There will be times when a very brief check on your hive is sufficient. At other times a thorough examination is desirable.
The quick check. Beekeepers with many hives rely on a few signs that quickly give a rough indication of how each hive is doing. These signs allow one person the efficiency to manage a hundred hives or so. With experience, you will instinctively look for them. This "quick check" will not teach a beginning beekeeper as much as the more extensive
examinations described below.
Look first for bees flying in and out. Depending on the weather and time of year, you should see bee flight. Bees returning with pollen loads on their legs are always a good sign.
It tells you that the bees are rearing brood, and that pollen bearing flowers are available. Bees waddling in with large balls of pollen indicate that pollen is abundant. At other times they will carry very small loads, indicating that pollen has been hard to find. Estimate the number of bees returning in a 10-second interval. During a honey flow in late spring, 50 or more bees may return to a vigorous hive in 10 seconds. Returning bees will be far fewer for weak hives and when they are not on a honey flow. If you see no pollen foragers returning, your colony may be in trouble. Or worse, the colony may be dead. In this case, the bees entering may actually be robber bees from another colony, raiding the leftover honey. Robbing bees never carry pollen.
Remove the inner and outer covers. How many of the frame top bars are covered with bees? Compare your observations with what you saw during the previous examination, and consider what you would expect for the time of year and the colony's history. Look for tiny bits of white wax added to the edges of the dark, older comb. This is also a good indicator of colony health. It is commonly seen when the bees are on a honey flow. It may be observed also when the bees are feeding on sugar syrup from a feeder.
Look for bees with deformed wings, often a sign of varroa infestation. Bees crawling in the grass on warm days in late winter suggest tracheal mites. Flattened grass and skunk feces in front of the hive point to the need for skunk guards. Lean over the opened hive and sniff for honey in the making, or the unpleasant odor of American foulbrood. Listen for the distinctive buzz of a queenless hive. (These and other problems are addressed later in this publication.) If problems suggest themselves, you should take additional time to remove frames for a thorough examination and to do some trouble shooting.
If the bees are on a honey flow, check to see whether they have enough storage space (frames with many empty cells). Frames with most cells full of brood, honey and pollen tell you it's time to add an extra hive body or super so that the colony can expand and store food.
In two or three minutes, this quick check will generally tell the experienced beekeeper of obvious problems and needed maintenance.
The general examination. This is a set of observations generally sufficient for routine visits to your hive. Once your veil is on and smoker puffing, this examination won't take more than 10 minutes per hive.
After the "quick check" observations described above, you will need to look at a few frames. If you have supers on the hive, pull several frames out to determine how many in each super contain honey. By looking down between the frames you can tell the frames which seem to be the outermost of the honey storage area.
Set each super aside, and remove several frames from the brood box or boxes. Examine the brood nest for the brood pattern, an estimate of the total amount of brood, and signs of brood disease. You can be encouraged by seeing many eggs and young larvae, since this tells you the queen is laying well and the nurse bee workers are feeding the larvae well. Hold the frame up so that sunlight shines directly into the brood cells. Ideally, each young larva in its worker cell is surrounded by a bit of glistening white food, the worker jelly. A hive which is struggling to feed itself cannot provide an abundance of worker jelly for each larva. A large amount of capped worker brood tells you that many young worker bees will soon emerge and support the activity of the colony. A bad brood pattern -- insufficient brood, scattered brood, excessive drone brood, or disease -- means that remedial action is needed. In summer, use tweezers or the sharp corner of your hive tool to break open a few capped drone cells and check for reddish-brown varroa mites. See the following sections and other publications for descriptions of these problems. Usually it is not necessary to look at every brood frame. A serious problem will show itself on the first few frames with brood.
As always, compare your observations with what you saw the previous times you examined that particular hive. Beginners and experienced beekeepers often keep a notebook to follow the trends and compare one year to the next. The brood nest and adult bee
population should be increasing from February to June, and declining gradually from July to November. If the supers are filling with honey, make a rough prediction about when the next super will be needed. For example, if the bees are filling five frames a week, another 10-
frame super may be needed every two weeks. Of course, the honey flow can accelerate or slow down according to the weather and what's blooming nearby.
The thorough examination: On certain occasions the beekeeper will need to go through the whole hive frame by frame. If possible, do this on a warm, calm, sunny day. If you are battling a case of American foulbrood I recommend that every brood frame be
examined for this disease, periodically over at least a year, until it is clearly eradicated. If you are requeening your hive, it could be necessary to examine every frame in the brood boxes to find the old queen. (See Finding the Queen, p. 65.)
Also, it is very instructive to occasionally examine an entire hive. The experience will give a beginner confidence to do this complete examination when it actually becomes necessary.