We have gotten into a weekly inspection cadence with our bee hive.  We’ve been advised to inspect our bee hive every 7 to 10 days.  Today should have been that day.  Inspections to hives are done to make sure that your hive is healthy.  This means that you have a healthy, egg-laying queen and a hive that is free (mostly) from mites and disease that will destroy it. All that being said, we decided not to inspect today.

Our hive has been through a lot lately, their queen stopped laying, they’ve produced a new queen, she’s had to get ramped up on the job and all that took time.  In the meantime, all the eggs the previous queen had laid fully transitioned into bees and with no new eggs for a few weeks, the hive had no larvae and no pupa and therefore no place for mites to lay their eggs. Upon our last inspection, we found that our new queen was finally laying eggs and there were both larvae and pupa, however, there were no drone bee larvae.  She must be prioritizing worker bee production over the drone bee production.  Smart!

Since the hive now has a new healthy queen bee and no sign of mites, we decided to give the hive a break this week. Every inspection disrupts the activity of the hive, so the inspection has to be giving more value to the hive than its cost.  Today, we decided that the hive is busy rebuilding with its new queen and the threat of mites has recently been reduced, so an inspection was less necessary.  We will inspect next week, but maybe we will skip a week for a while, until we find something that needs a closer watch. Always vigilant,  Sheri