Preparing to inspect your beehive | Beekeeping | Bees | Guide

Preparing your equipment before inspecting your hive is always a good idea. Firstly, you should make sure you have all the tools and equipment together that you need for the inspection. This list will depend on what you are about to do but as a minimum you will need:

Essential Items:

Hive tool
Smoker (liquid or flame)

Additional items:

Bee brush or goose feather.
Extra frames
Supers
Queen excluders
Clearer boards
Feed (either liquid or candy)
Queen catching apparatus
Queen marking cage and paint
Medications for treating any health problems

Light your smoker
If you are using a traditional smoker, you should light it before putting on your veil (there have been instances of beekeepers peering into the smoker to see if it's alight only to find that it is, when the mesh of their veil has caught fire!). If you are using liquid smoke, just check that you have enough in the atomizer to last the inspection.

Put on your veil
Put on your veil and you ready to spend time with your bees.

Customer Images

Comments

Brenda, 23 April 2020

Just beginning. This was useful information regarding inspections. Thank you.

Peter, 10 June 2011

looks good to me !!!