First check of my hives after a relatively mild winter.
The hive on the right is my main hive from which I harvested over 50 lbs of honey last fall. It is a traditional 10 frame Langstroth design. I use two deeps for the brood chambers and then shallow supers for the honey havest. The top box is a shallow super I left with 4 frames of honey just to be sure they had enough food going into winter. The front entrance has a mouse guard to keep the critters out during the winter.
The hive on the left was just started last season. It is an experimental top bar design. The base box is an eight frame Langstroth design, but the two upper boxes just have top bar slats for the bees to hang comb off of. Instead of building from the top down, they built from the bottom up last season, which made it almost impossible to check inside without doing severe damage to the hive. If you pull off one of the top boxes, you will tear a bunch of comb up.
The black wrap is just roofing tar paper, intended to help with warmth throughout the cold winter.
Sadly, the Langstroth hive did not survive the winter. There was still a lot of honey in the box, as seen in the picture above. All the capped area in an arc around the upper portion of the frame is capped honey. There were a number of frames that looked like this. In addition, the four frames I left in the upper super were untouched, still full of honey.
Still, they almost certainly died of starvation, as the telltale sign is a patch of dead bees with their heads inserted into cells. This is exaclty what I found when I opened the hive.
There were only a few inches away from some capped honey, but in a cold spell, they won't break cluster to move to a new portion of the hive or frame. The cluster of bees in the picture above is all dead. I cleaned up the hive a bit and reduced it down to one deep and one shallow box. I removed the tar paper and closed up the entrance to prevent bees, wasps, or other critters from stealing the honey that is still in the box. I think I may try to transfer the small hive into here, since it is much easier to check and has such an abundance of honey.
As for the smaller hive, the bees were flying about when I arrived. In the cold months, they come out of the hive on warmers days for cleansing flights, as they won't go to the bathroom inside the hive. The little yellow stains around the entrance board are the bee's "deposits" from these cleansing flights. They are all over the hive and the snow is stained with many yellow spots.
The small hive has an observation window, which is a nice way to do a quick check on the hive. 
I checked the hives abut a weeka nd a half ago during a warm spell. Since the, the weather has gotten chilly again. I will wait until it warms up again and work on tranferring the living hive into the larger hive box - no simple project since much of the hive is not built on traditional frames. But more on that in a future post.
