By all accounts, I shouldn’t have bees right now. I treated for mites at the end of summer and thought that I had lost a queen so I bought another. But by the time she came, the original queen was laying again. So I tried to do a split. But when the new queen wasn’t released in a week, I carefully poked a nail into the candy – only to watch her emerge and fly away! Then I ended up just messing around too much condensing the hives back and thought that I had lost all of them. My mentor suggested that I put the frames in storage so next year’s bees would have some drawn comb to start with, but one super just seemed too active , so I left it. Maybe they would die anyway but I didn’t want to just kill them. Christmas day was warm, so I thought I’d take a peek and there was a cluster! I got some fondant and they were still there today!