A couple of years ago I started to hear rumblings about how frequent inspections were a bad idea...read it in forums, heard it in meetings, and finally one beekeeper confided that they seldom inspected their bees and the bees "were better for it". But really, how would you know!?

And since to learn to understand what you are seeing in a bee colony you must inspect as much as you can, and invite yourself to beekeep with others so you can see even more, I agree that new beekeepers in particular should inspect often. Maybe not as often as during swarm season, but often.

If you have watched Paul Kelly at UGuelph and Devan Rawn on YouTube, they cage HRH in a roller cage for safety during inspections. Most new beekeepers are not going to want to do that, but they could adopt Billy Davis' practice of using a quiet box (a nuc with a soft cover): the frame with the queen on it is placed in the quiet box, secure and out of the way, while the inspection is held. She is returned, on her frame, carefully, at the end of the inspection. Preferably by quietly sliding the next frame over to the face HRH is on, being ultra careful not to squish her.

The use of cover cloths is also handy, particularly when paired with placing any box you take off the hive onto an upturned outer cover so HRH cannot scuttle down into the grass. That is not always a practice new beekeepers remember to use.

However, what I really wanted to ask you all about was something I read in one of the Aebi beekeeping books. Mr. Aebi mentions a few times that he and his dad felt the bees were demoralized by too-invasive inspections. They went so far as to mark the frame tops with a diagonal swipe of a permanent marker to ensure frames went back into the hive in the same order they were found. Aebi does not really spend time explaining this, or whether the demoralization he observed was a product of frame placement OR inspection frequency, or the thoroughness of the inspection, or a combination of all three.

I have over the years become somewhat attached to frame manipulation, pulling partly drawn or new foundations into the broodnest to push the bees to draw out new comb and expand operations. I often move all the open brood to the lowest box, with the queen and some drawn comb, and then put all the capped brood into the box on top of that, giving brood room once that capped brood emerges.

How do those practices square with Aebi's admonitions? I ask as in all other matters Aebi seems so sensible and sensitive to what is best for the bees.

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