Hive Inspection Checklist: What to Check and How Often

A hive inspection checks seven things in order: the queen's presence, eggs and young larvae, the brood pattern, food stores, space, swarm cells, and signs of disease or pests. In swarm season inspect every seven to ten days; outside it, every two to four weeks is usually enough.

How often should you inspect a hive?

Inspection frequency follows the colony's risk, not the calendar. The busiest period is spring build-up into early summer, when a strong colony can go from building comb to sitting on capped swarm cells in a little over a week. Outside that window, opening the hive less often costs the colony less heat, comb damage, and disruption.

These are typical ranges for temperate climates. Local conditions, your bees' temperament, and your own club's advice all shift them.

What to check, in order

Working in a fixed order is what turns an inspection into a record rather than a rummage. Most inspections answer these seven questions in under ten minutes.

1. Is the queen there? Seeing the queen is a bonus, not the test. Eggs are the evidence that matters.
2. Are there eggs and young larvae? Eggs mean a queen was laying within the last three days or so. Tilt the frame so sunlight reaches the cell bottoms.
3. Is the brood pattern solid? A tight slab of capped brood with few gaps suggests a healthy queen. A patchy, scattered pattern is worth a note and a follow-up.
4. How much food is stored? Count frames of honey and pollen, not percentages. Frame counts are what you can compare across visits.
5. Does the colony have room? A brood box with no empty cells for the queen, or supers filling fast, is a colony about to make a decision for you.
6. Are there queen cells? Check the bottom bars and frame edges. Charged cups along the bottom edge in spring are the classic swarm signal.
7. Any sign of disease or pests? Look at the brood for sunken or perforated cappings and odd smells, and monitor varroa on a schedule rather than by eye.

The right conditions for opening a hive

Inspect on a calm, dry, sunny day, ideally from late morning to mid-afternoon when most foragers are out and the colony is smallest at home. Many beekeepers use roughly 15 C (about 60 F) as the floor for a full brood inspection, since chilled brood is a real cost of a cold-day rummage.

Light smoke at the entrance and under the cover a minute before you open, then work steadily. Bees are generally shorter-tempered before a storm, after a dearth, or late in the day, so if the colony is roaring at you, close up and come back.

What to write down every visit

The value of an inspection compounds only if it is recorded. A minimum useful record is the date, frames of brood, frames of stores, whether eggs or the queen were seen, strength, temperament, supers on, any queen cells, and any varroa count you took.

Combwise is built for exactly this: a glove-friendly, big-tap Yard Mode capture of those fields, fully offline and back-datable, so you can write up yesterday's visit tonight. Its Next Actions engine then reads the same logs and ranks what to do next, such as requeening an old queen, adding a super under swarm pressure, or flagging possible queen loss after two visits with no eggs.

Common inspection mistakes

• Staying in too long. Ten minutes of purposeful checking beats forty minutes of admiring frames.
• Inspecting too often in cold weather. Every opening costs heat and propolis seal.
• Recording nothing. Without frame counts across visits, "the hive looked strong" tells you nothing next month.
• Judging mites by eye. Phoretic mites on adult bees are a poor guide. Do a wash or roll on a testing schedule.
• Not tracking queen age. Queen age is one of the strongest predictors of swarming and supersedure, and it is free to record.

Related guides

• Varroa Mite Treatment Schedule: When to Test, Treat, and Harvest
• Signs of a Queenless Hive: How to Confirm and What to Do
• Combwise: the offline beekeeping logbook