In this instructional walkthrough, the beekeeper conducts the first inspection of the 2026 season on a strong German Buckfast colony. He checks queen presence, egg laying, brood pattern, and food stores, noting an abundance of honey and healthy brood. The colony is a double‑brood setup, which he evaluates for space and swarming risk, and decides to use the surplus frames for early splits rather than adding supers. He outlines his varroa management strategy (summer and autumn treatments with Apivar and oxalic/Varroxil, no spring treatment) and reconfigures the hive: moving brood centrally, placing capped stores on the outer edges, installing a queen excluder, adding double supers on castellated frames, and fitting a crown board. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of adequate space, good brood pattern, and proper timing of treatments to ensure a productive honey flow in 2026.
Chapters
Come and have a look inside this colony here for the first inspection of 2026. So this is a beautiful German Buckfast breeder queen from Lutz Egger. And look at this, just look how close I can get to these bees. This is a big, strong colony of bees. And if I move out of the way where I've been blocking the entrance, look at all these bees flooding back in now. They are pretty chilled out. I could sit here all day and just kind of watch the bees. We broke the seal a little bit over there and the bees are trying to clear it up and make sure the stores are all in the right place. But there is a purpose to this video. What I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna go through, check the queen status, check the queen's still there, make sure they've got enough food, which looking at the top here is definitely gonna be a yes. But more importantly, first inspection of the year, I need to make sure that they've got enough space. It's that space stores conundrum. It's about time we got inside and pulled out the first frames of 2024. So you know it's beekeeping season when you're losing your hive tool already, but let's get some of these frames out here. So these are not the normal self-spacing frames that we have in the UK. Normally you have a square to point, so you just got to take your time. I like to go on the second frame in, so not the one closest to the wall, one frame along. I clear out that frame and then I compress everything back up that way. So I'm expecting to see a lot of stores in here. There's definitely a lot of honey. This top box here could just be completely honey. Get this first frame out. And there we go. Yeah, case of overfeeding without a doubt. And I think that's going to be the case across the majority of the box here. But it isn't a massive issue because we make tons of nucs up at Black Mountain Honey and we'll just take one of these frames here, frame of stores, frame of brood, and a mated queen, and you can make yourself your very own split. So you put that one down there. So I can see this frame is exactly the same already, so I'm not going to dwell on that one. This is a double brood configuration, which means I have a brood box at the top, which is the one that I'm going through at the moment, and then there's a whole other brood box underneath. So this could be bad management if you were using this just for honey production colonies, but for split making, this really is a really good resource for me to make up splits early on in the season. Saying that though, double brood like this where it is completely backfilled and all of the frames are just stores like that, Can cause issues if there's not space elsewhere in the beehive and it can cause early swarming. There's so many bees in here that I know that's not the case. They've definitely not swarmed yet. But there is a lot of stores, a lot more stores than I'd like to see in the top brood box. But here we go. This is the last one. And then once I put this back in, there's a little bit of empty space. What I'm looking for on the first inspection is eggs. I'm not doing any tidying. I'm not messing around. I just want to go in there, check the status of the colony. Check they've got enough food. Yes, way too much food in this instance here. Check the queen's there, check she's laying well, check the pattern looks good, and then make sure they've got enough space in order to not swarm over the next few weeks and hopefully start to gather some honey. Now what I wouldn't do with this colony here, I wouldn't go in and just put a super on here because there's way too much stores here, and I think it would probably contaminate my supers. So I'll use all of these frames making up splits, which is perfect. But here we go, this is a little bit better, isn't it? Which is lots and lots of space, and if you zoom right in there, Zane, you can see we've got tons of eggs right down in those cells. Okay, but it's this next frame that I'm very, very excited about. It really is a cool frame. There's a lot of brood, I can see it. You can't see the angle yet, but it is a very nice frame of brood. And this is what I'm looking for really, which is have we got big slabs of brood like that? Are there lots of frames that have got slabs of brood like that? What's the pattern like? Is there any chalkbrood? Is there any sacbrood? Or are they just pearly white, nice larva like that? Beautiful, brilliant pattern, lots of bees covering them, and then have you got lots and lots of frames of it? If you've got that, that's the difficult part. If your bees are coming through winter with lots of frames of worker brood like that, you can pretty much fix any other problem. Is there a bit of wax moth in there? You can fix it. Is there a bit of sacbrood? You can fix it. Have you got some old dirty frames that you might need to replace? As long as you've got frames of brood coming out like that and you've got eggs and you've got a queen and the bees have got enough food to get through until the next time you're going to check on them and you've got nice good weather, then pretty much any colony is salvageable coming into the spring. One thing I'm always looking for at this time of the year though is the impact of varroa. The varroa numbers in here will start going up again and I'm not seeing any sorts of issues with varroa at the moment, no deformed wing virus, No signs of PMS, parasitic mite syndrome. These are just nice healthy bees that have been treated at the right time of the year to keep that mite level low. I don't do any spring treatments when it comes to varroa. I just focus in on the summer and the autumn treatments that I do, mixture of Apivar and then whatever oxalic acid treatment you want to use. I use Varroxil, and if you do those 2 treatments, then come the spring you shouldn't really need to worry too much About anything because your bees are going to look nice and healthy like this. So final frame is another beautiful frame of brood like that. Now I just had a little look down into the second brood box and it's pretty much more of the same, so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to slightly reconfigure this colony here. I'm going to put all of this brood in the middle, I'm going to put the stores out to the side, and then I'm just going to go ahead and put the supers A lot of the stores that's in the brood box there is fully capped over. Likelihood of the bees moving it if it's on the side of the brood nest is actually quite low. But these guys here, these bees are ready for a super on top. So I'll configure that now, get it all set up, get it stacked up ready for the season, and we'll see just how much honey these bees produce in 2026. So I'm taking that frame of stores, that capped stores, placing that on the outer edges, bringing any brood frames in centrally like that. No need to see the queen because I've seen eggs, I've seen tons of nice brood, really good pattern. I'm confident the queen is in a very good condition, so I don't need to see her, and she's clearly actively laying. So the bee spacing is wrong on this Payne's box here. I put the frames in without castellations, obviously a lazy error in the winter. So I've chosen this queen excluder very specifically because the bee spacing is wrong, but if I've got it right, that should just sit Neatly on top like that, and it means that I can go ahead and put my supers on. I will have to come back in and clear out all of that burr comb, but I'll do that on a separate video. Couple of supers on here and we are very nearly finished. So big strong double brood colony. I'm going to double the supers up straight away. These are on castellations, so they're spaced like this, and it is just foundation that's going in there. But this spacing, 10 spacing on castellations, mean that they won't build too much burr comb. The final thing that I need to put back on is the crown board. And let's see if we can get that on without any squishing. There we go. So there we go. First inspection of 2026. This colony here looks very, very good. I have no doubt that those supers will be filled in a matter of weeks, and I look forward to coming back and tasting the honey.
