Check for queen laying eggs:
By now everyone should have checked their bees. The check should have been for a laying queens. This is for packages and overwintered colonies. The queen has to be laying for the hive to move forward.
Don't assume the queen is good. Beekeepers who do this will find a hive so depleted of bees that it will not continue to function. Beekeepers need to look.
Divides:
To do a divide you need eight frames of brood and bees to do a divide. If you don't have this, you need to wait until you do.
Some colonies coming out of winter with maybe four frames of bees right now, probably will never be able to split. Doing a split late say after the second week of June, is not advisable. The late splits will weaken the parent colony and it will not produce much honey. the split at that point will not produce any honey and will have to be fed most of its winter stores.
Walk away splits should not be done this year in the month of May. The late spring and the delay of natural pollen will have many hives with low drone populations. Natural pollen started coming in a week ago for the first time. It is the inflow of natural pollen that spurs a colony to raise large drone populations. Even if the bees started raising drones in large numbers, say by today. It will be near the end of May before we get any emerging drones. Then it will take a while before they can fly and are sexually mature. This may put us into the first two weeks of June. Getting a queen properly mated will be difficult at best. Doing a walk away split or thinking that the bees will just make a queen, may prove to be a waste of good brood or the hive will get so depleted of bees that it may turn to laying workers or perish.
Queens:
We will be getting our first shipment of queens this week. This first shipment will be not be a large number of queens, about 150 queens. They will go fast. Then for the next month we will be getting weekly shipments of queens. The queen shipments should arrive sometime on Wednesdays.
The cool spring:
With this cool spring, everything is behind. The dandelions should be blooming about right now for most if us. It may be we won't see dandelions in large numbers for 10 days yet. The fruit bloom that normally hits by mid May will probably show up in the later part of May. This all can change if we get warmer than average days. Splits that usually happen in early May will now be more likely after May 10th.
All of the delays because of the weather should also affect the nectar flow. If we have normal temperature from now on, the nectar flow may not start until early July. This will give package bees, nucs and weak colonies time to develop. Swarm control will have to be in place for strong colonies. The delay in the nectar flow may put many strong colonies up into a tree.