Hello again, and welcome back to my monthly column on all things beekeeping called Adventures in the Apiary. Spring has sprung in my area of Ohio, and boy do we have the blossoms! I swear everything is blooming as once, and the honeybees are loving it.

I went into winter with 45 viable hives and whether it was the mild winter, the hardy Ohio born and raised honeybees, my stellar beekeeping skills (most unlikely) or pure dumb luck, this is the third winter where I did not lose a single hive.

Swarm calls are already starting and it looks to be an interesting year.

For those new to beekeeping this year – welcome to this very unique hobby. We are often called bee keepers, but honestly the bees “keep” me. They keep me humble, confused, fascinated, frantic, exhausted, and exhilarated, and all these emotions can run through me in a single day of working with my bees.

I am often asked what I do with a hive that has made it through the winter. Once the maple trees leaf out and I see “the ladies” bringing pollen into their hives, AND the sun is out with temps above 55, I begin my spring clean up of each of my hives.

Another question asked of me is how to tell if a hive has a viable queen in the spring without opening up the hive. Sometimes it is just too chilly to risk pulling up frames of brood. What I do is look at the foragers going into the hive. If they have pollen on their legs, that tells me a queen is laying or about ready to lay. The foragers are providing food for the bee babies, so the queen must be doing her job!

When it does get warm enough to tear a hive apart and clean it up for the season, this is what I do. If I am pretty certain snowy days are gone for the spring, I will remove the lid and inner cover and then permanently remove the moisture board. I put a moisture board on filled with burlap to collect any condensation that may occur during the winter when the inside of the hive is warm, but the outside temps are cold. 

So with that removed, I crack the next box down and pull it towards me and lift the one end closest to me and look underneath. If there is a bunch of burr comb or drone brood I have torn open, I will smoke the bottom of the box while holding the one end up, then use my hive tool and scrape off that excess comb and destroyed drone brood.

I then pick this box up and set it on a spare hive box I always have in the yard so I do not have to bend down so far to lift a box. Then I repeat this process until I get to the bottom board which is my goal. I either sit the other hive boxes I remove on top of the first box or I set the other boxes on their side in the grass.

Once I get to the bottom board, I take it away from my hive stand, pull out the white board and clean up underneath the bottom board. I often find wax moth caterpillar cocoons waiting to hatch and wreak havoc on my hive. I scrape off all the cobwebs, excess comb – any gunk and replace the bottom board back to its original site. By now the returning foragers are a tad confused as to where the hive went, but once I replace that bottom board, they relax. 

With the hive torn apart, I have to decide what order I am going to put the boxes back. Often that bottom box is full of drawn comb and nothing else. Bees move up through their hive, and the empty bottom box indicates they ate all their honey in this box and moved up to the next during the winter which is normal. 

This former bottom box will now be my top box. Otherwise, I return the boxes to the bottom board in the order I removed them making sure the front is still the front, etc. in order not to break up the brood nest. Then when those are back in place, I put what was once the bottom hive on top. Now the queen has room to move up to lay. I then add the inner cover, then the lid, and this hive is done.

This is my basic plan, but it can often change based on what I find when I open a hive. This spring one hive’s top box was nothing but wall to wall honey. I shook out those bees in that box, back into the hive, and put that frame in a spare hive box in my hauler and put on a lid. I will spin this honey out later.

One time one of the hive boxes was wall to wall brood in one box and none in another. I took the inside frames out of the one box that had no brood and replaced them with the outer-most frames of brood from the other box and stuck in some blank frames hoping this hive will draw new comb. Now the brood nest is four or five frames wide in two boxes – making sure those frames are above/below of each other and that each box has frames of nectar, pollen and honey on either side of the center frames of brood. 

Now this hive was also given another hive box on top of those two with the brood nests on top of each other. That top box will give the queen space to move up. If possible I put about three frames of drawn comb in that top box above the brood nest in the other two so the queen can immediately move up and lay giving the workers time to draw out new comb in that top box.

I am sure this can sound confusing, but I guess the take away from this is there is no singular right way to clean up a hive after winter. What you do will be all about what you find once you remove that lid, inner cover and moisture board. 

Each hive is its own unique science experiment which keeps us beekeepers on our toes! We can only do our best and then hope for the best! 

Happy beekeeping!

Susan Nutter and her husband, Scott, maintain 45 hives on their 65 acre tree farm in northeast Ohio, where they also produce maple syrup along with selling honey, beeswax, and honeybees. Follow Susan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/beesandtrees.co and on Instagram @beesandtrees.co Got questions about beekeeping or honeybees in general? Please email Susan Nutter at SusanNutter11@gmail.com.