So you hived your new bees, good job! Now you’ll need to know how to check on your new hives! You want to make sure your queen is laying eggs and has a good pattern. I will go further into detail below!
This post may contain affiliate links, from which I earn a small commission from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you. Click here to read our full disclosure policy.
Always Check Your New Hives!
It can be a little intimidating- opening a hive for the first time. But no matter how much you might want to leave them be, please check and make sure your queen is laying. You want to make sure she is alive, and a good queen. You only have a certain amount of time to replace her if you need to!
While in most cases, everything will be just fine, it will both put your mind at ease and be beneficial to check on new hives. You should wait to check until about a week after hiving and on a good weather day. That means over 40 degrees Fahrenheit, low winds, and no precipitation. I’ll go over some things to check for below.
*Note! Make sure if you had blocked the bees from leaving the hive (for acceptance) that you remove the blockage after about 3-4 days max! Especially if you don’t have a hive bottom with ventilation.
Checking Activity
Before cracking open your hive, take a little time to observe the activity levels. As long as the weather is over 40 and there is no rain, you should see bees coming and going from the hives.
Activity may not look completely equal between hives. If all your hives are in a row, bees will often drift to the hives on the edges. As long as a worker bee brings nectar and/or pollen- they are usually accepted instead of being fought off!
What you don’t want to see is a large amount of bearding on the front (unless it is very hot) or what looks like fighting at the front of the hive. This may mean another hive is attempting to rob them. If this is the case, you may want to either put an entrance reducer (I use entrance reducers for all new hives) or robbing screen on that hive.
Are They Pulling Comb?
Your bees should be hard at work building new comb. If you had some frames that already had pulled comb either from another hive or from a Nuc (Nucleus colony), great! Note that most bees will start pulling comb in the center of the hive and work their way to the edges.
When you first start taking frames out to inspect, start from an edge, away from the main group of bees. This will make it easier to manipulate the rest of the frames. It will also make it less likely that you will hurt your queen!
Make sure the edge frames are pulled away from the side of the hive body when you put everything back! If there isn’t enough bee space, they will ignore the edge and not pull the comb. Or worse- attach it to the wall of the hive body!
Now, after (or while) checking for quality comb- check for eggs!
Checking for Eggs
You always want to check for eggs in a hive, it’s more important than spotting the queen! If you’re seeing quality brood patterns, then you know you have a good queen, even if you didn’t get a glimpse of her.
A frame from the center of your hive first will give you the best chance at finding eggs. Again, be sure to start with a frame that is away from the main group of bees. You don’t want to hurt the queen! I love frame rests to hold the frames safely as you inspect.
So, what are you looking for? Well, you want to see eggs at the bottom of the cell. You should see one individual egg that looks like a tiny grain of rice right in the middle of the bottom of the cell. I have occasionally seen more than one egg in a cell, but you always want them on the bottom.
Why? This is because if you are seeing eggs on the sides of a cell, they are being laid by the workers! Their shorter bodies mean they can’t reach the bottom of the cell, so they will attach eggs to the sides. If you have laying workers, then that means you have no queen. Her pheromone suppresses the reproductive systems of the workers and in her absence, they can start laying eggs. This is not a good thing! Workers can only lay drone (male) eggs. And honey bee drones only eat honey and reproduce. All the bees in a hive that do work are female, which is from a fertilized egg.
As far as a pattern, it isn’t as important in a newer hive, but you want to see like larval stages grouped together.
You Now Know How to Check Your New Hives!
Woohoo! A big first step in beekeeping! Actually going into your hive and manipulating the insides! Be sure to always put your frames back in the way you found them, the bees will thank you! For a more visual explanation, see my video below!
Leave a Reply