Reading a frame

Track this against your own hives - free, on the web and the App Store.

Every other job in this library assumes you can pick up a frame and say what is on it. This is that skill. A brood comb reads in bands: eggs and young brood in the middle, sealed brood around them, then pollen, then honey over the top. As Wally Shaw puts it, the information is written on the combs. 5

Hold it by both lugs, over the box

Take the outside frame out first and stand it somewhere safe, out of the sun. That gives you room to move the rest without rolling bees. Check the queen is not on it before you put it down, and not on the underside of the queen excluder either. Every frame goes back in the order and the way round it came out. 1

Lift each frame straight up, by both lugs. Then keep it over the open box. Bees fall off a frame, brace comb breaks off it, and now and then the queen walks off the edge. Over the box she lands among her own bees. Over the grass she is gone.

The eggs give you a date

An egg is a small white grain, one to a cell, on the cell floor. They are hard to see. Hold the comb up with the sun over your shoulder so the light falls into the cells. The angle is what you are after.

• Standing on end. Laid within the day.
• Leaning over at about 45 degrees. Laid 24 to 48 hours ago.
• Lying flat. More than 48 hours old, and about to hatch. 4

So a standing egg puts the queen on that comb inside the last day. Short of seeing her, that is the best evidence there is. One caution from the same booklet. A late afternoon look can show standing eggs when a swarm left a few hours earlier.

Reading the larvae

To read the larvae you need the bees off the comb. Brush or shake them back into the brood box, and check the queen is not on that frame first.

A healthy larva is plump and pearly white, coiled in the bottom of the cell, with the segments easy to make out. 2 Fix that in your head, because every brood disease is a departure from it.

Size is age. Eggs hatch on day three and worker brood is sealed on day nine, so there are six days of feeding in between, and the bigger the larva the older it is. 5 A white comma barely bigger than its egg hatched yesterday, and one coiled right round against the cell wall will be capped tomorrow.

Worker brood emerges on day 21. Those numbers read backwards. No eggs but plenty of small larvae means nobody has laid in that box for about three days.

Worker cappings and drone cappings

Sealed worker brood is dry, biscuit coloured, and lies close to flat. It reads as a tan slab across the middle of the comb.

Sealed drone brood is raised and domed, like a field of small bullets, and it sits round the edges of the brood nest. 6 Often that means the bottom bar and the outside frames.

Drone brood is sealed on day ten and emerges on day 24, sometimes later. 5 Some of it is normal, and a strong colony with none in May would be the odd one out.

What to look twice at is a domed capping on a worker sized cell. That means unfertilised eggs are going into worker comb, which points at a drone laying queen.

Drone brood is also where the mites concentrate, because it stays sealed longer. A mated varroa female raises about 2.6 new mites in a drone cell against 1.5 in a worker cell. 10 That is why cutting a frame of drone brood out is used as a control. The August treatment is the other half of that job.

A good pattern, and a patchy one

The National Bee Unit puts numbers on a good frame where it sets the standard for selling a nucleus. 7 The numbers describe any decent frame, not only one for sale.

• Brood in all stages, from eggs to sealed cells.
• A continuous and consistent brood pattern.
• At least 30 per cent of the total comb area in sealed brood.
• No more than 15 per cent of the total comb area in drone brood.

The opposite has a name. A pepperpot pattern is holes through the sealed brood, where the bees have cleared out cells that died. It is not a diagnosis. It tells you something is wrong in that colony, and it always needs looking into. 2 The usual candidates are varroa and the viruses it carries, a brood disease, or a queen going off.

One pattern is more specific. Wally Shaw describes laying workers as brood with little pattern at all, eggs laid on the side walls of cells, and more than one egg in a cell. 5

Stores, pollen and the honey arch

Over the brood there is normally a band of sealed honey curving across the comb. That is the arch. It doubles as a natural barrier, discouraging the queen from going up into a super. A full sized colony wants two to three deep British Standard frames of honey available at all times. 3

• Sealed honey is capped pale, almost white, against the biscuit brown of the brood cappings.
• Uncapped nectar looks wet and glassy, and it will shake out of the comb.
• Pollen goes in bright packed plugs beside the brood, in whatever colours have been flying.

There is usually less pollen than people expect. Workers want it fresh, so the colony gathers it as it goes rather than banking it, and the National Bee Unit warns against taking the pollen stores on trust. 8 Autumn feeding turns a frame count into kilograms.

Where the queen will be

Most of the time you do not need to find her. Eggs and brood are enough to tell you a queen is laying, and there is no call to set eyes on her as well.

Marking colours run by year of birth: white for years ending in 1 or 6, yellow 2 or 7, red 3 or 8, green 4 or 9, blue 5 or 0. 3 An unmarked queen in a hive where you marked one suggests the colony has replaced her.

When you do want her, start on the frames with the youngest brood. That is where she has just been working. Two places catch people out: the underside of the queen excluder, and that first outside frame leaning against the hive.

Clipping her wings is a separate decision, and a contested one. Wally Shaw is honest about it: as a management practice it has pros and cons, and it often draws strong opinions. 4

What a healthy frame looks like

Put together it is one picture rather than a checklist. Larvae are white and glossy, clearly segmented, curled in the bottom of the cell. Capped cells are even, dry and biscuit brown. Eggs are one to a cell, on the cell floor. There are few gaps in the sealed brood, with stores arched over the top and pollen against the edge of the nest.

Knowing that well is what makes anything else jump out. The BBKA general husbandry assessment calls it reading the combs: point out every stage of brood, then say what the pattern is telling you. 9

• Carry tweezers or matchsticks to pick out a cell that looks wrong.
• Photograph anything you are unsure about. That is what a bee inspector can look at.
• Go through for brood disease at least twice a year, and write it down: frames of brood, bees, honey and pollen, mite count, temper. 1

Clean your hive tool and gloves between colonies. The soda bucket is the usual answer. Foulbrood is notifiable, and suspecting it starts the duty: what the law asks of you.

When to look, and when not to

The bees hold the brood nest at 34 to 35 °C. 6 Every minute the box is open they pay for that in heat. So the reason for opening a hive wants to be worth the bill.

Do not inspect below 10 °C at all. Between 10 and 14 °C you can open a colony quickly, but not go through it frame by frame. 3 Above that, on a still day with the bees flying, take your time.

Do not start in poor weather, or with people or animals nearby. Expect a colony to be shorter tempered just after a nectar flow ends. 1 Use the smoker sparingly and from the top downwards: lighting and managing a smoker covers how little you need. The last proper look before winter closes the season.