Why hive health matters
Beginning beekeepers often worry if their hive is healthy. They do inspections, but they don’t know how to interpret that data they see, or even know what to look for. This is perfectly normal. After all, these creatures are complex and most people haven’t grown up being exposed to them, like a cow or horse. In this guide, I’ll share exactly how to tell if your hive is healthy.
An inspection is how beekeepers check to make sure their bees are healthy and don’t need beekeeper intervention.
The top signs of a healthy hive
A strong, consistent brood pattern
A solid brood pattern means your queen is doing well. This looks like eggs, larvae, or capped cells one right after another. The queen works in a sort of spiral shape, so the brood pattern is most often circular or arched.
Spotty brood can be normal sometimes. If your queen is young, it can take her a little while to get her brood pattern perfect. If your queen has been laying for a while, and has a spotty pattern, then you may want to requeen her.
For more information about reading a brood frame, check out this detailed post.
The presence of eggs, larvae, and capped brood
Learning to spot eggs can be a challenge at first, but it is very helpful. If you see nicely laid eggs, you know you have a queen. (If there are multiple eggs in a cell, this could mean something else entirely, but one egg, at the bottom of the cell, signals a queen is present.) Eggs hatch after four days, so eggs mean your queen was there laying at the most four days ago. This is a very good sign.
To spot eggs, stand with your back to the sun and hold the frame out in front of you, keeping it over the hive. Look in the bottom of the cells. If you see what appears to be a tiny white grand of rice, the size of two grains of sand, you’re seeing eggs.
Healthy larvae are white, look moist and have almost a pearl-like shimmer to them. They should not be black or grey, or look chalky.
If it is warm outside, consistent above 40-60 degrees, and no brood is present, this can be a red flag. Queens don’t lay eggs through the cold winter months (in locations that get a real winter) so no eggs towards the cold end of fall are not reason to be concerned. If it is summer, and no eggs are present, this could signal a dearth where there is no nectar for them to gather, or it could mean a problem with your queen.
A calm, focused colony
When a queen is present, the bees stay busy. This is something to begin to recognize. When it is hot, you’ll see them fanning, standing still at one spot flapping their wings. They do this for a variety of reasons- to regulate the temperature or humidity of the hive, or to dry out honey.
Bees will also be coming and going, foraging. You can tell if they are gathering pollen by the little pollen sacks on their legs. You’ll see different colors of pollen coming in based off what is in bloom.
Bees will also be tending to young, feeding them, and also hauling out dead bees from the hive. All of this is sign of a normal, healthy hive.
In normal conditions, bees should not be agressive. See my post on why bees sting, here. If bees are overly agressive, a bear or skunk may be bothering them, or they may be queenless. They are irritable when they don’t have a queen.
You want to observe the colony in a “busy but calm” state. If you follow one bee with your eyes, you can see it is doing something definite. If bees are just flying wildly about in circles, this might be the start of a swarm.
If your bees are so defensive you cannot work them, this is a problem. Ask your mentor to evaluate them. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by that many stinging insects at once, and it’s also easy to accidentally move through the hive roughly, angering the bees. If in fact the bees are consistently being agressive for no reason, then you will want to requeen, changing the genetics of the whole hive.
Steady population growth
In the spring and summer, your bees will begin to increase their numbers which is a very good thing. The smaller the colony is, the longer it will take them to increase. A large colony can support a frame or two of growth a day, a tiny colony is doing well to grow by a full frame in two weeks. It all just depends on the colony size. You want to watch for growth of any size. This is a good sign.
In the fall and winter, your bees are preparing to cluster, basically they share body heat to stay warm. They need only the number of bees necessary to survive so they will not raise as much brood when it starts to cool off. Every bee is one they have to feed.
It’s important to keep track of how your colony is growing. But you also don’t want to count bees! That would be time consuming and besides, they wouldn’t hold still long enough. In the spring, summer, and fall, growth is measured in terms of how many frames the bees are occupying. In winter or in a swarm, the bees are measured in terms of either sports balls or fruit based on how big the cluster is. It’s not uncommon to hear a beekeeper say they have a basket ball or watermelon size cluster, or a pineapple size cluster, all the way down to a baseball size cluster.
Healthy food stores
You’ll want to watch that your bees have enough food. They fill the arch’s above the brood with honey and pollen. This way, their food is easy to access. Pollen is often found in different colors, usually a variant of orange, but sometimes white, yellow, pink, blue, purple or even shades of green and brown. This variety signals they have a range of plants to feed on.
Clean, dry, well organized comb
You don’t want to see mold or excessive burr comb. The comb is the bees’ home and they should be keeping it neat and clean. Sometimes bees will attach comb at odd angles. It’s usually best to just scrape this off with your hive tool and have them start again.
A queen who’s doing her job
The good news is you don’t have to see your queen every time. You want to see eggs or young brood, and this is enough to know she’s still alive. A solid brood pattern signifies she is doing her job well.
If you don’t see brood or a queen, you might have a queenless hive. I share more details about that situation here.
What a healthy hive does not look like
- Unexplainable spotty brood
- No eggs for multiple days when the queen should be laying
- Unexplainable aggressive behavior
- Excessive debris
- Visible pests
Learn more about pests here.
When to take action (and when not to)
I rarely take a drastic measure without at least waiting four days and reinspecting the hive. It is very easy to miss something. In this time, I will research the suspected problem so I have a better understanding of it. The bees have a way of righting a lot of their own problems, so I like to know how they will proceed so I am not working against them. Usually adding a frame of brood from another colony is a safe move to make, ensuring the queen is not on it. This gives bees the resources they need to fix most queen issues themselves.
If you’re unsure what you’re seeing, or how to proceed, it’s a good idea to ask an experienced beekeeper for help.
Final thoughts: Trust your observations
The more inspections you do, the more confident you will become. It does become easier and almost second nature.
Healthy hives have variation.This is normal and to be expected.
For more step-by-step information, check out these articles:
How to Inspect a Beehive: A Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners
Thinking About Getting Bees? Read Before You Start Beekeeping