Long Hive First Inspection - What To Look For On Your First Inspection

In this video, I'm going to show you what to cover in a single beekeeping inspection. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, the second episode in our long hive series. And today I'm going to show you what to look for in your first inspection when you look inside your long hive. It's exactly the same as what to look for when you look inside These hives really aren't that different. The only difference is a normal hive, you stack the boxes vertically, and in a long hive, you stack the frames horizontally. So everything is cross-transferable. There really is no difference in terms of what you're looking for every single time you're going in to check your bees for an inspection. I'm going to start this video off with a question to you, and the question is, why are you inspecting your bees? And I know that sounds like a really patronising question, and it's not intended to be patronising. It's intended to prompt you to think, why actually am I inspecting my bees? And a perfectly legitimate answer is you're doing 7-day weekly inspections because you don't want there to be swarm cells in your colony. And that's something we're going to cover later on in the video. But it's just thinking about that and thinking, do I actually need to be inspecting them today? Because if you're doing your weekly 7-day inspections and then halfway through the week you think, oh, I'm just going to pop down and have a look and see how the bees are, I would say there's no need to be doing that inspection. Stick to your schedule and work out why you actually need to be going in there to do the inspection, and it would just help the inspection flow so much easier because you're not looking out for stuff you don't need to be looking out for. So we'll get on to that first point now, weekly 7-day inspections, and that is the best piece of advice you can give to any beekeeper. If you do not inspect your colonies every 7 days, highly likely that your bees are going to swarm in the first year. Because if you don't do it every 7 days, you miss that swarm cell creation cycle and you miss the prompt in order to do some sort of swarm management technique in order to stop you losing half of your bees. So first thing, what you're looking for in an inspection is a regular inspection schedule every 7 days. Pick a Saturday morning or a Sunday evening, something that's going to work really, really well for you And dedicate your time to looking at those bees. Now the rest of them, I'm going to get inside this colony and I'm going to do an inspection because I think that's a much better way to learn about what you should do in an inspection as opposed to me just talking to you about what I do in my inspection. So I'll get my hood on, I'll open this colony up, I'll do an inspection, and I'll just talk you through what I'm doing. Now the things I'm talking about this inspection, they're in no particular order, but there is one thing that I tend to look for first. It's the first thing that I'll look for, and that is to spot So let's open up the long hive. I'm going to pull out the center frame in the brood area, and I'm going to try and spot some eggs. So here's my colony of bees. You can see they've completely filled the portion of the hive that I've given them. Really nice calm bees. You can see that the crown board's on the right way, so they've not built loads of burr comb in between the crown board and the tops of the frames. Really nice looking colony. So you can take your crown board off, pop that over to one side. Remember, crown board goes that way up on this because it's a top bee space hive. And then when you're doing a long hive inspection, you can give yourself a little bit of space. On a national hive or any sort of normal boxed hive, you maybe need to take out a dummy board or lever in, but on a long hive like this, you can just take the follower board, slide it along a little bit just like that, give yourself a little bit of space to work. It's actually really, really nice to work on a long hive like this because it's a lot higher up for me and you can just move that follower board so nothing's getting stuck together. So then, like I said, first thing I'm looking for in an inspection is I'm going to try and find some eggs. The most likely place to find some eggs is going to be right in the middle, so I'm just going to shift the frames all along a little bit and I'm going to go and take out that middle frame, see if I can see some eggs. So it's always one of the hardest things to show you on camera, but hopefully you can see from that little snippet there Got eggs in the center frame. So I know that the queen has been here within the last 24 hours, and it leads me really nicely onto my next point, which is you don't need to see the queen. Just don't get too caught up on looking for the queen every time. It's something that I never, never look for in my colonies. I'll go in there, I'll check to see whether they've got eggs, and for me, that tells me within 24 hours ago there was a queen in the colony, and that's all I need to know. So I'm going to pop this frame back in now and I'll talk you through the rest of the things that I look out for in an inspection. Right, so the next thing I look for is space. And in order to stop your bees swarming, you need to ensure that there's enough space for them to store nectar, which they'll turn into honey, and for the queen to produce brood. And obviously at the moment we've got a little bit of a mixed box here. There's no queen excluder, so they're just using that void to do both of those things. Now, my rule of thumb with any hive is if you've got 80% of bees covering the frames, That's the time to add on another box. So if I've got 8 frames out of 10 in my brood box, I'll add a super on. And if I've got 8 frames out of 10 in my super, I'll add another super on. Now obviously a long hive is completely different to that. You just need to manage it the best that you possibly can. But looking at this here, they have filled the area that I've given them. