Practical guides for managing your hives through every season — inspections, splits, swarm control, disease management, winterization, and first honey harvest.
🔍 Inspections
Step-by-step inspection guide — what to look for, how to find the queen, how to read brood pattern, and what to record in your hive log.
✂️ Splits
Walk-away splits, nucleus colony splits, and queen-right splits explained. When to split, how to execute, and how to check for queen acceptance.
❄️ Winter
Fall preparation for colony survival — feeding, mite treatment timing, ventilation, insulation, and what to monitor during winter months.
🍯 Honey
When to harvest (capped honey only), uncapping methods, extraction with and without an extractor, filtering, and bottling.
🐛 Varroa
Monitoring methods, treatment thresholds, and treatment options — oxalic acid, formic acid, and Apiguard. When to treat and how to do it safely.
🔬 Diseases
American foulbrood, European foulbrood, chalkbrood, small hive beetles, and wax moths — identification, severity, and treatment options.
👑 Queens
How to find the queen in an inspection, how to tell if she's laying well, signs of a failing queen, and when to replace her.
Signs of a healthy colony: steady flight activity at the entrance, bees bringing in pollen, a solid brood pattern (few empty cells in the brood area), a laying queen (you'll see eggs with practice), low mite counts (under 3%), and adequate food stores. Problems show up as irregular brood, foul smell, unusual aggression, or dramatic population drop.
If the colony has eggs (tiny white slivers at the bottom of cells), the queen was present within 3 days. If you see young larvae, she was there within 6 days. Don't panic if you don't spot her — queens hide. Look for a longer, less fuzzy bee moving deliberately through the brood nest. If you see no eggs and no young brood, the colony may be queenless.
The newspaper method: place the queenless or weaker colony's box directly on top of the stronger colony with a sheet of newspaper between them. Bees chew through the paper slowly, allowing scent to mix and preventing fighting. After 3–5 days, combine the frames and remove the extra box.
Add a super when 80% of the brood box frames are covered with bees and 70% of frames are drawn out with comb. Adding too early means bees won't use it; adding too late causes overcrowding and triggers swarming. A good honey flow window is when clover, basswood, or your local primary nectar source is blooming.