Hive inspection checklist: the fourteen readings that matter

Most inspections go wrong before the hive is open. The beekeeper arrives without a question, lifts every frame, finds the queen, closes up, and has learned nothing they can compare with last week. A checklist fixes that, not because the list is clever but because it is the same list every time. The same fourteen readings, in the same units, on every visit, is what turns a season of afternoons into a record.

Before you open the hive

How often. Every seven to ten days through the spring build-up and swarm season, because a colony can go from play cups to a capped swarm cell in nine days and you want to catch it between the two. Every two to four weeks through summer and early autumn, when the questions are stores and mites. Not at all once the colony has clustered for winter: heft the hive from the back to judge stores, and leave it alone.

When. A still day, fifteen degrees Celsius or more, late morning to mid afternoon when the foragers are out and the hive is calmest. Not in rain, not in wind, not at night. If you have to choose between a cold bright day and a warm dull one, the warm one wins: the brood is what you are protecting.

How long. Ten to twenty minutes. A routine inspection of a queenright colony can answer its questions on the first three brood frames; a full review, frame by frame, is for when something is wrong. Longer than twenty minutes and the brood is cooling and the temper is rising.

What you are asking. Three questions, every time: is there a laying queen, does the colony have enough room, and is there any sign of disease or mites. Everything on the list below is evidence for one of the three.

The fourteen readings

These are the fourteen fields BeehiveMind records per visit, and they are the fourteen a paper sheet should carry too. Quantities are in frames, because a frame count is a judgement you can make with the frame in your hands and it stays consistent across a season.

1. Date. Filled in for you by the app, written first on paper. Nothing else on the list means anything without it.
2. Frames. How many frames the box holds. It sets the scale for every other count.
3. Population. Frames covered with bees, seen from above before you lift anything. Five frames of bees in a ten-frame box is a different colony from nine, and the trend across visits is the earliest sign of trouble.
4. Pollen. Frames of stored pollen, usually an arc around the brood. A colony with brood and no pollen is about to slow down.
5. Honey. Frames of capped and uncapped stores together. In late summer this is the reading that decides whether and how much to feed.
6. Open brood. Frames with eggs and uncapped larvae. Eggs mean a queen laid within three days; the pattern says whether she is laying well.
7. Closed brood. Frames of capped brood, recorded separately, because it forecasts the workforce three weeks out. What closed brood tells you is the single most useful thing on the list.
8. Queen seen. Yes or no, but do not spend ten minutes on it. Eggs are the evidence; a sighting is a bonus.
9. Queen cells. Charged cells only, not empty play cups. Where they are and whether there are eggs alongside tells you swarm, supersedure or emergency: three questions about the queen covers the difference.
10. Queen year. Recorded when she is introduced and carried forward. Second- and third-year queens are the ones that fail mid-flow.
11. Varroa. Mites seen on bees or in drone brood, and, when you do a wash, the count per hundred bees. The count is what decides treatment; the sighting is what prompts the count.
12. American foulbrood. Sunken, greasy, perforated cappings; a dead larva that ropes out on a matchstick; a smell. Notifiable in most countries. Close the hive and call the inspector.
13. European foulbrood. Twisted, yellow-brown larvae dying before capping, in a pepper-pot pattern. Also notifiable in many places.
14. Nosema. Streaking on the front of the hive and a colony that dwindles in spring. Confirmed under a microscope, suspected from the entrance.

The three disease readings are the ones you say only when you find something. Silence means absent, and a season of silence is itself a record.

Reading the list as a whole

The readings answer the three questions in combination, not alone:

• Queenright? Eggs present, no emergency cells, population steady or rising. If there are no eggs, look for cells; if there are no cells either, the colony needs help this week.
• Room? Population and honey against frames. The seven out of ten rule says add a box when seven of ten frames are drawn and covered. Queen cells on the bottom bars in a full box means you are already late.
• Health? A solid brood pattern, no disease readings, and a mite count under the threshold your local guidance uses, commonly two to three mites per hundred bees. The varroa guide covers what to do above it.

Two rules of thumb worth keeping

• Seven out of ten. Add the next box when seven of ten frames are drawn and covered with bees. Earlier and the colony cannot defend or warm the space; later and it swarms.
• Three feet or three miles. Move a hive less than about a metre at a time, or more than about five kilometres, or the foragers return to the old spot. Anything in between loses bees.

Record it before you close the hive

The checklist that gets filled in later, from memory, in the kitchen, is the checklist that stops being kept by June. Write it at the hive or say it at the hive. With the app the fourteen readings are ten spoken phrases, confirmed by a beep, with the phone in your pocket; the row appears on the dashboard when the phone finds signal, next to every previous visit, and the platform reads the new row against the old ones and tells you what changed. On paper, keep the same fourteen columns and the same units, and the comparison is still there, it is just yours to do.

Either way the discipline is the same: one row per visit, every visit, in the same words. That is the whole method. Notebook, spreadsheet or app is only a question of what happens to the row afterwards.