The first inspection of the year, and what can wait

Track this against your own hives - free, on the web and the App Store.

When it is warm enough

The National Bee Unit puts numbers on this, so you do not have to guess. Colonies should not be inspected below 10 °C. Between 10 and 14 °C they can be opened quickly, and only quickly. 1

A colony can be gone through properly on a fine day with the bees flying freely. Free flight is what tells you the cluster has broken.

Three states, then, not two. Too cold to open at all. Warm enough for a quick look. Warm enough to go through the frames.

Both tests have to pass. The thermometer sets the limit, and free flight is a second condition on top of it, not a way round it.

A still, sunny 13 °C with bees pouring out of the entrance is a better morning than a blowy 15 °C with rain coming in behind it. It is still a quick-look day, though. Pulling every frame waits for a day above 14 °C. Wait for it. It arrives.

Late February or March, not April

Late February or early March is the window. Start on the first day the weather gives you with the bees out and working. April is too late. 1

An expanding colony can run through its stores fast, which is the whole reason for the deadline. Where the weather stays against you, a check on the food alone is the least you should do.

This should also not be your first visit since autumn. Bees put to bed in October and left to themselves until March are far more likely to be lost. The last proper look before winter is the other half of the job.

Some beekeepers would rather not open a hive at all this early, and heft it instead. The NBU meets that head on. Briefly lifting the crown board to see whether the bees can actually reach their stores is far less harmful than letting them starve. 2

Keep it short

Before the roof comes off, read the hive from the outside. Dead or diseased bees on the ground, what is on the floor tray, and how the traffic is moving at the entrance. Do not start at all in poor weather, or with people or animals close by. 3

Then be quick. On a cold day you do not have to pull every frame right out to read it. Lift each comb halfway out, far enough to see whether it holds brood or stores, and put it back. That is enough to count the food without chilling brood. 2

Smoke sparingly, from the top downwards, and only to clear the part of the box you are working in. Lighting and managing a smoker has the rest of it.

Is she laying

You do not need to see her. Eggs and brood answer the question, and that is what you came for. Check for brood in all stages, and note whether any queen cells are present. Then count the frames the adult bees are covering. Five to ten is the healthy range, and fewer than five says something has gone wrong. 1

One case is worth knowing. Seeing the queen with no eggs and no brood at all is not good news. It can mean the colony is short of suitable stores, pollen included, or that she came out of a winter supersedure and will not come good. A queen you marked last year who is suddenly unmarked says the same thing.

A colony that really is queenless in early spring is best united with another, as long as both of them are free of disease.

Have they got food

This is the check that matters most in March, and the one people skim. Work outwards from the brood to the combs at the edge of the nest, and check you can see actual honey and actual pollen. A full-sized colony wants two to three deep British Standard frames of stores in the box, whatever the month. 1

March and April are the exception, because that is when reserves go fastest as the colony expands. At that time of year a colony should have at least four to five combs of stores, which is about 9 kg. A British Standard brood frame full of honey holds about 2.3 kg, so this is something you can count rather than guess at. 4

Two to three frames is the floor at any point in the season. Four to five is the spring target. Count three in the third week of March and you are close to the line, not comfortable.

If they are short, feed now

What you feed depends on how cold it is, and getting that wrong wastes the feed:

• Cold. Fondant. A block over the feed hole in the crown board, or straight onto the top bars with an eke or an upturned feeder over it to make room. Sugar syrup should not be fed in cold weather, because the bees cannot process it. 4
• Warmer. Thin syrup in a contact feeder or a frame feeder. A contact feeder holds the feed right against the bees, which is why it suits spring better than a rapid feeder.

Take the eke or the upturned feeder away once the fondant is no longer needed. A colony building up fills that space with brace comb, and then you are cutting it out again.

Learn the signs of a colony that is nearly out, because by then you are working in hours rather than days. Dry cells all round the brood nest. Nibbled cappings over healthy looking pupae. Pupae on the floor or thrown out of the entrance. Bees dead head first down in the cells. 2

Nibbled cappings on their own are not proof of starvation. Foulbrood, a heavy varroa load and chilled brood all do the same thing. Feeding a colony that is nearly out and the syrup mixes cover the rest.

The floor, and a spring clean

Winter leaves a mess, and clearing it takes ten minutes. All of this is the NBU’s own spring clean: 1

• Clear the entrance block and take the dead bees out of it.
• Scrape the floor out. On a mesh floor, get the debris off rather than leaving it to sit.
• Scrape brace comb and other muck off the top bars and the crown board.
• Mouse guards can come off, and the entrance can be opened enough that the bees are not queuing to get in.
• If scraping will not do it, lift the combs and the bees across into a clean box standing on a clean floor, then scrape and lightly scorch the old one before it goes back into use.

Old or damaged combs that you already moved to the side of the brood chamber can be swapped for clean drawn comb, if you have any. Keep every bit of drawn comb you own. An artificial swarm in May needs a supply of it, and foundation is a poor substitute at that point in the year.

Mites, before the supers go on

February and March are one of the key times to monitor varroa, and the reason is practical. You want the mite population as low as it will go before the colony expands and the supers arrive, because supers on a hive cut down what you are allowed to treat with. 5

While you are in there, look at the adult bees for deformed wings. That is the sign of a high level of deformed wing virus, and it is what tells you an emergency treatment may be needed.

The August treatment does the heavy lifting. This check is what tells you whether you can wait for it.

What can wait

A first inspection is a short one, and several jobs belong to a warmer day later in the spring.

• Not a full brood disease inspection. The NBU puts that job later in the spring, once the box is full of brood and the day is fit for a slower, longer look. 1 Seeing something you cannot explain is different. Suspected foulbrood has to be reported, and that is a legal obligation rather than a courtesy. 3 What to report, and who to has the contacts.
• Not foundation into the middle of the nest. Early in the season it goes on the edge of the brood nest, so it becomes the next frame drawn as the nest grows. Interleaving it between brood frames is a job for later, when the box is crammed with bees. Never put it against the hive wall, because there it gets drawn last and drawn badly. 6
• Not foundation at all without a flow. Bees do not use stored honey to make wax, so either nectar is coming in or you feed to make it happen.
• Not swarm control. The swarming urge peaks in May and June. Swarms can happen as early as March or early April in warmer places, London in particular, so if you do find queen cells at your first look, assess the whole colony before you decide anything.
• Not knocking queen cells down. Destroying them is not swarm control and never has been. Position and number are clues, not proof. Two or three grouped on the face of one comb usually means supersedure. Swarm cells turn up on the face as well, though, and they do it most often on a colony living in one brood box. Cells built out of ordinary worker cells, with no eggs anywhere, are emergency cells, and the queen has already gone. Supersedure and emergency cells do not usually need anything done to them. If you cannot tell which you have, and the cells are nowhere near sealed, close up and look again in two or three days. More new cells means swarming. 7 Queen cells, and what you are looking at goes through them.

What is normal in March, and one frame to pull

Two things you will see this month are worth not panicking about. Drone brood from about mid-March is ordinary spring build-up, and it does not mean the colony is getting ready to swarm. Empty queen cups on the bottom bars are ordinary too, and they only start to matter once there is an egg or a larva sitting in one. 7

A third sight is less relaxing. A supersedure attempted this early often fails, usually for want of drones to mate with, so a colony trying it in March can end up with no queen at all.

The one thing worth lifting out is last autumn’s feed. Those frames are largely sugar syrup, and after six or seven months of bees walking on them the cappings go dark and dirty. Give them to a colony that needs feeding rather than leave them under this year’s honey crop. 6