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to add more frames in. It's as simple as that. And the way that I'm going to do it on a long hive is I'm going to add 1 frame at the front and 1 frame at the back. Now, if you want to add 2 frames at the front and 2 frames at the back, you can do that as well. Because it's getting on for the middle of June now, there's good weather, there's good flows, you might as well try and stay 1 step ahead as opposed to the bees getting to that point where they've expanded so much and they're going to condense the nectar back down onto that brood area and they're going to trigger a swarm. So that's what I'm going to do on this colony today, and I'm going to move that follower board along. In order to try and give the bees sufficient space. So that's the next thing on my list. Look for the amount of space the bees have got, and if they need more space, give them more frames. So I've just got 2 frames here, frames of foundation. I'm just gonna put one at the front, one at the back, and I'm gonna come back in a few days and maybe add more if I need to. So the way to do that on a long hive, take your follower board, move it right back, right out of the way, give yourself loads of space. Take a frame of foundation, put that up next to the follower board, move everything back one space so it's flush up against the follower board, and then take the other frame of foundation and put that at the front. Then you can slide everything back up towards the front, make sure all the frames are touching each other. The DN4 frames are designed to be touching each other, should be no gaps in between. And then when you've finished your inspection, you can take your follower board and push that right back up to keep the space correct. I'm gonna do a few more things in this inspection, so I'm just leaving the follower board out for the time being. Right, the next thing you're looking for, and this forms part of your weekly 7-day inspection, is you're looking for swarm cells. You go through every single frame, all over the frame, every single nook and cranny. You wanna find the swarm cells. Hopefully you're not gonna find any. The idea is give them enough space, they shouldn't create them, but bees will ultimately swarm at some point in the year or the next year. That is what bees do. So your 7-day inspections, you're looking through every single frame, trying to find swarm cells. If you find them, then we're going to cover that in a separate video on what to do if your bees swarm in a long hive. So there's my queen. Didn't need to spot her, but I just came across her as I was going across a frame, so I thought I'd give you a look at her. 2020 blue marked queen, really, really nice. She just popped back down now, and there you can see some brood as well. So at this moment of the video, I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about brood as well, because that is the next thing that you need to look for. So you go through all of the frames, checking that there absolutely is no swarm cells anywhere, And then what you need to do is you need to look at your capped brood, and what you're seeing here is nice, good quality, healthy capped brood. I'll flash up a couple of images at this point, and I'm not going to cover them in detail in this video, but what you're looking for is any bad brood disease. So you're looking for EFB and AFB. They're the two that are reportable. They're the two that are going to cause you big issues. Obviously, you've got sac brood, you've got chalk brood, you've got all of the other brood disorders that aren't reportable, But they're not desirable in your colony. But that's what really good quality brood looks like, nice healthy brood. If you're seeing that in your colonies, things should be okay. So there we go, bees are getting a little bit grumpy with me now. The final thing I want to talk about is checking for stores, and it's just not a problem in this colony at all. It's jam-packed full of stores, but you need to make sure at all times of the year that the bees have got sufficient amount of food in the colony In order for them to survive until the next week. So they don't need a huge amount, maybe 1 or 2 frames of stores is advisable. And that's pretty much it for the video. I just wanted to cover what you're supposed to be looking for in your first inspection. Just to summarize it again, you're looking for eggs. If you're seeing eggs, you know that the queen was there within the last 24 hours. You're looking to give them enough space, so if they're over 80% or more of the frames, add some foundation at the front, add some foundation at the back, move the follower board along, give them sufficient space. You're checking to see the brood is in good condition, healthy brood with no brood disorders, and you're checking all of your frames to see if there's any swarm cells. If you see eggs, they've got enough space, they've got enough food, and there's no swarm cells, close them back up, come back next week, do the same thing again. So there you go, that's it for the video. I didn't want to cover too much detail in this video, I just wanted to cover the things to do really in your first inspection. There's some more stuff that I can cover later on, and we'll cover that in future episodes of this long hive series. But I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you found it useful. I hope you're getting lots of enjoyment out of your long hives. I certainly am. They're really, really nice beehives to work. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.