What Does the Novice Beekeeper Need to Know?

Number 5

HIVE INSPECTION

"And Why"

You know you need to do Hive Inspections, but what should you be looking for?

Well, at first you should be looking to see if you still have bees. This may seem intuitively obvious, BUT! There is always the proverbial but. The comment I hear from new beekeepers most often, about missing bees, is "I saw bees coming and going out of the front entrance". This is absolutely true. Those "coming and going bees" were robbing out the left-over honey from your dead colony.

After properly installing your new package, you should leave them closed up with proper ventilation and feed for 4-5 days. This will allow the queen to get settled and start laying eggs. It will also allow the in-hive bees to start pulling beeswax comb. The syrup feed is to provide the nectar to make the honey and beeswax. Many of the "forager bees" that were in you package will forage from the feeder. The "storage bees" will make the honey and put it in the comb as soon as the "wax builder bees" get some comb drawn. It will take less than 24 hours for the comb to start being formed. When you inspect at the 5 day point you want to see the comb building being done properly. You will also see some of the comb being used to store honey even though the comb is not drawn out to full depth.

Now you can look for the queen. Is she still in the shipping cage? Frequently by day 5 the bees will have eaten through the candy plug and she is released into the hive. Carefully check each frame to see where she is at and what she is doing. Probably walking around. You may not see eggs if she has even started laying yet.

If she has not been released then release her. You do this by figuring out how to open what ever type shipping cage she is in. There are at least four types. Remove one frame from the hive creating a wide opening. Hold the cage entrance very close to the empty frame space while opening it. The queen might JUMP out. Or, walk out. You want her to go down into the empty frame space. Optimally, you will see her exit the queen cage. If you don't see her exit, put your finger over the exit while you inspect the cage to see if she is in or out. If she is out GOOD. If she is still in the cage, put the entrance back into the empty frame space and maybe tap the cage a few times to scare the queen out. If she won't leave the cage, move an adjoining frame over to jamb the cage in place, in such a manner that she can exit later. Close up the hive and come back tomorrow to look for the queen on the frames and replace the frame you removed.

After a couple of weeks, you will want to inspect your hive again. Until the nectar flow, you will want to inspect your hive about every 10 days. You will be looking for the queen to determine her health and productivity. She will start by laying less than 500 eggs a day because there are not enough foragers to bring in food for more larvae. You are looking for a plump queen with a fully distended abdomen. I know that is subjective, but if she looks scrawny, she is. Does she have a broken wing? This can happen during her initial capture and caging. The worker bees will supersede a damaged queen. Is comb being drawn out or honey being stored if the colony started with drawn comb?

Next week when you inspect you will start to see capped brood (16 days from egg laying). You will be able to start to determine if her brood pattern is "good". You want the brood pattern edge to edge. If she is skipping cells, she is not laying well. She could be laying but the workers are removing the eggs/young larvae because they are damaged by disease or parasites. You will need to determine if it is the queen's fault and she needs replacing or if the workers are doing it. Hive beetles are known to eat honey bee eggs.

Okay, life is started in you hive. You want to pay attention to the increased size of the brood area. Each inspection, it should be larger. The brood area starts to cover onto more frames. Is adequate nectar and pollen coming into the hive? If it is not the queen will not lay more eggs than the nurse bees can feed. This is a two-pronged observation. Are there enough nurse bees? Is there enough food? You should see the forager bees bringing in the pollen. You might see the nectar foraging bees face to face with other bees (the storage bees). They are transferring the nectar from forager (nectar carried in the "honey stomach") to the storage bee. This process will be repeated 4-5 times before the last storage bee places the honey in the cell. You can monitor the new stored honey volume by looking at the cells on the drawn out frames. You will see shiny liquid in them. The adjacent cells will be filled to various depths as the storage bees are working the comb. Usually they start near the top bars and work down. You will eventually see capped honey occurring in the same pattern. If you determine the bees are not bringing in enough food you can help by placing small pollen patties (1"x4"x3/8") on the top bars over the brood and feeding 1:1 sugar to water syrup as a nectar substitute. Your style of feeder is pretty much immaterial. Check with your mentor for a good way to feed syrup.

