How to Inspect a Hive Part 3

By: Darryl Gabritsch

Inspecting a hive is only one part of colony management. If you see an issue while inspecting a hive, there are various management techniques to do depending on what you see. This article will be three parts. Part 1 covers the concepts behind a hive inspection. Part 2 covers pre-inspection procedures. Part 3 covers the actual hive inspection procedures.

How often and when you inspect a hive totally depends on your lifestyle, beekeeping experience, what your philosophy is and what the purpose of the inspection is. All inspections should be systematic and have a specific purpose. Why are you opening a hive? Are you simply lifting the hive body to check under the frames for swarm cells (cold months)? Are you opening the hive to remove frames to do a detailed inspection (warm months)? Are you opening the top to simply look at the cluster location and strength, or simply checking a hive top feeder?

Actual inspection steps I do when I inspect a hive are as follows:

  1. Look at the outside of the hive as you approach it to see what the bees are doing (swarm preparations, robbing, normal orientation flights, etc.).
  2. Look for scattered hive components. This indicates bears, pet interaction with a colony or human activity (vandals). Do you see scratch marks on the ground or hive? This indicates a skunk, or another small predator.
  3. Are the bees defensive as you approach the hive? The issue could range from undesirable genetic traits (bad queen and drones), pest issues such as skunks, Varroa mites, extreme hive beetle or wax moth infestation. Perhaps you are in a dearth (lack of nectar flow). Rarely do you have an Africanized colony, but it is possible if you live in the deep south where Africanized honey bees have been found. Most of the time, the cause isn’t a bad queen or Africanized honey bees. Also realize all colonies will have a bad day occasionally.
  4. Look all around the hive and on the ground around the hive for evidence of pests, disease or pesticide poisoning. Don’t stand in front of the hive during an inspection. You will be in the flightpath of the bees and will be visible to the guard bees in the colony. Stand behind or to the side of the hive during your inspection.
  5. Look for indicators of disease such as viruses (disoriented walking bees, hairless bees or diarrhea on the outside the hive) If you see poop on the outside of a hive, remember to look for it on top of the frames. It’s normal to occasionally see small amounts of poop (thin brown streaks and splats) on the outside of a hive; especially during cooler months… a girl’s got to go when a girl’s got to go! Do you see piles of dead bees on the ground around the hive? It is normal to see a couple hundred dead bees around a hive. Remember the queen lays between 1,200 and 2,000 eggs a day. Most foragers die before returning to the hive, so you won’t see thousands of dead bees around the hive unless something is wrong (starvation or pesticide poisoning). If you see thousands of dead bees, call your state apiary inspector to help diagnose the problem. Your bees may have been exposed to pesticides while foraging.
  6. Use your senses when inspecting a hive. Do you see indications of problems? What smells do you smell? Do you smell something like rotten oranges? It could be small hive beetles (Aethina tumida). Do you smell something like rotting meat? It could be American Foulbrood (Paenibacillus larvae)? Does something smell like old socks or old cheese? It could be European Foulbrood (Melissococcus plutonius), or it could simply be goldenrod or some other honey in the Fall. Do you know what propolis and beeswax smells like? Do you hear noisy bees? Your senses are only a starting point. You must do further investigation and analysis to determine the cause of the abnormality.
  7. Gently smoke the entrance of the hive to mask alarm pheromones.
  8. Use your hive tool to crack open the top-most hive body and puff a generous, but not excessive amount of smoke through the crack to mask alarm pheromones.
  9. Wait about 30 seconds to allow the smoke to filter through the hive before opening the hive.
  10. Remove the top cover and look at the top feeder for ants and if all the syrup is gone,. Does the syrup smell sour (fermented)? Place the hive top on the ground to serve as a base to put the rest of the equipment on.
  11. Remove the hive top feeder and place it on the hive top.
  12. Look down through the top bars of the frames to see where the brood is and if there is drawn comb or filled cells with brood, honey, pollen, etc. Look for wax moths (Galleria mellonella) and small hive beetles trying to escape.
  13. Gently remove any hive beetle traps you may have between the frames, being careful to not spill the mineral oil from them. The traps should be filled about half full of mineral oil. The mineral oil should be liquid and move freely. If it is gelled (viscous), you need to replace the trap. Look at the trap to see how many small hive beetle adults are trapped in it.
  14. Gently push individual frames to one side of the hive to allow extra room for you to remove the outside frame. If the weather is cold, you should use your hive tool to push down between the frame end bar tabs to prevent breaking off the tabs as you pry apart the frames that have excess propolis on them.
  15. Use your hive tool to gently lift up one end of the outside frame. I love to use a J-Hook hive tool with the J-hook end to do this. Grasp that end of the frame with one hand. Use the hive tool to gently lift up the other end of the frame. Lift the frame straight up and out of the hive. Once the frame is out of the hive, you can rest one end of the frame on the hive while you place the hive tool on top of the box.
