Last year I thought what I was seeing inside the hive was bee larvae. It was varroa mite larvae. I didn't know the difference, and that ignorance cost me an entire colony. Thirty thousand bees, gone. By the time I saw the wax moth damage, it was already too late, and the girls were declining so fast there was nothing left to save.
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Last year I was inspecting weekly. I was checking food, watching them bring pollen in, making sure they had water, watching for overcrowding, looking for swarm cells. I was doing the things I knew to do. What I didn't know was what I was actually looking at. I thought the varroa larvae I was seeing on the frames were bee larvae. I didn't know what a shotgun brood pattern looked like, so when I was seeing one, I had no idea it was telling me something was wrong. I didn't know that honey and nectar belong on the outer frames with brood packed toward the center, so I couldn't read the frame layout for what it was. A good inspection is detective work, but you have to know what's out of place before you can recognize a clue. I was inspecting. I just didn't have the vocabulary yet to understand what the hive was telling me. By the time the wax moth damage made the problem impossible to miss, the colony was already past saving.
So this year, going into my first inspections with three new nucs installed in mid-April, I changed my mindset. I went from having a beehive, to having an apiary. In nature, you can find a beehive anyplace they decide to set up shop. And a natural beehive will do what natural beehives do... including collapsing and dying. What I have (or at least what I'm shooting for) is a honey-producing apiary. So I have to learn as much as I can and manage it tighter than I'd like to, if I want to increase the chances of survival and honey production.
I've decided the natural approach isn't about doing nothing. It's about choosing mild, organic interventions early, before the problem is visible. That distinction matters, and I didn't understand it until I had an empty hive to show for it.
This past weekend I opened all three hives, and it was a very different inspection process form this time last year. Last year, I was on a queen hunt. I thought if I found her, I was done with my job. But an inspection is not a queen search. It's detective work. I'm reading cues, gathering evidence, and deducing whether the hive is healthy without anyone in there telling me a thing (man that would be sooo much easier!).
The things I'm checking every time I open a hive are these: Is the hive queen right? Does it have enough space but not too much? Are bees active on every frame and what is their temperament? How's their food storage looking?
And a few times a year, I'll be checking the mite counts?
Queen right doesn't mean you spotted her. It means you can deduce she's present, laying, and healthy based on what you find. Eggs in the cells tell you she was laying within the last three days. Larvae at different stages, from the youngest curled grubs to fully capped brood, tell you she's been consistent. What I was looking for was all three stages present and accounted for, and in all three hives, Queen Aretha, Queen Diana, and Queen Erykah's girls delivered.
The brood pattern was where I learned something new this weekend, and I would have missed it without my mentor. I sent him a photo through my Meta glasses [LINK: Meta smart glasses] because I was second-guessing what I was seeing, and he set me straight. I thought a healthy frame meant wall to wall brood. What I was actually seeing, dense brood packed tightly in the center with a ring of nectar and capped honey arching around it, I thought might be a problem. My mentor explained it's actually the opposite. That ring is the pantry. The nurse bees responsible for feeding the larvae have everything they need within arm's reach. Efficient, organized, exactly what you want.
I was also watching for swarm cells along the bottom edges of frames, which would signal the colony is preparing to leave. Finding one means you act fast. I didn't find any. I also checked whether the bees were engaging with the new second box I had added the week before, specifically whether they were working the blank frame I'd put up there after moving a brood frame to encourage them upward. I had painted the new frames with melted burr comb I'd been saving from inspections all season, froze it first for a few days to make sure nothing unwanted came along with it, then melted and brushed it on so the frames would smell familiar. [LINK: beekeeping frame brush] Whether that made the difference or not, they were moving up.
Then came the part I had been avoiding since I started keeping bees. A varroa mite wash. You take a sample of about three hundred bees, shake them in a solution that separates the mites from the bees, and count. The bees don't survive it. That bothered me more than I expected it to, standing there with a jar in my hand knowing what I was about to do. But here's the math I kept coming back to... three hundred bees to protect thirty thousand. That's not a sacrifice that requires a lot of deliberation once you've already watched an entire hive die because you didn't know what you were missing.
Queen Aretha's hive came back with two mites. Queen Diana's had three. Queen Erykah's had none. With counts that low, I won't need to do another wash for about a month unless something changes and gives me a reason to look sooner. If counts had come back elevated, the preference is to start with mild organic options before anything more aggressive. But right now, the news was good across all three hives.
Standing in the apiary after that last count, looking at three strong colonies instead of the empty box I stared at last fall, was a different kind of feeling. Not just relief, though there was plenty of that. It was more that the cues and the clues actually added up. The calm temperament when I opened the hives. The eggs, the larvae, the capped brood, all present. The honey already capped on the outer frames. The bees covering every frame in the new box. I was looking for the story the hive was telling me, and this weekend, all three were telling the same one. They were happy, busy little bees.
From The Field: Every inspection is really just one question: is this hive healthy, growing, and headed in the right direction?