Checking Your New Beehive for the First Time

Checking your beehive for the first time, what to look for and what to expect. Make sure you are prepared before visiting your hive. There are several items you are going to want to bring with you to ensure a successful check of your new bees. You’ll need your suit, smoker, fuel for your smoker, a way to light your smoker, a hive tool, a gallon of 1 to 1 syrup to feed and you might also want to take notes or pictures to help you track the progress.

Put your bee suit on or whatever protection you prefer to wear. Install fuel, we like to use long, dried out pine needles, into your smoker, and light. Make sure its going good and going to stay smoking long enough to get through your hive inspection. It is sometimes helpful to bring extra smoker fuel with you just in case you need add to your smoker.

Now that your smoker is smoking good, grab your other items and head to your beehives. Puff the entrance with smoke a few times and pop the lid and put a few puffs of smoke in there as well and leave it closed for a minute. Set your smoker near by where it’s easy to access. Remove your lid and inner cover and now your beehive should be fully exposed.

The first thing to look for once you have the hive fully opened is how many of your frames are covered in bees and make a note of that so you can track progress for the future. Depending on if you started with a package, nuc or beehive, you should see 3 to 10 frames covered and being used by your bees. We like to use 8 frames and a feeder in a 10 frame hive so we can feed as needed and the frames are easier to manipulate and the comb drawn out a litter further.

Puff the hive a few more times from the top and get ready to start pulling frames. You’ll probably notice your bees are hanging out at the top of the frames peering up watching you, this is completely normal. Access your hive tool and use it to pull one of the outer frames. We recommend inspecting your hive from the side so you are not blocking the entrance and upsetting the bees. We start with pulling the frame closest to us. If you started with a package or nuc, this frame is most likely empty still. Put that frame off to the side and this will allow you to move your other frames around and pick them up easier.

As you continue to pull the frames from your beehive, keep them in the same order that you pulled them so you can put them back the same way. You do not want to break up the brood nest by removing it in one order and replacing it in a different order.

So you’ve pulled some frames that are empty and you are to the frames that have bees on them. As you pull these frames, be careful not to smash them or drop them, although its not the end of the world if you accidentally smash a few, there are 1000’s of bees in your hive. Add a few puffs of smoke as needed to keep the bees calm.

Look over your first frame with bees. You are looking for the comb to be drawn or starting to get drawn out to make it useful to the bees. You are also looking for resources to start showing up in your hive. You’ll be looking for yellows or oranges inside the cells in the frame and that is pollen. The bees need the pollen to survive and feed to the young developing bees.

You will also be looking for eggs, brood, and queen in your hive. It’s ok if you are unable to locate your queen. It’s nice to be able to see her but as long as you are able to find eggs in your hive that look like a piece of rice within a cell, that means your queen has been there in the last 3 days.

Make note of how many frames are covered in bees and how much brood you have within your beehive. This will help you track your progress from week to week.

Now that you have successfully been through your new beehive for the first time, carefully replace the frames in your hive in the same order that you removed them. At this point, we recommend filling your feeder with syrup. This will help boost production. Replace your inner cover and place the lid back on your beehive. Take your tools and notes and leave the bees bee for a week or so.

Note you might see a lot of increased activity around your beehive for a few hours and this is completely normal. They will settle right back down and everything will be ok.

Check out some of our great products at https://petricbees.com/sale for the many options on how you can get started in beekeeping.