Entry 01 · Inspections
What I look for in the first full inspection of April
The first full inspection of the year is the one I used to get wrong by doing too much of it. Standing in front of four hives on a warm afternoon in April, the temptation is to look at everything, and looking at everything costs the colony more than it tells me.
- At the hive
- 6 May 2024
- Typed up
- 18 June 2024
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Stand
- the Taunus foothills above Frankfurt
Waiting for the right afternoon
The first inspection is a weather decision before it is a beekeeping decision. I want fifteen degrees in the shade, no wind worth mentioning, and the hour either side of two in the afternoon, when the foragers that are going to be out are already out and the box is at its emptiest. On this slope that combination arrives somewhere between the tenth and the twenty-fifth of April, later than in the city below and later still if the wind is coming over the ridge from the north.
In 2021 I opened all four hives on the third of April because the afternoon felt warm on the back of my neck. It was eleven degrees and falling. Two colonies had brood right out to the edge of the frames, and I stood there holding one of those frames long enough to chill it. A week later the patch had a ring of dead larvae around the outside, which is the kind of damage you cause rather than find. Warm on the neck is not a measurement.
Written on the card
- Fifteen degrees in the shade, rising rather than falling
- Early afternoon, when most foragers are out of the box
- No north wind coming over the ridge
- Pollen going in at the entrance for at least three days
Reading the entrance before the lid comes off
Five minutes on an upturned crate in front of the hives tells me most of what the inspection will go on to confirm. Steady traffic in both directions, pollen of two or three colours going in, no fighting on the landing board, nothing being dragged out that should not be. A colony that is short of something looks different from twenty paces: fewer bees, slower departures, and a flight line that wanders instead of leaving as though it had somewhere to be.
Hive three, in the spring of 2023, was the quietest of the four and I had recorded it as calm for a fortnight. Calm was the wrong word. There was no pollen going in at all, and in the third week of April that means nobody inside is feeding larvae, which means there are no larvae. The queen had failed some time in March. Five minutes of watching would have caught it earlier than the full inspection did, and watching now comes first, every time, before anything is lifted.
Brood, stores, queen: in that order
I pull two frames, sometimes three, and almost never more. The first is a brood frame from the middle of the box, and if it carries eggs standing upright in the bottom of clean cells, the queen was laying within the last three days and I do not need to find her. Brood in all stages, laid in a solid oval with few gaps, tells me she has been at it for weeks. The rest of the inspection is arithmetic: frames of brood, frames of sealed stores, room left to expand.
The pattern matters more than the quantity, and it took me two seasons to read it properly. A frame with brood scattered across it in ones and twos, sealed cells beside eggs beside empty cells, is either a queen running out or a colony with something wrong in the comb. A tight oval with a rim of pollen and stores above it is a colony doing exactly what it should. I write the number of brood frames on the card and compare it with the same hive a fortnight later, which is the only comparison that means anything.
Written on the card
- Eggs upright in clean cells: the queen laid within three days
- Brood in a solid oval, not scattered in ones and twos
- Frames of sealed stores counted, not guessed at
- Room to expand, or the colony will make its own plan
What I write down, and what I leave alone
Each hive has a card in a plastic sleeve under the roof and a duplicate line in the notebook, because a card under a roof gets rained on eventually. Date, time, temperature, frames of brood, frames of stores, temper on a scale of one to five that means nothing to anybody but me, and one line for the decision. The decision is the part I used to leave out, and it is the only part I ever read back.
The other half of the method is restraint. I do not hunt for the queen if there are eggs, I do not break the propolis seal on the crown board twice in a week, and I do not scrape comb tidy for the sake of tidiness. Ten minutes in a box is a normal inspection; twenty-five means I have started rummaging. A colony spends two days putting itself back together after an inspection, and that cost is real even when my notes look thorough.