The bees fed well in the fall and packed all the free frames with sugar syrup. I lost two late splits and nucced a small hive, and as a result I now have 3 brood boxes and a super mostly full of capped syrup. In addition, the remaining strong hives have 3/4 of their frames still filled with syrup. They haven't laid up any more brood since I checked on 2/25, so I think they may be "syrup" bound. One hive is absolutely boiling over right now, but no swarm cells present -- yet, in any hive. And although I sraped the cappings from the super of syrup and set it in the field, none of the hives was interested in robbing it. They've been going to the water trough, though. They ate all the pollen patties I put on 2/25.
It seems to me the thing to do is to just extract the syrup from the extra supers and introduce the empty frames into the hives. (Checkerboarding?) Does this sound like a sensible plan? Could I then dilute the extracted syrup and feed it back as 2:1 syrup?
We had a wonderful spell of temperatures in the 60s and 70s, and I put a Miller frame in my mellowest hive to start trying to raise some queens. We'll soon be going into a period of daytime temps in the mid to upper 40s, with overnight lows at freezing.
-- Kris