Beekeepers kill more bees than anyone else in the world. Better habits during inspections can help. Little tricks can make our work more efficient, and it is always nice to be able to accomplish your work without causing trouble for the bees.
If using your smoker to calm the bees, use it gently. You are hinting to the bees that they should fill up with honey. Using the smoker to bully the bees will make them runny instead of making them calm. Three puffs at the door and one or two under the inner cover are more than sufficient. If they are Africanized bees or are extra cranky for some reason (like inconvenient weather), you may need to use the smoker more often, but not more aggressively. Too much smoke makes the bees meaner and can also taint any uncapped honey with a smoky flavor.
The smoker can also be used to push the bees off the box edges when you are re-stacking, or to push them out of a honey super. In this case, a bit more aggressive smoking might be in order, but don’t try to completely clear the honey super using smoke (it can’t be done anyway) if the honey isn’t totally capped.
When inspecting your colony, first set the outer cover upside down on a flat spot near the hive so that you don’t have to move far to set boxes on it as you go down through them. Lean the inner cover against the landing board, so the bees on it can walk in while you are working. If the top box is a honey super, you can leave the inner cover on it. Pry the super loose from the box below and lift it straight up so you don’t crush bees between the ladders that were connecting the bottoms of the upper frames with the tops of the lower ones. Set it catty-corner on the outer cover. This way you crush fewer bees than if you set it straight down. You can tip it back and get an idea how much honey is in it by looking up through the frames, so you don’t have to take time to pull each one.
Instead of using a frame hanger to keep the frames clean while you inspect the hive, you might consider using an old wooden nuc box. This way, if you get lucky enough (or eventually skilled enough) to find the queen, you can put the frame that she is on in the nuc box for safe keeping. This way you know she is out of the way. Also, if you should discover that you need to do a split, or if she needs to be replaced, you know right where she is and don’t need to go back through the hive looking for her. The alternative is to pick her up in a queen-catcher when you see her, but then don’t forget to put her back! There is nothing worse than finding her in your bee-suit pocket at 10 p.m. The queen cannot be out of the hive for more than 15 or 20 minutes. If it is longer than that (say, for instance, you forget her) or you change your mind two hours after pulling her, she will need to be re-introduced using a cage. Even though she was their own queen until recently, they will kill her (ask me how I know). Hindsight might be 20-20, but second-guessing yourself is beekeeper torture, though it seems to come with the job …
