I already had a couple of hive shims (short 1 1/2" pieces of hive body) which you need in order to leave space for the sugar. So today I thought I'd at least add some sugar to the green hive.
Here's what I saw when I opened up the top of the hive:
You can see there is a healthy grouping of bees, but the fact they are on the very top of the hive means they haven't had much to eat (bees eat their way through the hive from the bottom up). So I laid down the paper and proceeded to add the sugar:
You can see the wooden (unpainted) shim I added.
Just FYI, here's a picture of some bees eating sugar (not mine, some other person's hive):
After closing up the green hive, I thought I'd give a peek into the presumably dead brown hive. I hadn't heard anything from it when I would tap. I took off the top and inner cover, and saw what I always saw - no bees.
This time I decided to tip up the upper body and look between the hive bodies. And what did I see? BEES! I saw a cluster a little larger than a softball (the cross section, I mean). I closed it up quick to keep out the cold, then had to go back inside and quickly grab the other frame shim and more newspaper. I put down some sugar for these bees on the top frames as well. When I was adding the paper I did see some bees peek up from in between the frames to see what I was doing.
So... it looks like the brown hive isn't dead like I though. I hadn't 100% written it off, since every beekeeper I describe it to told me to just hold off - they may surprise me. So hopefully they will keep surprising me and survive the winter!
Nothing much left to do except keep checking and feeding, and wait for the warm weather. I'm going to check into making some bee candy to see if that works better. Lots of dead bees in front of the hives, but that's to be expected during the winter.