Your new queen can disappear anytime from 20 days after putting the package in a hive to 6 months. Maybe, she will make it 1 or more years. Keep checking.

If the bees have decided to replace the queen you will see queen cells start to be drawn out on the frame. They can be in the middle or along the outer edge of the frame. Emergency starter queen cells can be built but not used. When the workers want to use queen cells they will quickly be drawn out to full length. You can see the bees working them. If you turn the frame, you can see the royal jelly (white) in the bottom indicating a larva is being fed. You might even still see the old queen in the hive. You only really have 2 choices. Remove the old queen along with 2-3 frames of bees and start a nuc. Or let nature take its course and the hive will supersede the queen. Now, the queen will either be killed or she will swarm taking the foragers with her. This is another whole lesson, but you need to be aware from your inspection that something is happening. Check with your mentor.

There is a point after the queen cell is drawn out when you cannot reverse the process of what ever is happening. Your decision is to save that old queen by placing her in a nuc or not. Is she worth saving? Why are the workers replacing her? Again, you mentor is essential here.

After the colony seems to be established your inspections will require a little longer check list.

Do I have parasites? Varroa mites, hive beetles, or wax moths. A strong colony can withstand some of these pressures. A weak colony will succumb.

Do I have diseases? American or European Foul Brood (AFB or EFB)? Do I have nosema apis or nosema ceranae? You will have to learn the symptoms, detection techniques, and the treatments.

What is the condition of my wood work? New wood work properly assembled and painted is the easiest. Hand-me-down wood work is okay, as long as you know it is disease free. Second-hand equipment may be well worn. Dry rot in the hive boxes. Weak old worn frames. Boxes needing painted. Severe damage from wax moth cocoons. This equipment will require constant inspection to ensure it is holding up.

Your brood larvae that you can see should always be pearly white and moist looking. If there is any tan/brownish look, something is going wrong.

After your first 3 inspections you will want to start developing the skill of aging your larvae. Can you see the eggs in the bottom of the cell? Frequently the reflection off the bottom is mistaken for an egg. Use a LED flashlight to help look in the "empty" cell. Once you can see white in the cell with the naked eye, you have a hatched egg that has been fed royal jelly. This is about day one after hatching on day 4 after laying. As the larvae grow you can see them curled up in the bottom of the cell. When the larvae are not quite ½ the cell depth you are about day 6 from egg laying. You are at day 8 when the larvae are ½ the cell depth. Take a guess as the larvae continues to grow. The larvae will be capped on day 16 and hatch out on day 21. This is for worker bees which are the preponderance of your cells. You can learn drone and queen processes as you gain experience.

This growth gauge is important when you really can't find a queen versus when you look but miss her. How long has the queen actually been gone and what are the worker bees doing about it? What should I do to intervene? If you see capped brood, larvae filling half deep in the cells, white in the bottom of cells, and dry cells next to the brood area, you probably have a queen you missed. At worst your queen has only been gone 1-2 days. Come back in 5 days to see if the situation has changed. If you only see capped brood and ½ filled cells you queen disappeared 8 or so days ago. Are there queen cells? They are capped on day 11 after queen egg laying. If you have capped queen cells your choices are to let nature take its course and you will have a new queen in 16 days from egg laying (4-5 more days after capping). Or you can do some "splits" moving bees and frames with queen cells into nucs. Or you can kill the queen cells and buy a queen that is already laying. This is another whole discussion. Check with you mentor.

Some queens are not worth saving, and neither are their daughters. If the queen does not lay a good brood pattern, lay enough eggs per day, her workers don't collect honey, her colony is not somewhat disease resistant, she lays too many drone eggs, just go ahead and kill her and buy a new queen.