  16. Now inspect the frame. Grasp both ends of the frame like you are holding a steering wheel at 10 and two position. Put your back to the sun, so you have light shining over your shoulder and into the comb. If you don’t have good light, you can use a small LED flashlight as a light source. To use the flashlight, rest one end of the frame on a hive and use the free hand to shine light into the cells. You can gently move the frame in small circles to see the flat portion of the cells at the bottom of the cells. I quickly search in a clockwise manner around the side of the frame in ever shortening concentric circles until I finish inspecting that side. Then, rotate the frame around, example: rotate it horizontally while maintaining the frame upright until you reach the other side. NOTE: You could simply rotate the frame out and then upside down; however, if you have unwired / unsupported comb you run the risk of the comb falling out of the frame. You also might spill out any uncured, watery honey. To me, the risk is too great, so I simply rotate the frame horizontally.
  17. What are you looking for? You are looking for capped and uncapped honey. Newly capped honey will have white cappings on it. Older capped honey will have a dark “wet” look to it. Wet cap honey is still good honey. Look for honey in the top and top corners (honey band) on a brood frame. Next, you will find pollen of various colors. The colors are from the flower the pollen came from.
  18. You will be looking for the queen (marked or unmarked), drones, workers and capped worker and drone brood. Do you see workers with gray, fuzzy hair that can look wet? That’s a young or newly emerged worker. Do you see workers with a darker looking thorax? That’s an older worker. The hair has been worn off or thinned as it got older.
  19. Look for a tight brood pattern with almost all cells capped. It is okay to see some holes where hygienic bees have sensed something wrong with the brood and removed the pupa, or you might see where an adult bee emerged from its cell. If you see a shotgun pattern (lots of scattered holes), you might have a Varroa mite problem. You are looking at the larvae color. They should be bright / pearly white. If you see yellow to brown larvae with visible white lines, you might have European foulbrood. If you see “melted” larvae you might have a severe Varroa mite problem. Look at the bees’ wings (mostly worker wings). If you see deformed wings (shriveled wings) it is caused by Deformed Wing Virus, which is transmitted by the Varroa mite. Look for wax moths (adults and larvae) on and in the comb. Do you see spider webbing through the cells? That’s caused by wax moths. Do you see “pepper flake type items”? That’s caused by wax moths. Look for small hive beetle adults (they look like a black ladybug) and larvae. Do you see slime in the cells (especially honey cells)? That’s small hive beetle damage. Do you see slime on the frames and honey cells? That’s small hive beetle damage. Do you see greasy, sunken cells with small perforations? That’s likely American Foulbrood. If you find wax moths or small hive beetles, kill them immediately, IF you have first checked for the queen on both sides of the frame. If you see the queen, I wouldn’t kill the beetle or wax moth unless you are holding the frame over an open hive body, so that if the queen is knocked off the frame while you are killing the beetle or moth, she will land safely inside the box instead of falling into the grass where you likely will lose her for good. Unfortunately, this has happened to me in the past… lesson learned the hard way.
  20. Look for eggs. The eggs are roughly 0.4 mm wide by 1.5 mm long (about the size of a grain of rice). You will be looking at the tip of the egg. Each egg should be roughly centered on the bottom (flat area) of the cell. Do you see multiple eggs in a cell? That could be normal or a laying worker. A queen, especially a young queen, will sometimes lay a couple eggs in a cell. That’s normal. The workers will remove one of the eggs. Occasionally, you will have a worker lay eggs in cells in a queenright colony. That’s normal. The workers can tell the difference between eggs deposited by a queen and those deposited by a worker. The workers will remove the eggs deposited by a worker. Do you see many cells with multiple eggs in it, with the eggs on the sides of the cell? That is likely a laying worker and the problem needs to be addressed.
  21. Look for queen cups (acorn shaped cells on the face of the comb). It is normal to see a lot of queen cups. Look in the queen cups. If you see royal jelly (thick white, cream-looking substance), an egg (with or without royal jelly around it) or a larva inside the name changes from queen cup to queen cell. The workers will continue building the queen cell into a peanut shaped cell. Are the cells on the top half of the comb? These are normally supersedure cells. Normally, you will only find a few supersedure cells. Leave them alone and let the queens emerge as adults. You can choose the two best looking capped supersedure cells (cells that are long and have a distinct peanut ripple effect on them) to become queen adults, and destroy the rest (or use the other queen cells in a queen cell split). The workers will ball and kill the mother queen by suffocation and hyperthermia (cook her) during a supersedure. Do you see queen cells on the lower half (some books say the lower third) or along the sides and bottom of the comb? These are swarm cells. You can carefully cut around capped queen cells (being