What the bees are bringing in

Stand beside the entrance for two minutes before you open anything. It tells you most of what an inspection would.

Four things come through the door

Nectar, pollen, water and propolis. Nectar becomes honey and is invisible arriving, carried internally, so you read it from weight and from the smell of the hive. Pollen is the obvious one, packed on the hind legs in colors that tell you what is blooming. Water is collected for cooling and for diluting stores. Propolis is tree resin, carried like pollen but glossy and sticky.

Steady pollen traffic at the entrance tells you, without opening the hive, that there is brood to feed and so a laying queen.

Reading the entrance

Purposeful two-way traffic with bees landing heavily and walking straight in is a working colony. Bees hovering in loose arcs facing the hive in early afternoon are young bees orienting, which is normal and a good sign.

Bees fighting on the landing board, or arriving without foraging loads and leaving heavy, is robbing rather than foraging, and it needs acting on the same day. A colony that is quiet on a warm day when neighbors are busy is the one to open.

Why a strong flow changes everything

During a genuine nectar flow colonies are calm, build comb quickly, and tolerate handling that would provoke them in a dearth. The same colony inspected a month later, with nothing coming in, can be a different animal entirely.

This is why advice about temperament is so contradictory between sources. Much of what gets described as a colony's character is really the state of the forage around it, and judging a colony during a dearth is judging it on its worst day.

Distance and what it costs them

Bees will fly several miles when they have to, and it costs them. Forage close to the hive produces more surplus than the same forage further away, because the flight itself burns what they collect. That is the practical argument behind siting and behind not crowding too many colonies into one yard.

You cannot plant your way out of it at any scale that matters, and the honest version of that sentence is worth saying: a garden's worth of flowers is lovely and is not what fills a super. What fills a super is a landscape, and your real lever is where you put the hive.

References