How many Brood Inspections per Season?

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karen
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How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by karen »

They say
Beekeepers usually check their brood once or twice a year.
I should hope not! Now-a-days I do not know anywhere that beekeepers can go the season with 1 or 2 brood inspections.

What happens when the queen goes up in those drawn frames to lay, it happens more than not here in the late summer, early fall. There is the potential for loss of a lot of brood at a bad time of year. Here if the bees haven't already committed to working the super a queen excluder usually keeps them out it. The timing for putting on a queen excluder is beyond most beginners and this is equipment that will need a queen excluder and geared to the inexperienced. What about propolis? How easy will those movable parts on the frames move after the first season? Small hive beetles are going to be an issue too. Robbing, they say cover the containers, the bees and every other sweet eating bug is going to be all over that container. I have seen some really tiny ants that can get under a jar lid. Then there is my license to bottle and sell honey, I can see my state letting me drain my supers in the bee yard with no second sink to wash my hands etc.

I too have had many people post it to my Facebook page. They are not beekeepers and think it is the bee’s knees. They would not understand the issues this presents. They just see the dish of pancakes under the tube and probably think they can eat breakfast in the bee yard.
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Countryboy
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How many Brood Inspections per Season?

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I should hope not! Now-a-days I do not know anywhere that beekeepers can go the season with 1 or 2 brood inspections.
Why would you need/want to do any more brood inspections than that? There comes a point that unnecessary inspections are a waste of time. There also comes a point that your skills should be adequate that you don't need to do invasive inspections to know what is going on in the hive. Management styles also affect things.

Early to mid-March I will visit hives. I will pull a couple frames just to make sure there is brood (viable queen) and look for any signs of AFB. (never found AFB in my hives, but saw EFB one time) If queenless, I shake them out. If they have a laying queen, I give them one strip of Apivar in the center of the cluster and a gallon of thick syrup on the frame feeder that I keep in my brood boxes. I put on 2 or 3 patties. I gather up deadouts. (I do inspect brood frames for signs of AFB in deadouts.) I give the bees a scoop of TM.

In a couple weeks, I add more patties, and give the bees more syrup if necessary. As long as the bees are eating the patties, I don't inspect further. I may rearrange boxes depending how the bees are building up. The bees get another scoop of TM.

In 2 more weeks (mid-April), bees get patties again. Around this time I am finding purple eyed drones, so I may start grafting queens from my strongest hives depending on the weather and extended forecast. I do not search every hive for drones...just a couple strong hives. Depending on the weather, I start grafting between the middle and end of April.

The Apivar strip gets pulled at the end of April. As long as patties are being eaten, I know things are going good. Boxes may get rearranged depending on the hive. Fruit trees have bloomed and dandelions are still going strong, and I should be seeing fresh white wax. If I see fresh white wax and patties being eaten, I don't need to inspect further.

By beginning to mid-May, strong hives are split. Splits may be given a cell, or I may put 2 frames of bees in nucs and give them a cell as a 5 frame mating nuc. (These 5 frame nucs will be split again the beginning of July, and these nucs will be strong enough to overwinter by the end of the season. Or these nucs will be put into weak hives that aren't building up right by the beginning of June.) I mark splits that are given a cell, and I do check in a month to make sure I have a laying queen, but the brood inspection is limited to just making sure brood is present.
If I see patties being eaten and fresh white wax, hives are shaken down to a single deep brood box with a queen excluder and given 2 or 3 supers. By mid-May, I do not give them any more patties, as we have plenty of reliable pollen coming in by then.

At the beginning of June, I do any last splits just to prevent swarming using mated queens from my nucs for the splits. I do not split any hive after June 1 if I intend to make honey from it. At the beginning of June, I open the hive just far enough to see if they need more supers, and then super accordingly. (2-3 shallow or medium supers over the super they are working in.)

If any hives don't build up by June 1, I just pull enough empty frames so I can drop a nuc with a laying queen into them.

The beginning of July to mid-July I start pulling honey. When I pull honey, I pull boxes down to the excluder. I can tell if I have a box of bees or not, and as long as I have a brood box full of bees, I don't inspect the brood box. I try to leave the bees 3 supers.

Mid to end of August when I pull honey I give the bees one Mite-Away Quick Strip placed on top of the excluder. The bees typically get 3 empty supers.

At the end of September I pull the supers and excluders and get rid of the used MAQS. I put 2 empty supers on the bottom board and the brood box at the top. I inspect the brood frames, making sure I have a queen and that everything looks healthy. Weak hives are combined together. I give the bees a gallon of thick syrup in the frame feeder. I make sure the hive has an insulation pillow under my migratory lid. The bees get a scoop of TM.

During October I do as much feeding as necessary to prepare for winter. I try to do feeding as soon as possible. Once feeding is done the hives are on their own until March. Every time I feed a hive, it gets another scoop of TM.

