Beekeeping schedule: what to do each month, north and south

Every beekeeping calendar is wrong for somewhere. The one below is written for a temperate climate with a real winter, which covers most of the United States and Canada, the British Isles, and the cooler parts of Australia and New Zealand, and it gives the southern month next to each northern one. Warm climates keep the sequence and move the dates. After two seasons, the inspection dates in your own records are a better calendar than this one, because they are for your sites.

Four hinges hold the year together: the first spring inspection, swarm season, the late-summer varroa treatment, and the autumn stores check. If those four happen on time, the rest is detail.

January (July in the south)

The bees are clustered, eating stores, and in most places raising no brood at all. You heft the hive from the back every couple of weeks; a hive that feels light gets fondant over the cluster, not syrup. If the midwinter oxalic acid treatment did not happen in December, do it now on a still day: it is the one dose a year that reaches nearly every mite. Clean and repair equipment, order foundation, and read last year's records for the colonies that came through light.

February (August)

The bees start raising brood again in a small patch at the centre of the cluster, and stores go down faster than they did in January. You keep hefting; this is the month colonies starve, with honey a frame away from a cluster too small to reach it. Fondant if light. Where forage is late, a pollen substitute helps the build-up, but only for colonies your records show stalling. Do not open the hive except on an exceptional warm day, and then only to move a frame of stores next to the cluster.

March (September)

The bees are flying on warm days, bringing in the first pollen, and the brood nest expands week by week. You do the first inspection on the first still day above fifteen degrees Celsius: eggs present, stores enough to reach the first flow, floor clean. A quick check, not a full review, and the first mite count of the year on the same visit. Unite a weak, queenright colony with a strong one rather than nursing it. Replace old, dark comb at the edges of the nest as the colony expands onto it.

April (October)

The bees build fast, the population may double in a month, and drones appear, which means swarm season is coming. You move to inspections every seven to ten days, on the fourteen readings, watching population against space and looking for the first play cups. Add the first super when seven of ten frames are drawn and covered. Set up bait hives. This is when a strong colony needs room a week before you think it does.

May (November)

The bees swarm. A colony can go from a charged queen cell to a departed swarm in about nine days, so the inspection interval matters more now than at any other time. You practise swarm control: a split, an artificial swarm, or room and a second brood box for a colony with cells, and read the cells for swarm, supersedure or emergency before acting. Add supers ahead of the flow, count mites again, and start raising queens if you raise your own.

June (December)

The bees are on the main flow in many temperate regions, filling supers and, if crowded, still swarming. You keep adding supers, keep the ten-day interval until the flow is on, then relax to a fortnight. Count mites; a rising count with supers on is the case for a formic treatment where the label allows it. Mark and clip new queens as they start laying, and record the year.

July (January)

The bees cap the honey, and in areas with a summer dearth they get defensive and start robbing. You harvest the spring and early-summer honey when the frames are capped and the moisture reads eighteen per cent or less, weighing per hive at the extractor. Reduce entrances where robbing starts. Count mites: this count decides the size of next month's treatment.

August (February)

The bees are raising the winter bees, the long-lived generation that must carry the colony to spring, and the mite population is at its peak. You do the year's most important job: the late-summer varroa treatment, supers off, full course, the day after the last harvest comes off. Take the stores reading on the same inspection, in frames, because feeding is a decision made on this reading and not on the calendar. Extract the last honey, and give the wet supers back to the bees to clean.

September (March)

The bees evict the drones, contract the brood nest, and take down whatever thick syrup they are given while the weather holds. You feed the colonies the August reading showed to be light, with two-to-one syrup, until each has its winter target of stores; feed nothing to the ones that do not need it. Count mites three to four weeks after the treatment to see whether it worked, and run a second course if it did not. Fit mouse guards and wasp guards as the nights cool.

October (April)

The bees cap the last stores and the cluster starts to form on cold nights. You finish all liquid feeding before it is too cold for the bees to process it, do a final quick check for a laying queen and adequate stores, and stop opening hives. Strap lids against wind, make sure the hive is tilted forward to drain, and check ventilation. Record the final stores reading per hive: it is the number you will compare against in February.

November (May)

The bees are clustered, with a small patch of brood in warmer areas and none in cold ones. You leave them alone. Heft, clear entrances of dead bees after a cold snap, check for damage after storms, and start the year's paperwork: costs and harvest per hive for the season just gone, which is when the site comparison and the requeening list get written.

December (June)

The bees are, in most temperate places, broodless for a few weeks around the solstice. You take the one chance of the year to treat with oxalic acid while no mites are hiding under cappings, on a still day, in and out in a minute. Then close the record of the year, order bees and equipment for the spring, and plan the splits from the colonies that earned it.

The southern hemisphere

Add six months to every heading and the sequence holds: an Australian or New Zealand spring build-up runs from August into October, swarm season peaks around November, the main flows are typically December to February, the late-summer treatment falls in February or March and winter feeding decisions in March and April. Two differences are worth noting. Winters are milder across much of Australia, so the broodless window for oxalic acid can be short or absent and the midwinter treatment needs a count first. And varroa is new in Australia, established since 2022, which means monitoring rules, permitted products and reporting requirements are still changing and the state department's page, not any calendar, is the authority.

From a calendar to your calendar

A calendar tells you what usually happens. Your records tell you what happens on your sites: which apiary builds up a fortnight early, which one needs feeding every August, which month the mite counts climb. In BeehiveMind the reminders for treatments and to-dos are attached to an apiary and dated by the course you scheduled, so the calendar above becomes a list that arrives on the right day, and the inspection history becomes the version of this page that is true for you.