Get Darwen Beekeepers Hive Inspection Sheet

Most beekeepers harvest honey 2-3 times per year/season. Honey is normally harvested between mid June until mid September. How often you harvest depends on your local climate and plant life. Poor weather conditions, disease and pests infiltrating your hives will also affect your harvesting schedule.

Yes, with the help of empty beehives, you can attract a swarm of bees. If you were to keep an empty hive as it is, the chances of bees getting attracted to it are pretty low. However, if you follow a proper procedure, you can easily find success in this endeavor.

They need an energy source so they work during the warmer months to create and store honey. Bees normally produce 2-3 times more food a year than they need so beekeepers can harvest the excess honey.

Sun and Shade The best location for beehives is facing south or southeast. It is beneficial for the bees to be exposed to the early morning sun. It helps to warm up their bodies to prepare them to fly, and it gets the hive active earlier in the day. This gives them more time to forage.

Remove a brood frame (without the queen bee) and shake most of the honey bees back into the hive or at the hive entrance, leaving the brood comb clear for inspection. Hold the frame by the top and inspect the brood thoroughly.

Inspect the FramesLook for her long, slender, unstriped abdomen and for a circle of workers around her. If you can't find the queen, it's important to find eggs, which indicate the queen was there in the past one to three days. Check for any parasites or pests mites, wax moth larvae, foulbrood, etc.

On average, a beekeeper can expect to yield about 50 pounds (4.2 gallons) of honey each year from a healthy colony in a fertile area. However, the amount can vary quite a bit from year to year and from location to location.

In order to keep bees and not harvest the honey, you have to continue to move the filled honeycomb frames of honey away from the Brood area of the hive. This keeps them working, providing their 'fuel for warmth' in the winter. ... As long as the queen has a place to lay her brood, you could have your bees and honey, too.

Here are some considerations: In the past, most hives were white. White is especially good in the warmer climates where a light color will reflect a lot of light and a lot of heat. In the cooler climates it's nice to have a color that will absorb heat, such as green or brown.

Bees cannot fly when the temperature drops to around 50°F (10°C) and honey bees are rarely out of the hive when the temperature is too hot such as above 100°F (38°C). So a good rule of thumb for inspections is to aim for temperatures between 60 and 100°F (15-38°C).