My advice to you, as a first year beek, is to learn to walk before you try running.
I used to feed early to get them going (1:1 syrup). I don't do that any more. I do it different. I'm not an high output beek and, as I have posted more than a couple of times, I have missed the boat on more than one OSR crop.
A lot of beeks will say there was no nectar, so they didn't harvest a lot of OSR honey. Most years (but not last year, for sure) they were likely late building up and were still brooding the forage bees when the flow was at its height.
It is a lotto when the crop gets into full flow and that is the biggest puzzle to sort in advance.
Queens are laying at a low rate with a cluster of perhaps 10k worker bees - and they will all be dead by the time the OSR is ready. You need getting on for 50k bees. If the queen lays at 2000 a day that is 25 days and she does not go from very few per day to that number all at once. There would not be enough nurse bees to keep the brood warm. That means she will get faster after the first brood cycle. You then need 6 weeks more to get your approx. 17k bees to the forage part of their life. Neither the end of the month, or even half way through, will achieve your ideal goal if the OSR blooms the first week in April. But it will likely be better than waiting for them to wake up on their own. OSR is not a nature type crop, is it?
But you are further north than me and the OSR will be later in your area than mine.
So, what do I do? I do supply a small feed then mostly water for the bees. I do select the bees I am going to take to the OSR. I do transfer brood, about to emerge, to the 'OSR hives'. That means some hives are kept as 'no honey' hives for the first flow. They catch up later.
Mostly they do not need pollen patties as I am not overly worried about how many hives I get ready for the OSR. I go with the flow, you might say. Most years they collect pollen without any trouble and have good pollen stores from the last autumn. Hence my comment about the actual need for patties.
There are a lot of 'ifs and buts' and no one season is the same as the others. I change my plan if it needs to be changed, spring unites are all part of the plan as well.
As I said early on in this post, learn to walk first, and for sure if you don't savvy the way bees build up in a normal fashion, let alone speeding them up to be ready for the OSR, learn a bit more before you try to run or you will trip up.
Right, tried to avoid three part words all the way through the post and you still will not manage it in your first year with a couple hives. Too early and you will have to feed them in a very careful way. Most likely they will be too late for the best crop. But any help they get will improve the chance of a good crop. You will get the idea when you have a bit more detail to work with; it is all very basic stuff really and can be got from any good bee book.