How to inspect a hive

The four questions

• Is there a laying queen? You do not need to see her. Eggs answer it.
• Is there room? For the queen to lay and for nectar to go.
• Are there stores? Enough to get to the next inspection.
• Is anything wrong? Disease, pests, queen cells, a pattern that looks off.

The order

Smoke at the entrance and under the lid, then wait a minute. Crack the lid rather than lifting it. Work from an outside frame inward, because the outside frames are stores and the middle is brood, and you want the brood nest open for the shortest time.

Lift frames vertically and turn them by rotating on their long axis, so comb is never held flat where its own weight can break it out of the frame.

Eggs are the answer to most of it

Eggs are hard to see. Sun over your shoulder, tilt the frame, look down into the cell rather than at the face of the comb.

How long

Ten to fifteen minutes for a routine inspection. A colony takes hours to re-establish its temperature and order after being opened, and repeated long inspections are a real cost to productivity and temper.

How often

Every two weeks through the swarm window, which Penn State puts at mid-April to mid-June in the mid-Atlantic and which moves with your spring where you are, because egg to emerged queen is about sixteen days and a three-week gap means you can miss an entire swarm decision.

Outside that window, monthly is usually enough, dropping to almost nothing in winter when opening the hive does more harm than the information is worth.

What to write down

Date, whether you saw eggs, frames of brood, frames of stores, space added or removed, anything unusual. Six items and it takes twenty seconds.

You will not remember hive two by the time you have finished hive four, and a record turns inspections into a sequence you can read rather than a series of impressions.

References