The Bee Bench › Hive Inspection Checklist

📋 Hive Inspection Checklist

What to actually look at, in the order you'd look at it. Tick it off on your phone at the hive, or print it blank for the clipboard.

How to use this. Tick boxes as you go — the page remembers them on this device until you hit reset, so you can work through a hive and pick up where you left off. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Printing gives you a clean blank copy for the clipboard.

Before you open

Set your objective for this visit — why are you in the hive today?

Tool kit ready: smoker lit, hive tool, notebook or phone, and gear for whatever you plan to do.

Weather OK? Calm, mild, ideally sunny mid-day when the foragers are out of the way.

Outside the hive, before opening

Predator signs: skunk scratch marks at the entrance or on the ground? Get the hive up on a stand if so.

Fecal matter: a little on the front is normal. Heavy orange-brown streaking signals dysentery or disease.

Guard bees: wave a hand slowly across the entrance. If a guard follows it, a puff of smoke breaks her attention.

Traffic: are bees flying and coming back loaded? Compare it against the hive next to it.

Population

Enough adult bees for the season? Strong means bees nearly covering both sides of each brood frame.

Queen status: worker eggs present? Signs of supersedure or swarm prep? Multiple eggs per cell means laying workers.

Brood: solid or spotty? All ages present — eggs, larvae, capped brood?

Trend: does the population look like it's growing or shrinking for this time of year?

Drones: seasonally appropriate? About 5% at peak. A lot of capped drone in late summer suggests a drone-layer.

Nutrition

Floral sources: what's blooming right now? Has drought or a long stretch of bad weather hurt the forage?

Foraging: 10 to 20 bees a minute coming in with full pollen baskets means plenty is coming in.

Stores: how much bee bread and how much nectar or honey? Right amount for the season?

Larval nutrition: are young larvae floating in abundant white royal jelly? Thin or absent jelly means think about protein.

Pests, parasites and disease

Brood disease signs: discolored, twisted, melted or cannibalized larvae, or punctured cappings.

Adult bees: deformities or odd behavior? Visible varroa, hive beetles, wax moths or their larvae?

Pests up in the honey supers or anywhere else in the hive?

Are the bees noticeably more defensive than they usually are?

In the brood nest

Inspect at least four brood frames per box.

Adults: look for hairlessness, greasy-looking bees, deformed wings, twitching.

Brood health: hold the frame with the sun at your back, angled so the light fills the cells. You want a solid rainbow pattern.

Brood pattern: eggs near the center working outward, one egg per cell.

Queen cups and cells: a few empty cups is normal. Many cups with eggs or larvae along the BOTTOM of frames is swarm prep. A few near the CENTER is supersedure or emergency.

Brood nutrition: one to two frames of pollen per box is ideal, with plenty of royal jelly around the larvae.

Comb condition: replace the two oldest frames per box each year — but never pull more than four frames at once.

Wrap up

Put every frame back in the same order and the same direction, so the brood nest stays intact.

Decide the management: more storage room? Swarm control? Treatment?

Note when to come back and anything to follow up on. Photograph anything unusual.

Four frames, not fourteen. A full frame-by-frame teardown of every box every time chills brood, sets the colony back a day of work and tells you very little you could not learn from four good brood frames. Go in with a question, answer it, and close up.

See something wrong? Disease & pest ID →