HiveMind AI

Your first year with bees, month by month

By HiveMind AI ·

Most first-year guides describe a good year. This one describes a normal one: a package that needs feeding for weeks, a summer with no honey to take, a mite count that comes back higher than you hoped, and a winter you can prepare for but not control. None of that is failure. That is what a first year looks like.

The calendar below is written for a temperate Northern Hemisphere climate, the kind where bees arrive in spring and cluster through a real winter. If your winters are mild, slide everything earlier and expect a longer mite season; if you are far north, slide it later and expect a shorter window for everything. Your local club knows your dates better than any article can.

Two facts before you start. Backyard beekeepers who answered the 2024-2025 US beekeeping survey reported losing 51.4% of their colonies over the year, and 36.5% over winter alone. And the University of Georgia's advice to beginners is blunt: don't expect to harvest honey in your first year. Neither is a reason not to begin. Both are reasons to keep notes, because a first year you can read back is a first year you can learn from. So each section below ends with what is worth writing down.

January and February: decide, order, join

The bees. Somebody else's colonies are clustered and eating stores. Yours do not exist yet; that is the point.

You. Decide between a package and a nucleus colony. A package is a screened box of roughly 10,000 bees and a caged queen; a nuc is five frames of drawn comb with bees, brood, food and a laying queen. Nucs cost more, establish faster, and have a higher success rate. Order early; suppliers commonly sell out of spring bees. Join the nearest bee club and go to a meeting before you own a bee. Ask the club and your extension office two questions: which varroa treatments are registered where you live, and what mite threshold they use. Pick yours now, while nothing is at stake.

Write down: supplier, what you ordered, the pickup date, the club's meeting night, and the mite threshold you chose and why.

March: build the yard before the bees

The bees. Established colonies are starting to grow. Yours are still in a truck somewhere.

You. Assemble boxes and frames now, not the night before pickup. Choose a site with morning sun, some shelter from wind, and water nearby, and think about where the flight path crosses your neighbor's garden. Check whether your state or province asks you to register hives. Buy the mite-check kit with the smoker, so the first count is never skipped for lack of a jar. If you can manage two hives, do: a second colony is the only thing that tells you whether a problem is yours or the season's.

Write down: the site and why you chose it, the equipment list with what is assembled, and a photo of the empty stand.

April: bees arrive, and feeding begins

The bees. A package arrives with no comb, no brood and no stores. Before the queen can lay much, the workers have to draw wax, and wax takes food. A nuc skips that step.

You. Install the bees and start feeding thin syrup, one part sugar to one part water. The Mid-Atlantic extension consortium's advice on packages is to supply plenty of food until a strong nectar flow begins, and to leave the hive alone for four or five days except to refill the feeder. Then confirm the queen is out of her cage and look for eggs. An egg hatches on its third day, so eggs mean a queen was laying within the last three days, even if you never spot her. Feeding a package for weeks is normal, not a sign something went wrong.

Write down: install date, the day the queen was released, how much syrup they took and how often, and the first day you saw eggs.

May: build-up, and a baseline mite count

The bees. The population climbs. A worker takes about three weeks from egg to adult, so the bees you see at the end of May were eggs at the start of it. Comb keeps getting drawn as long as food keeps coming.

You. Inspect roughly every week to ten days: eggs, a solid brood pattern, and room to grow. Add the second box when the first is mostly drawn and crowded with bees, not before. Keep feeding until nectar is clearly coming in. Do your first mite wash or sugar roll this month, even though the number will probably be low: you are buying a number to compare against in July.

Write down: eggs seen or not at each visit, frames drawn, feed taken, and the baseline mite count with method, sample size and date.

June: growth, swarm pressure, and no honey to take

The bees. This is peak growth. A nuc, which started ahead, can get crowded enough to swarm; a package is less likely to, but it can. Nectar is coming in and going straight into wax and brood, exactly as it should.

You. Stay ahead on space and look for queen cells along the bottom edges of frames. Once the bees are storing nectar on their own, stop the syrup; Michigan State's extension guidance is not to feed while supers meant for surplus honey are on. Do not add a honey super hoping for a crop; a first-year colony is building its own house, and the honey comes later.

Write down: the date the second box went on, any queen cells and what you did about them, and if you have two hives, how they differ.

July and August: the varroa decision

This is where first-year colonies are lost, and it is quiet. Penn State Extension notes that mite loads and virus levels both rise from spring to fall, and that controlling mites in the fall is a major factor linked to overwintering survival.

The bees. The colony is at or past its peak. Brood shrinks toward late summer while mite numbers keep climbing, so the ratio of mites to bees gets worse. The bees reared now are the winter bees: a summer worker lives about six weeks, but workers reared in the fall may live six months and carry the colony to spring. Mites feeding on that cohort are what kill a hive in February.

You. Count monthly. Three methods give you the same unit: an alcohol wash, a sugar roll or a CO2 check all sample a known number of bees (half a cup is about 300) and give you mites per 100 bees. Nine mites in 300 bees is 3 per 100. A sticky board is a different animal: it counts a daily drop over a set number of days from a colony of unknown size, and Penn State's López-Uribe lab says plainly there is not a reliable threshold for it. Use a board to watch a trend if you like, but never compare a board number to a wash number.