I know if the bee population doesn't seem right. I can see if the bees aren't doing anything in the supers. I can tell if the bees have a queenless roar. Does the hive feel light? Is there fresh white wax, and patties being eaten? When you learn to read a hive by everything else, you can get a good idea of what is going on in the broodnest without having to inspect the brood frames. So why waste your time doing unnecessary inspections?

I don't (and have never) monitored for varroa. I've seen mites before. I saw DWV when I didn't treat. I know I have mites, so I treat. A strip of Apivar is about $3 and a strip of MAQS is about $2. Varroa treatment is so cheap I just treat rather than spending time checking for varroa. I don't go through hives replacing weaker queens. If a queen is getting weak, the hive will be weaker and will get combined in the fall. Or the bees will replace her.

So far this winter I have 15% losses for my hives and nucs. (I also took about a 15% loss in the fall when I combined weaker hives.)

It helps to keep in mind that I worked a season for a commercial beekeeper who spends about 2 man hours per hive per year, and learned a lot of my fast tricks and techniques from him. Boxes are prepared and brood frames sprayed full of syrup in the winter, and placed in yards. 2 pound packages are dumped in the last week of March. Mid-May to June 1 strong hives are split. (usually about 1/3 of the hives, and you should be able to do at least 25 splits a day.) Any drone layers or queenless hives are shaken out. The only brood inspection is to make sure brood is there, which you can tell by the population of bees just looking through the excluder. Extracting begins mid-July. After the final pull, bees in a single deep quickly starve. In winter you collect boxes, and use an air hose to blow dead bees out of cells, and then spray syrup into boxes again. You can spray combs full of syrup and get 40 boxes a day ready.
The majority of the man hours taking care of the hives was spent on extracting honey. Actual time inspecting and working the bees was minimal.
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karen
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How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by karen »

Countryboy,
Just in what you listed you are in your brood box 5 times at the least, when I say brood inspection I am not talking about going through frame by frame to the bottom board. It happens when I split, requeen, check for purple eye drones, when doing these things I see 1 or 2 frames of a good brood pattern and that is all I need to see. When splitting I may go a little further than 1 or 2 frames, I split most hives twice in the season.

Last summer EFB was a problem here, a lot of people lost hives. Then the summer before it was AFB. They are losing hives to these diseases because some new beekeepers avoid opening hives and the bees are dead before they know they are sick. I do not go into the brood box every time I visit hives it is more than 1 or 2 times through the season. My point is these frames give people a way out of not checking brood.

I am up early to head to Florida to inspect hives. ;-)
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Countryboy
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How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by Countryboy »

You must have misunderstood me. I do 2 brood inspections a year making sure everything is ok. Other than that, I have to have a reason to do a brood inspection, and those inspections will only be for the targeted hives. My style is a minimalist style, where I leave hives alone unless I have a reason to look in the broodnest. But I am also to the skill level where I can tell a lot about a hive by looking at the entrance, popping the lid, patty consumption, and going by what I hear and smell from the hive.

In early to mid-march, I am in the brood box of every hive doing an inspection. At the end of September, I do another inspection of the brood box. This is two inspections a year. It is a small portion of established hives that get the brood frames inspected more than twice. I also inspect brood frames of deadouts, but then again, this is just a portion of hives annually.

I don't consider looking for purple eyed drones to be a brood inspection because it is just 2 or 3 hives in my grafting yard.

My idea of requeening is to drop a nuc into a weak hive, or to drop a cell in. (Or combining weak hives in fall. I just stack the boxes up, with no inspection.) Usually, I never backcheck to make sure I have a laying queen. If the bee population drops off, I will get into the hive to see what happened, but it's uncommon for the virgin to kill the old queen and not get mated.

Depending on how I split, I may or may not pull any frames in the broodnest. When doing cutdown splits on single deep hives, I do pull frames of brood, but again, this is a small portion of hives.
An easy way to split a hive with no brood inspection is to lift the brood box from the bottom board and set it aside. Set an empty brood box on the bottom board, and remove 3 or 4 of the center brood combs. Smoke down and then shake the brood box into an upturned lid, and dump the bees into the empty brood box and then drop in the pulled frames. Lay an excluder on the box, and then sit the old brood box on top of the excluder. Come back in a week or two. Remove the top box, and give it a new queen, no inspection needed. If you did not shake the queen out and she is above the excluder, you will have virtually no bees below the excluder.
Shake bees out of a box with no inspection like this. Smoke them down, and then bang them out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iddq0-hjYXQ

I do get into my nucs more often, as I am raising queens and overwintering nucs and they require closer management than bigger hives.
When splitting I may go a little further than 1 or 2 frames, I split most hives twice in the season.
You split most hives TWICE in the season? No wonder you are inspecting brood so much. Do you normally have 75% annual losses? Or are you raising bees to sell nucs?

