How to Read a Frame When Checking Your Bees | What the Beekeeper Does

hi i'm larissa from beekeeping made simple i was a beekeeper in pennsylvania i kept bees for seven years for commercial apiaries and now have my own bee farm here in the big island of hawaii i am going to show you in this video how to inspect your frames this is for people who maybe don't have bees yet or in their first few years of beekeeping and are maybe struggling with what exactly you're supposed to be doing as a beekeeper and how you can help your bees i'm going to show you what is going on on the frames inside your hive so you can properly inspect it because ultimately your goal as a beekeeper is to help the bees accomplish what they're trying to do and you can't do that unless you know what they're trying to do later on in this video i have a link it's also down in the description below for a free identification guide you can download that at our website and that's something you can print out put in your inspection notes so that when you're out with the bees you don't have to have all this stuff memorized you can have the photos and the descriptions right there for you to glance at whenever you need to so let's get started so i'm going to pull out the first frame and see what we have now inside a frame in your beehive every frame it's either going to be empty or it's going to have honeycomb that's it so your frame is either going to have nothing in it or the foundation you chose to put inside or it's going to have a honeycomb so right here we have honeycomb now within the honeycomb that's really just the building block for the bees it's like the empty rooms in a house either the bees are going to be putting food inside the honeycomb which is nectar honey bee bread or the queen's going to be going into that cell she's going to be laying an egg that egg could turn into a worker bee a drone which is what we call the males or a queen bee now the honeycomb is so where where everything gets put inside it's also what the bees walk on the bees are using the honeycomb to get around the hive the bees stand on the honeycomb and do a waggle dance the it's it's like the floor the ladder the stairs the way for them to get around because they're not flying inside the hive they're walking around on the honeycomb so this frame here when i look at it and you can always rotate the frame it's a pretty foggy cloudy day which is nice for beekeeping it's not raining but it's also not sunny which means you not getting too hot standing out here checking your hives but it can also make it difficult to see what's going on inside these cells because you don't have the sun so you can either take your phone or a flashlight and hold the frame with one hand and shine a light inside to see what's going on or sometimes you can just rotate the frame to help you this frame is food and usually the first and last frame in your box is going to be food no matter what box it is your first your second your third or fourth usually the first frame is food and that's the case for this ring now i'll take it a little bit closer to show you when you rotate the frame if you see a shine inside the cells and you can see inside the cells because there's no cap over them closing them up that means this is mostly nectar this is what the bees are gathering from the flowers it's got a lot of water a lot of moisture in it so it's not fully ready it's not honey yet the other thing you can notice when looking at a frame are the adult bees walking around on it there are worker bees and there are some drones the worker bees are going to be over 98 of the bees in the hive there's going to be one queen most of the time but sometimes two and then there's going to be some drones sometimes if this is early spring mid spring most likely you're not going to see any drones you also most likely not see any drones in the fall or winter unless you live in a warm climate so when inspecting a honey frame there's really not much to do you're saying okay there's honey we have an inspection sheet down in the show description you can download from our website and this helps you go through checking a beehive so you would pull out this frame see that it has honey on it and put a check mark next to the word honey if needed you see a lot of bees on this next frame you can put a little bit of smoke in the area to get them to move out of the way if that's not necessary then don't do it you don't have to use more smoke than you think is needed and i pull this second frame out and i can rotate it to see what's inside the cells i'm also seeing cells with a capping over it and so let's take a little bit of a closer look this again is another frame of food going to see here now if you can't see what's going on inside the cells because there's too many bees on them blowing it lightly the bees get out of the way it doesn't get them too upset they really just don't like your breath right here is a capping over this cell now when you see a cap over the cell and which prevents you from looking directly inside the cell there's only going to be one there's only going to be two potential things inside that cell either honey or baby bees and that final stage before they hatch which is the pupa stage this one is a very bumpy capping you can't see a definite hexagon shape over each cell you can't really see entirely where one cell starts and the other one ends that's how you know that this is honey inside now when i poke it and there we see the honey dripping out what's also on this frame is some b bread and that's what we call the pollen mixed with nectar the bees bring it in not in huge quantities but some and it's fed to the baby bees in the larva stage that is the middle stage of development before they hatch and in that larva stage they need more protein than the adult bees need and so that's why they get the pollen you see here where you have some cells with an orange color or a yellow color inside that is the pollen and pollen can vary in color i've heard of pollen being even blue from some flowers most of the time i'm seeing them in different shades