top bar hive
Walk through your bee yard, and see what’s happening. A lot of future problems can be prevented by observing your bee hives daily. You can learn about what’s going on inside the hive without lifting the cover. In any climate a beekeeper can benefit from visual hive observation.
If you inspect often, they will get used to your presence and you can avoid their security defense. This means you can walk around in your pajamas and coffee without fear of being stung. But always dress in accordance to your ability to feel safe.
While inspecting, you will want to see bees busy at work. Watch to see them flying in and out of the entrance, one after another, bringing back pollen, flying in low, laden with nectar, and leaving quickly and flying off. You may also see, new worker bees flying around the hive and back, orienting themselves to flight and hive site. This is a good example of a happy, healthy hive.
If you are getting stung while observing, this can be a sign of a dearth–lack of pollen and nectar. Bored security bees will take extra precautions against honey robbers –which they may have come to associate with you. Honey bee robbers tend to fly into the hive high not burdened with a load of honey and often miss the landing. As the beekeeper, you should give all weak hives with an entrance reducer so they may better protect their stores.
Bearding
If you see them bearding, which is a thick coating of bees at the entrance, one on top of the other, looking like a man’s beard, you’ll want to investigate a few things.
One of the first things to observe, is temperature. When it is hot and the sun shining on the hive, bees will step out to cool off. Check to see if the bees are going in and out, business as usual. If so, perhaps, you need to open another entrance or alter the lid by creating airflow under it to cool off the hive.
If this doesn’t help, maybe it’s time for a honey super or honey harvest. If the hive is full of sealed honey, the bees have nothing to do and will stand around outside the hive. Bees can be hot, bored and over-crowded.
Often, bees will beard when they are preparing to swarm. An astute beekeeper will already know which hives may swarm by noticing swarm behavior during open hive inspections. There will be drone brood, or drones present, backfilling of empty combs with honey, and swarm cups (queen cells) present.
However, if you notice the bees bearding, just standing around with not much activity and lining up and staring at you, it’s time to investigate further. I suggest pulling the beetle trap first. I can do this without smoke or bee suit. Pull the tray and see if honey and beetle or wax moth larva is in it. If there is, time to get in there. Best case scenario, a comb may have fallen and honey leaked out in the tray. Worst case, you’ve got a slime out in progress and most likely pests are eating through the combs and honey is dripping into the tray.
After your visual inspection, and you’ve observed your hives to be healthy. The next level of inspection is removing and inspecting the beetle trap. Do yourself a favor and place a beetle trap under each hive you have. This is the first line of defense for many pests including SHB (small hive beetle), varroa mites, and wax moths. Understand that even with a beetle trap, hives can be overwhelmed with pests and go out of balance.
Hive with tray removed
I recommend using diatomaceous earth or DE in the beetle tray and not vegetable oil. Both will kill pests if they land in it. I dislike oil because you cannot learn as much from oil; it’s expensive, it goes rancid fast and you have to store used oil in buckets. DE, however, is inexpensive, it gives you a visual map to the health of your hive, it doesn’t need to be replaced as often as oil, it’s easier to work with and you can dump it in your garden or around your house to kill ants and various pests. Both will kill bees if they fly into it so keep your trays secure, bee and air tight.
When you pull your tray, you can get an indication of the amount of pest that are in your hive by the number of dead bugs. You can see the length of your hive and where the bees are working hardest (most likely the brood chamber). Notice the wax cappings or dropped pollen. Where you see none, there will be no comb above that, thus giving you a visual map of the hive’s length.
In a top bar hive, the brood chamber will be closest to the bee door, and they will build out from there. You may see a water leak by noticing wet or dried DE. As before mentioned, you will notice spilled honey indicating a broken comb (usually caused by the beekeeper, a pest problem, or heat and weight).
While observing, you can remove any wax moth cocoons you see in and around the tray. Filter through the DE with your fingers removing any clumps or breaking up any walk ways the pests are using by fluffing up the compacted DE and wax cappings. In the tray storage area, you will also be able to see if the hive has an ant problem. You will also note if it’s time to replace the DE. Old DE will be clumpy or compacted.
If you have not been able go into hives because of rain, especially in the tropics where it can rain for months, inspect the hive tray. Keep it clean and it will greatly improve hive survival rates until you can open the hive and inspect.
Other things you might notice is gecko or toad populations, mice or rat droppings, SHB on the bars or entrances, ant trails, wax moth poop in-between the top bars, leg or hive part replacement needs, or anything out of the ordinary.
Beekeepers who do not visually inspect their hives can expect grave hive losses, spoiled honey and extra work cleaning up the aftermath of a slime out. Take the time to connect with your bees, this will make you feel more in tune with what’s going on with them and it will make for happier, and healthier bees.