 5
Bought roof 4.5
Floor, Super, Brood, frames, crown 12
There was 1.6 KG of stores still in the hive.
My estimation of 2.36 for a super was wrong, and so this winters calculations are out. If each item always weights the same my currant winter setup (floor, super, brood, frames, crown) =12Kg. I guess 10,000 bees weights around 1Kg.
Next year for a full size colony, if I take 13Kg from it's weight I will have an estimation of their stores.

First check

THe small left colony has died. There was around 8lb of stores scaterred around the frames so I presume it was cold. The cluster was only small and only used the a single space between two frames. There was no brood and I did not see any pollen. This was my smallest colony, it had made an emergancy queen during August.
Gave the other two some fondant.