Ours are still hunkered down - temps are relatively mild but you need scuba gear and weight belts to move around outside given the amount of rain and gale force winds!
LIke it I like it.
That's one good reason to chose you hive sites very very carefully .
One guy I use to know set up an enclosure of five foot high hit & miss fence panels slotted down " H " section concreted in reinforced 9 foot long concrete posts. the floor inside was paving slabs .. he started doing it in the erly seventies because he lived in a new town development and he didn't want to give the moaners any cause to complain .
He even dyed his white bee suit black so it didn't stick out like th proverbial sore thumb .
He was able to look at his bees at almost anytime of the year under almost any conditions . His preference was to go out in his bee suit during darkness with a red filter on his head lamp .. He reckoned that with darkness the hives would be full of bees trying to keep warm thus less likely to attack and so it was far easier to see the state of the hive . plus the red l,ight was far less noticeable to the locals than a moving white light would be . Bees are far les prone to fly at a dark red light at night than a bright white one
I tried it and found it marginally better than giving a hive a rainy / windy day examination .
Later in my keeping I found it very very useful as follows .
It's good if your securing the bees in their hives in just floored & lidded brood boxes carrying the empty supers separately then loading up the hives up for travelling over night to do fee paying bee pollination or going for the premium priced heather honey or any other high provenance honey such as lime or second cut clover etc.
It allows you to condense and secure the floored & lidded brood boxes along with one drawn super in good day light .. at night the whole hive gets filled .
You then load the empty drawn supers at say two more per hive in day light & sheet them down .
Come the night two of you hump all the prepped hives on the lorry stuffing the entrances with a strip of soft foam sponge immediately to loading
When prepping the hives for traveling like this I had two 20 mm ratchet straps per hive , a vent screen that also held up the roof , a crown board feeder , the brood box & first super & the base. Plus two 6x6 x 24 inch sections of sawn treated pine to sit the each hive on at the ground .
At the drop off site the hive was set on the 6x6's in groups of four with the entrances facing different ways , the foam removed . The next two supers added then the crown board feeder which was then given a gallon of 1:1 syrup & finally the travelling screen and the lid . These were then ratchet strapped together with one strap per hive . The rest of the straps being used to hold the block of four hives together . By then it was time to lay flat on your back to look at the stars , get up , have a cup of coffee and a sarny or three then make the journey back home .
I did this for seven years , travelling from PE134BJ to the top end of the Peak district to a small farm that had a lovely area of light forestry that had fabulous roads/drives through it . It was always a well worth exercise despite having to hire a tail lift truck , pay for the fuel and paying bee site rentals to the farmer .