When I started beekeeping, I tried the treatment free methods. 70% losses were not uncommon, and I had to split surviving hives twice just to keep my numbers stable. Honey production was erratic. Some hives would do little, and other hives would produce ok. There was no consistency in strength of hives or honey production or overwintering. I was in my hives all the time.

Now I run hives as singles for honey production. (In winter, I add a couple shallow or medium supers, or an empty deep with combs under the brood box.) My hives are more consistent, and I now see variations between yards, rather than individual hives. I treat my hives. I spend a lot less time in 75 hives now than I did with 20 or 30 hives when I was non-treatment and splitting like crazy to keep bees in boxes.

It's easy to spend 80% of your time doing the 20% of tasks that are the least productive. Decide what is really important, and what is not.

Using your management style, could you manage 1000 hives a year by yourself, other than needing help for pulling honey and extracting? If you can't, that means there are ways to improve the efficiency of your operation. Things can be done faster, and you can eliminate unnecessary tasks. You also have to be prepared to find a box of wax moths sometimes. I saw 2 or 3 the year I helped a commercial guy with 820 hives - a queen would get into the supers, we wouldn't catch it and she would get blown out. The end of the season the brood box was full of moths. You have to be prepared to sacrifice weaker hives, and cull aggressively. You have to be prepared to lose a few swarms.

The guys managing 1000 hives a year are not doing many brood inspections if they are producing honey. (I can't speak for the pollination guys, as I haven't spent time around those operations.) But once you learn how guys manage the 1000 hives a year, you realize how unnecessary a lot of stuff really is.
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How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by Allen Dick »

Very interesting discussion. I love it when two excellent beekeepers compare notes. We all learn something.

FWIW, I think you are both right.
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Re: How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by karen »

I split in early May to sell spring nucs and split in July to winter over nucs. I also raise a lot of queens. I try to make more bees than honey. Some day the bee boom will stop and I will be back to making honey.

I think we both manage close to the same I am just calling any time I get in the brood area an inspection. I am there for another reason but I inspect, which means take a quick look, since I am there. I only get into the brood area when splitting, checking drones, treating for mites or something seems off when I look at the entrance of the hive.

I do not loose many hives to winter. I hate to say that because it makes me feel like my day is coming.
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Re: How many Brood Inspections per Season?

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How is Florida? Working bees there?
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Re: How many Brood Inspections per Season?

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Since it took all day to get here I did not go to the bee yard today. I sent you an email about my adventitious day and will post some here since I just said it was adventurous and I may have some wondering.
I left Maine at 6 AM and should of been here at 12:30 PM but delays where every where. I had a 1 hour lay over at JFK but I didn't leave JFK until 12:30, the time I should of been arriving in FL. There was so much air traffic heading south that we had to fly west to go south which turned the 3 hour time in the sky to 4 hours. I get here and my brother and mom take me to dinner. While we're eating two guys break out in a fist fit, tables and food go every where in the room they where in. Luckily not our room, it was a total mess with people running out emergency exits to get out of there. Four police cars come every one has to be interviewed, I stayed out of it. We get to my moms and just when it gets dark we loose the power. I am in the dark not just physically but mentally too. You get to travel all over creation with out a hitch, I get on a plane and my whole day goes to hell.

My brother is looking forward to me helping with his bees he has been in Honduras for 3 weeks, he owns a farm down there, and feels behind with his bees here. We will be splitting hives and making queens this week. All his bees are AHB so we always have to wear bee suits. I am not looking forward to wearing a bee suit when it is 80 out, I just left temps below 0 F and the heat will feel extra hot to me. The maples and oaks are in bloom and there has been a good nectar flow so we may extract too but first priority is splitting and grafting.
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Re: How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by karen »

In case some are curious the queens we are grafting from are ones I sent him last fall from my stock so they are not AHB. It is foggy this morning so we will be working bees in the later afternoon.
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Re: How many Brood Inspections per Season?

Unread post by Countryboy »

Very interesting discussion. I love it when two excellent beekeepers compare notes. We all learn something.
I agree. It's not a wrong versus right thing. It's what works for each of us.

My method is to make sure the hive is going good in spring, stack the supers, and then forget about them. In the fall, I pull supers, make sure the hive is good for winter, and then forget about them again. I lose a few hives that maybe could have been saved, but I save myself a lot of headaches and hassles by not babying hives through the year, and my time off and peace of mind is worth something to me.

I'm getting really, really lazy. (But making money, so I must be doing something right.) I do get more involved with a few "pet" hives at my houses, usually hives with queens I am grafting from, but most of my honey producing hives I just leave alone as much as possible.
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