The Bee Bench › Colony Strength

🐝 Colony Strength

"Strong" and "weak" are the two vaguest words in beekeeping. Count the frames the bees are actually covering and you get a number — and a straight answer on what the colony is ready for.

Deep frames covered in bees

Medium frames covered in bees

Time of year

Frames of brood (all stages)

Frames drawn in the top box

Frames per box

Count a frame as one if bees cover it wall to wall on both sides; half if they cover one side. Do it early on a cool morning before the foragers are out, or you'll undercount by a third.

—

Total bees

—

Foragers, roughly

—

Weight of bees

—

Mites at 3% would be

—

What it's ready for

Frames to bees

Frame	Bees, both sides covered
Deep (9⅛")	About 2,200
Medium (6¼")	About 1,500
Shallow (5¾")	About 1,300
Half a cup of bees	About 300 — the standard mite wash sample
One pound of bees	About 3,500
A 3 lb package	About 10,500

Count in the morning, not the afternoon. On a good flow day a third of the colony is out of the box by ten o'clock. Count the same hive at nine and at two and you'll get two very different answers — so pick a time and stick to it, or you're measuring the weather rather than the bees.

Frames of brood predicts the future; frames of bees describes the present. A colony with six frames of bees and eight frames of brood is about to double. One with twelve frames of bees and two frames of brood is about to collapse, and the queen is the reason. When the two numbers disagree, the brood is the one telling you what happens next.

Read a mite wash → Split timeline → Winter feed →