Mid-March still cold and no brood

I was hoping my worries for Matilda will be over with some brood. Purple Crocuses have been in bloom but nothing really much is in bloom since mid-March, although more and more flower buds are about to burst. Cherry blossoms are blooming at glacial speed. Last year this time, cherry blossoms are about to end. There has not been enough blooms to stimulate the queen to start laying. On March 14th, I added 1:1 sugar syrup mixed with Echinacea, peppermint and lavender tea and added a new pollen patty. The tea is not some special recipe, they were tea leaves given by my friend Andrew and it is so fragrant that I hoped it stimulates the bees to feed.  I thought at least by the 16th of March, the queen will start laying and I would expect to start seeing sealed brood by today. Instead, I saw that the queen just started laying yesterday. The eggs were upright and at least 100 eggs were laid. The queen was also found on the same frame. Well at least something and hope they are fertilized eggs. Doomed if they came out drones. I guess I would have been even more worried if I didn't see eggs by now. So I can expect to see the first batch of workers/ to emerge by April 16th. The next 8 days are crucial for the overwintered bees to do their best in making sure that most of the eggs laid will emerge into healthy new bees. By then I would also know if they were fertilized eggs. I also noticed that some cells had 3 eggs laid in it. Wondering why? Overall, the queen's laying pattern was good. Got an answer from BeeMaster Forum, that the queen when just starting to lay eggs will accidentally lay 2-3 eggs in a cell and nothing to be concerned about.

I have figured that artificial feeding is not a sure way of stimulating the queen to start laying. It would be the lowest average temperature of the day and the amount of natural forage available for the bees to bring back pollen. The artificial feeding as I understand is to sustain the hive in case the natural elements are lacking to provide with the food demands of the colony and may rely on it to maintain its current production of brood. 

These are some of the gorgeous Purple Crocuses that bloomed around the community garden on March 20th. These flowers were just about 5m from the hive and the bees were returning with heavy bags of pollen to the hive. 

Was cleaning up supers from Bombay that was infected with Nosema for Iotron treatment on Tuesday. Iotron is a name of a company that provides services to beekeepers, horticulturist and any food/medical business that needs to sterilize equipments. They use electromagnetic radiation to sterilize the equipments as the beams destroys the DNA molecules in the bacteria.  I was scraping off all the sugar syrup that were stored in sealed combs from last fall into the garbage bin. It was heartbreaking to remember how well the hive was doing last September and wasting all the golden beeswax that had sugar/honey. This had to be done as I was told that the electron beams don't penetrate combs with honey, or maybe it could be too heavy for those loading the conveyor belt or the sugars/honey could be carriers of the bacteria. Anyway, whatever it is I would like to not have a repeat of Nosema for the new nucleus colony I have ordered. Its painful to see bee poo all over the frames and knowing the bees died horribly. Read previous post on why they died horribly.

On a good note, Matilda can turn out to be a mite and disease free hive if it does well. The long dearth of brood (early Dec-March 25th) in the hive may have wiped out all the Varroa mites. I am really looking forward to manage a hive without any mites. So much less work, so much more healthy bees and definitely a higher survival rate for overwintering hives. Too good to be true? But it is a possiblity! For future hives to come, I would definitely be trying a method of caging the queen for about 13-15days to stop her from laying to control the level of mites in the hive. One more weapon to control mites without chemicals.