Judging from little yellow bits of wax cappings that have fallen on the snow under the hives through the screened bottoms, it looks like all four of the hives that were alive in December are still alive today. On the swarm hive at my dad's, the bottom of the cluster is all the way in the bottom of the hive. If you look up under there you can see them moving around. In the hives at my house, they are higher up in the boxes. I did not open up the lid on the Ohio queen nuc where I put sugar but I could see through a hole that there's still sugar piled up in there.
I read somewhere this week that the queen starts laying eggs for spring again shortly after the Winter Solstice. To the bees, spring is coming! The tough part now will be to be sure they have enough food to make it until spring. The long term forecast shows a warmup to almost 50 next week, so I may construct a candy board this weekend and put it on top of the hive at my dad's place on a warmer day, since they only have about one Medium box of honey stored up.
Dad has decided he will put the spare hive from the failed swarm in his cousin's yard where we caught the successful swarm last year. I will offer up a couple frames of brood comb from my failed hive to use as bait. Dad has really grown an attachment to the bees; I suspect we will add several more colonies at his house in 2013, through splits and swarm captures.
