March normally sees a warming trend along with the blooming of many wildflowers and plants across Deep East Texas.

Expect early dewberry bloom, sweet clover, hairy vetch, dutch/red clovers with the ending of the month seeing hawthorn, Yopon holly, black locust, and other early-flowering bushes and trees.

This is the month for grafting, cell building, splits, early swarms, and the first hive supers added at the end of the month. Keeping bees is really a type of farming. Each and every year you will see winter losses. This month is the time to regain those losses by splitting your hives. There are actually two main reasons to split; Hive loss replacement and Swarm control. This can be done by the purchase of queen cells or live queens, or if you have the understanding of the cell builder, queen bee calendar, and know-how to graft you can do your own.

You can also do this by natural splits made from making a hive queenless and the bees making emergency queen cells or looking for hives that have swarm cells and using those cells also for making splits. The main idea is to propagate new queens and hives to the level you intend to keep. Swarm cells can be friends or enemies according to how you intend to manage your colonies.

When the first honey flow starts it is natural that the bee colonies that are strong want to propagate and split. This, added to hive crowding, along with early weeks of stormy spring weather, is a catalyst for swarm cell building. Since we cannot control the weather we move to what we can control. With colony crowding if you can keep a colony always building and never crowded you have some hopes of keeping your old queen out of the trees along with half the hive. Putting supers on ahead of the colony growth is one key factor in stopping over-crowding.

The other is to keep the nest mixed up by checkerboarding (putting in foundation frames) just in and around the nest area. This manipulation keeps the bees rebuilding the nest and away from building queen cells. The last control method is to replace the old queen with a new one. New queens will not normally swarm in their first year of service.

The main goal for this month is maintaining or expanding your bee Apiary. The rule that we should use for feeding is to feed up to the time of supering a colony with honey supers. New starts should always be fed to support hive expansion with more brood.