Early Spring Hive Inspections
Should you do a hive inspection in early Spring?!
We are always told to not open your hive in winter… but after weeks and weeks of winter cold all of a sudden the sun comes out and your hive is alive with activity… it’s not spring yet… but it’s certainly not a winter day either.
I’m not sure about you but regardless of the season it makes me immediately run to the bee shed to don my suit and get the smoker going 😂
I did exactly this early in August 2024: it was ~14C, calm and sunny and my hives were looking very busy. So I decided to do a quick check…
Now this might be a little presumptuous when it’s only early August, so you need to be careful, choose a perfect day (sunny & calm), and be quick…. all this ensures you won’t cause harm to your hive by exposing young brood to cold air.
Why do an early hive inspection?
A quick check on your bees at this time of year is for two main reasons… ok three reasons if you also count an overwhelming desire to simply saying hello to the bees I haven’t seen for months.
The first reason is to check their stores of honey – it’s been months since pack down and I have no idea on how their stores are tracking. This time of year is risky: the queen is already likely to be laying and building up numbers and this means mouths to feed. A cold snap can leave a hive with lots of demand but little supply. So a quick check now gives me a peace of mind they will make it through to Spring.
The second reason is to see if my queen is alive and well. This can be done by sighting her majesty, but as I don’t want to spend a long time searching I am more looking to see evidence of brood – either eggs, larvae or capped brood. Once the queen or brood is sighted I quickly close up the hive to minimise stress and exposure to cold.
Outcomes
If the hive has good stores = a heavy super or several full frames of honey AND a laying queen I am very happy. I can relax a bit and wait another 2-4 weeks before doing something similar.
Finding a hive with low honey stores means I would consider feeding either dry feed or 2:1 syrup. You can find some info on feeding on my website here: https://bowralbees.com.au/2022/bee-tips/feeding-bees/
Finding no signs of a queen would worry me but I don’t panic… it might be i my haste I missed seeing a queen or brood, or the queen may not have started laying yet either. Regardless, there’s not a lot to be done as sourcing a queen at this time of year isn’t ideal. I’d recommend waiting until the next inspection ideally on a warmer day where you could be more thorough.
What were the results of my quick check?
I checked six hives at my home apiary spending only 5-8 mins in each hive. I found excellent honey stores in all hives which was encouraging but perhaps not a great surprise as I had packed my hives down early in Autumn and left a lot of honey in all of them.
Bees were bringing in pollen (a sign of egg laying / hive growth) and I saw new nectar in frames so that’s encouraging the bees already have energy coming in vs needing to use up their stores.
As usual for this time of year I found hives with several empty frames and (yuck!) some very mouldy outer frames. These will get removed next check and melted down.
If you find a lot of empty space in a hive I’d recommend removing a whole box. For example, one hive that I had was wintered as a 3 box (3 x 8 frames) and I removed the middle box as these frames were 90% empty. By removing this box I have reduced the space they have to keep warm and given them direct / obvious access to stores which were in the top box.
I did find one queenless looking hive – so that’s on my list to check more thoroughly next time.
I saw a number of small hive beetle which was quite a surprise. I have always assumed SHB doesn’t do well at all in cold weather… but seeing them already in hives means we need to be more careful with traps and keeping their numbers down this season.