Published triggers differ; know that going in. The University of Minnesota Bee Lab aims to keep colonies under 1 mite per 100 bees year round (0 to 2 mites in a 300-bee sample) and says treatment may be warranted above 2. Penn State Extension's integrated pest management page asks for "mite levels below or around a mean abundance of 2 mites per 100 bees", monitored monthly. Penn State's own López-Uribe lab calls about 5 per 100 a reasonable treatment threshold. Illinois Extension wants under 1 per 100 by late fall.

Read that Penn State pair twice, because it is the most useful thing in this section: 2 and about 5, published by two labs at one university, and neither is a typo. The threshold is genuinely disputed, which means somebody has to pick yours. Pick it with your club or extension office, and hold yourself to it when the count comes back at 3.2 and you would rather not deal with it.

If you are over, treat. Which treatment is a real decision with real trade-offs: daytime temperature limits, whether honey supers are on, how much brood is present, and what is registered in your jurisdiction. Your extension office and club know the answer for your area, and the Honey Bee Health Coalition's Tools for Varroa Management guide lays out the options by season for the US and Canada. Whatever you use, a treatment is not finished until a recount shows it worked.

Late summer in many areas also brings a dearth and robbing; if you see fighting at the entrance, reduce it.

Write down: every count with its date, method, sample size, raw number and the per-100 figure; the decision you made; the treatment, its start and end dates and the daytime temperatures; and the recount.

September: feed heavy, weigh the hive

The bees. The colony shrinks toward its winter size and stores whatever it can find. The last rounds of brood are the last of the winter bees.

You. Heft the hive from the back. Illinois Extension's figure for its climate is at least 90 pounds of honey, about a full deep or two medium supers full; your region's number may be lower, so ask. First-year colonies are often light because they spent the season drawing comb, and that is what heavy syrup is for: two parts sugar to one part water, fed until they stop taking it or it gets cold. Recount mites after any treatment. If you did pull a frame or two of capped honey, check its moisture with a refractometer before jarring it: the USDA grade standard tops Grade A honey at 18.6% moisture, and wetter honey can ferment.

Write down: heft or weight, frames of stores, syrup fed, and the post-treatment count.

October: close up

The bees. The cluster forms on cold nights and breaks on warm afternoons. Flights get short.

You. Stop syrup once daytime temperatures fall below 50°F, the cutoff Illinois Extension uses. Put on the entrance reducer or mouse guard, make sure the hive has a way to shed moisture, and wrap or insulate if your winters demand it. If it is still warm enough to sample, take a final count and ask your extension office whether a broodless-period treatment makes sense for you.

Write down: the date you closed up, exactly what you did, and the last count of the year.

November and December: leave them alone, and plan

The bees. Clustered, eating stores, flying only on mild days.

You. Do not open the hive. Heft it every few weeks, keep the entrance clear of snow and dead bees, and order next year's bees while you read this year's notes.

If the colony dies, and backyard beekeepers in the 2024-2025 survey lost more than a third of theirs over winter, look before you clean up. How big was the cluster? Was there honey left, or did they starve inches from it? Was the brood pattern spotty? Are there mites on the bottom board, or bees with crumpled wings? Unless your inspector suspects disease, keep the drawn comb; it is a real head start on next spring. Write it all down while it is fresh. It is the most useful page in the notebook.

Write down: heft dates and weather, whether you heard or saw a live cluster, and for a dead-out, the whole picture.

The one habit

Everything above comes down to one habit: a date, a number and a sentence, every time you visit. Paper works. If you would rather it lived on your phone and added the numbers up for you, that is what we built HiveMind AI to do.

What to do next

  1. Find your club and extension office. Write down the meeting night and the mite threshold they use.
  2. Order your bees and your mite-check kit in the same week.
  3. Start the notebook before the bees arrive. Page one is the site and the order.
  4. Put a monthly mite count on the calendar from May through October.

Sources

  • Apiary Inspectors of America and Auburn University, 2024-2025 US Beekeeping Survey results: https://apiaryinspectors.org/US-beekeeping-survey-24-25
  • University of Georgia CAES, A beginner's guide to successful beekeeping (Jennifer Berry): https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/news/beginners-guide-to-beekeeping/
  • University of Georgia Bee Program, Honey bee management (syrup ratios): https://bees.caes.uga.edu/beekeeping-resources/getting-started-topics/getting-started-honey-bee-management.html
  • MAAREC (Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium), Feeding packages syrup: https://canr.udel.edu/maarec/feeding-packages-syrup/
  • MAAREC, The colony and its organization: https://canr.udel.edu/maarec/honey-bee-biology/the-colony-and-its-organization/
  • Michigan State University Extension via Ask Extension, Feeding bees (Ana Heck): https://ask.extension.org/kb/faq.php?id=894831
  • University of Minnesota Bee Lab, Varroa mite testing and management: https://beelab.umn.edu/varroa-mite-testing
  • Penn State Extension, Methods to control varroa mites: an integrated pest management approach: https://extension.psu.edu/methods-to-control-varroa-mites-an-integrated-pest-management-approach
  • López-Uribe Lab, Penn State, Varroa mite monitoring: https://lopezuribelab.com/varroa-mite-monitoring/
  • Honey Bee Health Coalition, Varroa management resources and the Tools for Varroa Management guide: https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org/resources/varroa-management/
  • Illinois Extension, Prepare your bees for winter (Douglas Gucker): https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/know-how-know-more/2021-11-11-prepare-your-bees-winter
  • USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, United States Standards for Grades of Extracted Honey: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/extracted-honey-grades-and-standards