of yellow orange a reddish color and you can tell it's pollen because it will never have a capping over it it will be a color a solid substance it won't be a shiny liquid and it won't be a worm or an egg the other thing we have here is a little queen cell now this is just a teeny little one right there it's empty um if you held the frame upside down you'd be able to tell it was empty or you could squish it like i just did and see it's empty you know it's older because it's a brown brownish tan color it's not a very white or light yellow color and so when you see older queen cells it's almost all of the time it's empty it's also on a frame of honey so it's not going to have an egg in it it's probably not going to be a queen cell with a real queen in it i call them the practice queen cells and you sometimes see them in the hive but they're empty and they're small like that now on the other side we have some baby drones hatching you see their heads poking out so these are drones that just finished pupating they are ready to hatch they are fully grown adult drone bees now you know that they're drones as opposed to worker bees hatching because drones have very large eyes and they come out of a cell that has a dome capping the worker bees come out of cells that are flat oh and here is a great frame so here is the first frame of brood which are the baby bees these first two frames were food we saw nectar we sell honey and we sell bee bread and now we see our first full frame of baby bees what we call the brood this is all brewed in the final stage the pupa over here you'll see the drone cells they're larger they have that dome capping over them and then over here we see the pupating worker b cells they're a lot smaller they have a very flat capping do you see the difference between the drone cells and the worker b cells this frame is more brewed and this is typically how the beehive will work the first one or two frames will be food and then you'll have a big section of brood and then you'll have one or two frames of food before the end of the box this frame again is a lot of capped brood the pupa but you'll see here on the side there are some white worms in those cells these white worms are larva so the development of a baby bee is egg larva pupa then it hatches when it hatches it's a fully grown adult bee so the white worms are the larva when they have a capping over them their pupa and then they hatch as a fully grown bee now when you're inspecting your hive you don't have to pull out every single frame see what's going on you really just want to check for signs of all of the factors that you see on your inspection sheet and then you can close up your hive here we have a good example of the queen's laying pattern so you're checking for enough food for the bees you're checking for a signs of a healthy queen you don't have to see the queen and you're checking to see what their temper is like you're checking to see the activity you're checking to see if they need more space and to see if there's any problems within the hive so when you're checking the health of the queen what you want to make sure is that you're seeing eggs larva and capped brood all three stages of baby bees and you don't have to see any uh for the drones just for the worker bees and you also want to make sure that these eggs larva and capped brood are in a healthy laying pattern now what does that mean if you look at a frame with capped pupating bees you'll see that you're going to have most of the cells with a cap over them sometimes maybe some of the cells will have larva in them or eggs and you'll see all three stages of baby bees but what you don't want to see is a very spotty laying pattern when you see that you see a lot of empty cells and then the occasional egg or the occasional capsule this spotty pattern of baby bees means that you probably have an unhealthy queen another thing you could potentially see is signs of a virus when you see that you're going to look at a frame like this with pupating bees and instead of seeing a nice solid thick piece of beeswax over the cell you're going to see holes punctured in the cells you might not even see a cap over the cell and you might see the face of a pupating bee looking back at you now since i haven't seen any eggs yet and not much larva i'm going to keep looking through this brood box if i was to see these already i would leave this box alone and so now here on this frame i'm seeing lots and lots and lots and lots of larva in very small stage as well as larger larva that are taking up the entire cell and that lets me know that there is a nice healthy amount of baby bees and the larva and pupa stage in this hive here's more capped brood put that back inside this frame is honey which makes sense because it's the second to last frame inside the beehive it's mostly empty there's not much weight to it but there is a shine to it so now i'm going to look in the second box because this upper box showed me a ton of capped brood and honey and worker bees and grown bees but i didn't see any eggs yet so i'm going to put all the frames back and look in the second box there were four frames of honey they didn't have a lot of honey on them but they had some weight to them so in this box we had six frames a brood the baby bees and we had four frames of honey and that is more than enough honey to sustain these bees every frame in this box has comb built out on it so one thing i'm going to be doing since it is almost spring and here in hawaii the hives are growing they're bringing pollen they are expanding is give them another box on top so i just put a little bit of smoke not only to get the bees out of the way but their buzzing is getting louder which means they're getting tired of me my partially because of me talking i think you're a huge fan my voice see on this frame that this is pollen and capped brood of drones so oh and there's the queen bee okay see her she's a little bit darker in color and she's not moving very fast and there's a beast standing on her i'm gonna put this frame back because i don't want to annoy her this does not