A colony is not a pet and not a machine. It is a seasonal animal that grows, divides and shrinks on a schedule you can learn. Here is what it is doing each month, which hive to start with, and how to open one without wasting the bees' time.
Four states, not four months. Read the bees, then the calendar.
A hive spends the year on one job: getting enough bees into the next spring. Comb, honey, swarming, even the drones are in service of that. Open the season you are in.
Bees do not hibernate. They cluster around the queen and shiver, holding the core near 20 °C while broodless and near 35 °C once she starts laying again at midwinter. Long-lived winter bees, reared in autumn with heavy fat bodies, carry the colony through. Winter is mostly won the previous September.
Lengthening days and fresh pollen push brood rearing into overdrive; a colony can double in a fortnight. It is also the hungriest stretch of the year — more colonies starve in early spring than in midwinter, because stores run out just as brood needs feeding. Drones appear, then queen cells, then the swarm.
Full strength: tens of thousands of bees, a queen laying up to roughly 2,000 eggs a day, summer workers who live four to six weeks, and a main flow filling the supers. Out of sight, varroa climbs towards its own peak on the season's last brood — which is why mites get counted in late summer, not autumn.
The queen tapers off, drones are thrown out, and the colony rears the winter bees that must live for months rather than weeks. Those bees are made in late summer and early autumn, so a treatment applied after they are reared protects nobody. Feed while syrup can still be ripened. The planner has the weeks.
Pick for the back you have and the beekeepers near you.
The bees are indifferent; the choice is about your back, your budget and what your neighbours run. Borrowing a frame of brood from a mentor only works if their boxes fit yours.
Movable frames in stackable boxes, expanded upward with supers. The global default: frames, foundation and spares are interchangeable and easy to find, and comb can be spun in an extractor and given back. The price is weight — a full deep box can pass 18 kg.
The UK standard. A square 460 mm footprint and short frames with long lugs make the boxes lighter and squarer to handle than a Langstroth. The trade-off is a brood box that a prolific queen outgrows, which is why “brood and a half” and deeper 14×12 boxes exist.
Bees build their own comb downward from bars in one long body — no supers, nothing heavy, everything at waist height. Cheap to build and calm to work. In exchange the comb is fragile in warm weather, harvest means crush-and-strain rather than extraction, and none of it fits anyone else's kit.
A vertical top-bar hive worked by adding small boxes underneath rather than on top, built around minimal intervention. Harder to examine comb by comb. Some jurisdictions require combs that can be lifted out for disease inspection, so check local rules first.
Ask a question, get an answer, close the lid.
An inspection is a question you put to the colony, not a rummage. Fifteen minutes is plenty, and every extra minute the brood nest is open costs the bees heat and patience. In swarm season, go in every seven days.
Field note
Count mites, do not guess at them. A wash or sugar roll of about 300 bees gives a number; an eyeball estimate gives a feeling. Treat on the number, with a product licensed where you live.
Planner
Pick a cell. Timings assume a temperate Northern-Hemisphere season — shift them to match your own spring.
Tight cluster. The queen may restart laying on a few central combs.
Brood nest expanding while stores hit their lowest point of the year.
Brood rearing accelerates; the first real pollen comes in.
Population climbing fast. Drones appear — swarm season is loading.
Peak swarming. The main flow starts in many regions.
Maximum strength, and in some regions a gap after the spring flow.
Flow tails off; swarming eases; robbing pressure begins to rise.
Winter bees begin to be reared; mite numbers peak on the last brood.
The queen slows sharply and drones are evicted.
Brood rearing winds down; the cluster forms on cold nights.
Broodless or nearly so. The winter bees now carry the colony.
Minimum activity. The cluster is tight and quiet.
Colophon
This is an orientation, not an authority. It describes Apis mellifera kept in managed hives in a temperate Northern-Hemisphere climate; in the Southern Hemisphere shift the planner six months, and in warmer or colder regions shift it by your own local flow.
Two things this page deliberately will not do: diagnose a sick colony, and tell you which chemical to use. Brood disease and mite treatments are regulated differently in every country. Take suspected foulbrood to your national or regional bee inspector, and take treatment decisions from the product label that is legal where you keep bees.
The best next step is not another web page. Find the beekeeping association nearest you through your national federation and stand at an open hive with someone who has done it for years — an afternoon at their apiary teaches more than a season of reading.
Your records
This primer keeps no notes on its readers; the only thing it looks at is today's date on your own device, so the planner can open on the month you are in. Your inspection records belong in your notebook, next to the smoker fuel.