careful not to damage the cell) and use them in queen cell splits. You can remove the swarm cells completely, or you can put a hole in them to destroy them. The workers will see the hole, think something is wrong with the queen, and will tear down the swarm cell. NOTE: Once the colony gets the swarm instinct it is hard to get rid of, short of letting the swarm happen. You basically have two choices once the swarm instinct starts. You can try the Demaree method of swarm prevention (pioneered in 1892). It normally takes seven to ten days to complete, but it could take up to 30 days. You can also try destroying the queen cells if you want. I did an experiment in 2021 wherein I destroyed all the queen cells I found in a colony once the swarm instinct began. I finally won after ten weeks of destroying the queen cells every weekend. Do you see a queen cell with a thinned tip? This is a queen that will emerge within 24 hours. The workers will help the new queen by thinning the wax on the tip of a queen cell about 24 hours before the virgin queen emerges. The virgin will cut a hole in the tip, similar to the escape hatch on a submarine, and emerge out of the tip. Do you see a queen cell with a hole in the side of the queen cell? This is a queen cell that has been chewed open by a rival virgin queen. The rival queen will chew a hole in the side of her sister’s cell and sting her to death while her sister is trapped inside the cell.
  22. IF I find the queen, I isolate her frame (with her on it) by placing it in the spare hive body that is sitting on top of the spare hive top. I ensure there are no other frames close to her, so that I can reasonably expect to find her again on that frame before I put it back in the hive with her on it. Once you find the queen, you can speed up your hive inspection because you no longer have to worry about rolling and killing the queen.
  23. Go systematically through the hive from top to bottom; all the way to the bottom board (even removing and inspecting under a slatted rack if you use one on your hive). All of my hives have them! It is important to go all the way to the bottom board during inspections. I frequently find a small hive beetle larva under the bees, or under debris on the bottom board. Look for the wax moth or small hive beetle larvae under wax cappings, or under paper shreds if you used the newspaper method of combining a weak colony with a strong colony.
  24. You can get the workers to move out of the way as you do your inspections by LIGHTLY puffing cold smoke on them, by blowing on them (it upsets them, but it is highly affective) or by lightly touching them.
  25. As you remove each box from the hive to go to the next lower hive component, stack the boxes at an angle on the previous box that you placed on the spare hive body and spare hive top. If I isolated the queen in a spare hive body, I don’t place any more boxes on top of the isolated box, so she can’t move up to the upper box.
  26. If you decide to remove excessive propolis or wax from the frames you can do so after you place one end of the frame on top of hive AFTER you have checked the frame for the queen. You can then hold the frame with one hand and use the free hand to scrape off the excessive propolis. You can scrape off burr comb from the inside sides of the hive body once you have room to do it. If you see ladder comb (burr comb that is on top of the frame, or under a frame) you can scrape it off (they will rebuild it), or you can leave it alone as long as it isn’t interfering with anything. I normally leave ladder comb alone, but I do scrape off burr comb since it may scratch open the outside frame as I remove the first frame.
  27. You then reassemble the hive components in the order you found it, or you can rearrange the honey frames. In the Spring, beekeepers will rotate the upper hive body, that contains the brood, to the lower hive body. Beekeepers rotate the honey frames to the upper hive body in the Fall. The concept is that the honey bees will generally move up in the cold months as they consume the food stores.
  28. Lastly, mark the hive with a signal, or write on top of the hive top if you want a handy place for notes. The hive top is your built-in hive notes page. Repaint the hive top once you run out of room to write. I write notes with a Sharpie. I write the date of a queen cell split, or perhaps the date and type of mite treatment.
  29. I place a signal on the outside top of the hive. I use a brick to signal what I found. I lay a full red brick on top of the hive to mean I saw the queen OR eggs. If I see queen cells, I add a half red brick (break a brick in half by smashing it against a cinder block or other brick… shards work too instead of a half brick. If I need to put something inside the hive (replacement Beetle Blaster trap, frame with foundation, etc.), I place a stick on the top of the hive to remind me to “stick something inside the hive”.
    Summary. Learning how to inspect a hive is a crucial step in your beekeeping journey. Having a systematic inspection process will keep you focused on the steps needed to conduct a thorough, and eventually, a quick, hive inspection. Knowing what to look for will help you determine what is normal and what requires further diagnosis and remedies. Beekeeping is both a science and an art. Beekeeping science is knowing the cause and effect of diseases and pests. Beekeeping art is balancing the various management techniques to keep healthy, strong colonies. Thank you for reading the entire series if you stayed this long.

Darryl Gabritsch is a North Carolina Beekeepers Association Master Beekeeper and lives in NC with his family.