On the topic that bees left alone may "do better"...when I was fairly new to beekeeping there was a huge movement to reduce inspections. That admonition was kind of an outgrowth of the treatment free/natural/lazy beekeeper (and now "Darwinian"), be kindly to the bees movement. At one point it was common to hear the catchphrase "I don't inspect my bees often and they are the better for it".

My reply was "how would you know?!?". If you do not inspect bees, you only think you know what is going on, you cannot be certain. These hands-off kindly beekeepers rarely marked queens, and used no metrics to track hive progress or performance. So as long as the bees were alive when they did visit the beeyard, they assumed that meant all was well? New beekeepers in particular think if they see a few bees flying, the colony is alright. Ack. Most of them have never seen a truly healthy, robust hive in July, a river of foragers pouring out and in on any sunny afternoon.

I. Inspect. A. Lot. Why? Because in my locale, bees that come out of winter in any kind of decent shape often go into swarm mode a month after the first spring inspections. My yards are urban/semi-urban (ie farmland adjacent to neighbourhoods)...no way can I let those swarms go off. It means my best queens just left me, so I now cannot breed from them, $250 just flew away, and may end up in a structure, giving the municipality one more reason to rescind bylaws permitting backyard beekeeping...and if the swarms survive out there they will bless me with mite bombs as they fail in our late summer dearth.

But my point is: I inspect pretty much weekly, all season, due to swarm control in spring, getting ready for honey flows in June, and then queen breeding in July, and monitoring new queen performance in August. My apiary typically doubles each year, and triples in a good year. I get more honey than the local average (thanks to the goodly advice or Rev. Grant Gillard in his book "A Ton o' Honey"), and get 90% or more of my colonies through winter. So I think my bees are doing very well under the burden of my attentiveness.

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