Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
will now be visible and, hopefully, you will be using a stainless-steel mesh floor but, if
not, the floor should be clean and free of debris. If there is a build-up of debris, give it a
scrape clean with your hive tool or swap it for a new floor and clean the old one later.
A very dirty floor could indicate a problem, so look around for any other signs of
trouble. If a solid floor has a build-up of water, this means the hive is not tilted forward
slightly to allow water to run out of the entrance. Do this now if you need to.
Observing the bees
At this point it may be worthwhile unhurriedly holding up some frames and observing
the bees to see what they are doing. Try to make some sense out of the apparent chaos.
You could see a bee dancing and telling her mates about a good food source, or you
could see a bee with pollen baskets moving towards the pollen storage area. You will
undoubtedly see new adults cutting though the wax cappings of their cells and slowly
emerging, with all the other bees walking about over their heads.
If you are very lucky and the bees are calm, you could see the queen laying an egg.
I've lost several queens in my time while gazing at a queen moving around on a comb
- especially a young one. So take a quick look by all means but then gently lower her
frame back into the hive. Always remember to replace frames in the same way as you
picked them up, unless you have another task in mind, but we come back to that later
in this chapter when we discuss building up a colony.
Reassembling the hive
Finally, if you mentally tick off all the above checks positively, reassemble the hive and
move on to the next hive, where you should repeat the whole process.
This chapter provides a checklist of all the inspection points, and Chapter 8 a queen/
brood-nest troubleshooting guide. Use these guides until you are able to remember
each point for yourself. The full hive inspection applies to every hive, whether a nucleus
hive or a full colony of bees that is 10 boxes high and bursting at the seams.
