April sees the honey flow getting heavier with the continuance of the wildflowers along with the yopon holly that flows to mid-April and with the privet hedge starting about the time the Yopon stops and flowing to May 1^st. This early flow is the first excess honey that can be captured in Deep East Texas. The timing of extracting the honey should be about May 10^th. Be sure the frames are well capped before extraction.

Supering and queen evaluation take precedence over possible extraction this month.

• Rule Number One: If you want honey don’t be behind on your supers. Supering after the fact of the nectar flow is just a miss until next year.
• Rule Number Two: After splits you must evaluate the queen situation in each hive. Whether or not you are using queen cells or live mated queens you must evaluate them about two weeks after their introduction to the hive. Live queens can be rejected and killed at times. Queen cells are always a maybe. You can only know after they return if they do, if they have been mated correctly. It takes 12 to 20 drones to create a well-mated queen bee. At the first two week mark you will be noting if she has returned and if she is laying eggs (note late queens coming back in the third week will likely be bad). The next time you will note is at the one month mark.

If you are using full box splits with a lot of bees you should want to see a large laid out area at 30 days with minimum drone cells. The larger the laid out area, 6 to 8 frames, the higher the queen quality. If this is what you find, super this colony immediately. This queen will make you honey. However, If the brood area is extremely small and there are no eggs, spotty brood, just drone brood, or the brood just doesn’t exist kill the bad queen bee and replace her. She is a bad queen and will not improve (Note: A queen will only lay out an area as big as there are nurse bees to cover it). If it is late into the season you may also stack this super on a good queen for an extra boost on colony expansion and more honey.

Smaller 2 or 3 frame nuc starts should be evaluated based on their bee resource levels. These small starts should have extremely small entrances and, if possible, be kept in a different apiary yard a couple of miles from your main one. (NOTE: If there is a dearth of nectar small colonies normally are robbed out).

Package Bees ordered back in January will arrive with new queens and will need installation into hives. Swarm control will need to continue during the nectar flow time with extra supers. Keep those bees working. Continue to feed small hives or hives that you are still working to grow for brood production.