Two hives down
Here we are, six days later, and we’ve lost two hives. The first hive was the knee-biter hive and started off with relatively few bees and a few days ago they were low on bee count. I suspect they just couldn’t form enough heat for our unusually cold winter. The other hive had 2-3x as many dead bees as the othe rhives when I cleaned them out, so
maybe they tripped over a number-of-bees-for-heat problem or got hit hard by mites.
I added 3-4k of fondant to each of the remaining hives. Next decent day we’ll move all the uneaten fondant to the surviving hive and prep the dead hives for nucs.
One plan is to do “walk-away splits”. Wait until the healthy hives have capped brood including capped drones, then split each hive in half. Don’t worry about where the queen is, just split the brood and nurse bees between the healthy hive and the empty hive. The hive without a queen will start raising virgin queens ASAP, and that hive should have brood within six weeks (if I’m doing the mental math correctly).
The hive with a queen will now have a half-empty hive and no real reason to swarm. The queen can lay lots more bees and the hive can build a lot more honey.