happen often but i have had a queen once in a while fly off so i like to keep them out of the in the hive and don't keep them out of the hive for too long so i found the queen and there was a whole bunch of eggs on that frame and this is what eggs look like now that comb was really dark and eggs can be really hard to spot on dark comb so if you're not seeing any eggs in your hive especially in the springtime when the hive is small and there might not be a lot of eggs in the hive already so the few eggs that are in the hive you're not seeing don't be too worried especially if you're new with this it might take a while to spot eggs and um if you're seeing larva consistently week after week especially the smaller larva then don't worry too much about not seeing eggs because larva the eggs hatch into larva on day three so at least you know there was a queen in your hive three days ago so now that i've seen food i've seen a queen that's laying lots of worker bees a good population i have an idea of their temper of the activity i know that they need space in the hive i know they have enough food to sustain themselves i've seen baby bees and egg larva capped brood stage i'm ready to close up the hut there's nothing more that i need to look at even though i didn't look at the entire bottom brood box i'm just going to put all the boxes back on handle it oh but first since they do need some frames i'm going to add an empty honey super on top put the beetle trap on them later this box has 10 empty frames in it put it on top and put the lid on okay to sum it all up pardon veil hair going on here when you open up your beehive you're going to go through the inspection checklist that i have that you can download and the link right here and you're just going to go through the checklist and check off everything that you see in the hive you are essentially checking to make sure that the hive is healthy or to see if there's signs of an unhealthy hive when you open up the beehive you're going to look at a frame and it's either going to be empty or it's going to have honeycomb on it if it's empty there's nothing to do move on to the next room if it has honeycomb in it then you're going to look to see what's going on inside the honeycomb either there will be food or baby bees in the honeycomb the food is nectar honey and bee bread nectar is going to be a cell that you can see inside and it's going to be a liquid it's going to have a shine to it the honey will have a capped over capping over that cell and then a b bread will be open just like the nectar but instead of there being a shine to it there will be a solid colored substance usually the yellow orange red color but you can see a little bit different colors it's just not going to be a worm it's not going to be an egg it's going to be a solid colored something substance it will have a little bit of a shine to it because it is mixed with nectar but it will be a substance uh if you're not seeing food you're going to be seeing baby bees baby bees are have three different stages of development before they hatch as an adult bait they will either be an egg a larva or a pupa eggs look like this they are very small don't be worried if you have trouble seeing them a flashlight can help a lot to see them or some people choose to buy black foundation because the white eggs they say pop a little bit more after the egg stage after three days it hatches into a larva and a larva is a white worm the larva worms are very small at first and then get larger and larger and larger the really small larva worms are hard to see but the way the queen lays is she goes in the spiral pattern and lays after cell after cell after cell and that's how she doesn't miss any cells so if you're having a hard time seeing the very young larva but need to find it for some reason look for the big larva and then look next to the big larva get your flashlight out and that's usually when you will start to see the really tiny worms floating in a pool of liquid a pupa have a capping over them and the times that it can be tricky to tell what's going on in honeycomb are really when there is a capping over the cell because there's a capping over the honey and there's a capping over the pupa so how can you tell the difference between honey and pupil well pupa has a very definite hexagon capping over each cell like it was done each cell individually when you have a capping over honey it's kind of this bumpy capping that was probably done over multiple cells at once and you can't see each definite hexagon shape under the capping it can also be kind of bumpy and and not very even so that's another telltale sign or if you're maybe harvesting honey and really don't know don't want to take a frame of baby bees instead you can always just poke a hole in one of those little cells and if honey pours out you see a shine inside then you definitely know that you have honey not baby bees the other thing to know about when looking at your baby bees is that you can tell the gender uh of the bee by the way that the cell looks so in the egg stage it might be hard to tell the difference but in the pupa stage it's very very easy drones will be their eggs will be laid in cells that are bigger than the worker b cells and then the coin b cell is a totally different size and shape it kind of looks like a peanut shell but smaller and hangs vertically inside the hive the queen kind of like hangs on her head whereas worker bees and drones are perpendicular inside the frame and they're kind of laying on their side you're also going to be seeing adult bees walking around on the frames the big one that people always want to be able to spot is the queen bee don't worry if you don't see her it's very rare that you need to find the queen you just need to know that there are signs of a healthy queen which is seeing eggs or at the very least is very small larva if you have signs of a healthy queen then it's just as good as seeing your queen if you see your queen that doesn't always mean that you have a healthy coin that's fertile and laying eggs so just seeing a queen in your hive is not good enough you need to see signs that she's healthy and doing her job when getting started and really working on your queen spotting skills i recommend when you first pull out your frame looking for the queen before you do anything else don't look to see if it's eggs or larva or what's going on on the frame pull the frame out look at it for five seconds look for the queen flip it to the other side look for the queen for five seconds then flip it back around and look to see what else is going on on the frame it's really easy for the queen to hide under other bees to go around to the other side to just go into little crevices so you can't find her make it your number one priority when first pulling out the frame to spot her if you need to spot her or if you're looking to make uh help your queen spotting skills because when you first get a beehive it's small and it's a lot easier to find your queen bee and a small bee hive where there's maybe ten thousand bees just a few frames of bees then when you're looking inside a beehive like the one i just looked in which is three supers the population in that beehive is probably closer to 40 000 bees and it's harder to find a queen there and i have lots of tips for how to spot your queen even if your beehive is that size and that is in the queen spotting video which is down in the show description in the resources section so you want to see signs of a healthy queen and like i mentioned you have a laying pattern you're looking at your cells the pupa are the easiest to look at you want to see lots of cells with the same thing going on you don't want to see an egg once in a while you don't want to see a larva once in a while you want to see a frame of larva or a frame of larva and pupa and lots of baby bees all together nuts body that is a healthy lighting pattern you also are when you're pulling out frames are the bees attacking you are they aggressive towards you or are they going about your business because an aggressive hive is a sign that there's a problem just like with people when you don't feel good you're cranky it's the same thing with bees when they have a problem they're usually cranky too the other thing you're looking at is the activity when you are before you even open the hive actually how many bees do you see coming and going from the entrance in the early spring when the hive is small it's normal to see very little activity but when there's lots of flowers blooming and your hive is full you should see lots of activity and then in the late summer and fall when there's not so much blooming the activity will go down again so that's pretty much what you're going to see now there are pests within the hive you should not see any of them if you are seeing them that can be a problem you should not see varroa mites even if you have an infestation it's unlikely that you will see varroa bromides if you do see varroa mites on the pupating beads or on adult bees that is a problem check our video about how to do a mite test because there is a good chance you have an infestation and you should have a plan for what to do about an infestation whether you are treatment free or not another common pest that you will see in the hive is not too much to worry about is the small hive beetle here in hawaii we have no frost and so the small high beetle population is incredibly high uh it is very normal to take the lid off of beehive and to see lots of small high beetles scurrying uh out of the crevices that they were in and we have some high beetle traps on our hive all the time i have a link to the video about my preferred small high beetle traps there's nothing to worry about the only time you have to worry is when you see small high beetle larva and slime this is what it looks like if you see this in your hive anywhere i don't care if there's baby bees there take it out if you do not use foundation and it's not on the entire frame you can just cut out the part of the honeycomb with the slime just make sure you are not leaving anything with small high beetle larva or slime inside your hive if you're having trouble telling where the larva is sometimes they can hide you can poke through some of the cells near the slimy area and see if you're seeing small hive beetle larva you want that out if you're ever seeing any kind of webbing across your cells that is a sign of wax moth if you're seeing really large worms crawling around they are considerably larger than the small high beetle worms you want to take that that out and wax moth is really easy to prevent you just want to make sure you're not putting old equipment with beeswax on it inside your hive uh if you have frames of honeycomb or frames with beeswax on it put it in the freezer for a couple days take it out then put it in the hive it's okay if it's cold it's better than feeding your bees wax moth and then there is foul brood that will mean that the brood looks stringy and kind of grayish and it smells foul if you have that you have to burn the entire hive and report it to your state apiary department if you're thinking about getting started keeping bees check out our free getting started guide at beekeepingmadesimple.com and it has the seven steps that i recommend you take before you buy your bees if you'd like to see more beekeeping how-to videos we update them every week so hit the subscribe button and then i think there's a bell you're supposed to hit and that lets you know when new videos are actually out thanks for watching bye

Channel: Beekeeping Made Simple

Views: 313,061

Keywords: how to keep bees, beekeeper, beekeeping, beekeeping for beginners, langstroth beehive, honey bee, beekeeping in hawaii, intro to beekeeping, introduction to beekeeping, beekeeping near me, how to become a beekeeper, free beekeeping class, how to find the queen bee, what to do about wax moth, what are varroa mites, what to do about small hive beetle, beekeeping 101, how to read a bee frame, whats in a beehive, how to identify bee brood, what do bee eggs look like

Id: uD2hykh1DKE

Length: 31min 51sec (1911 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 19 2022