Participating in a Maryland State Beekeeping Study

Early one May, my phone rang. It was my local bee inspector, Dean Burroughs, a kind and gentle soul who had a way of making even a brand-new beekeeper feel like she belonged in the bee yard. Dean explained that my apiary had been selected for a beekeeping study run by the University of Maryland, College Park. He and state apiculturist Jerry E. Fischer would be out to the farm within the week. I did not have to be there for it, he said. But there was no chance I was going to miss watching two of the most experienced beekeepers in the state open my hives. My plan was simple: stay out of the way, observe everything, and document it all.

The Day of the Hive Inspection

When they arrived, it was just about the most beautiful day of the season. No wind. Mid-seventies. The sun was out, the birds were going at it, and the Chester River sat perfectly still. It was mid-morning, and I was armed with my big gun, a Canon EOS 5D, and my little iPhone for backup.

We had installed our nucs back in early April. (More on nucs another time.) Now, a month later, the first wave of forage was wide open: locust trees, apple and pear blossoms, and a sea of wildflower. I paused for a second just to take it in. Every shade of green you can name, flowers everywhere, and a tangle of sweet fragrances hanging in the air. Best of all, my bee source had come through exactly when he promised the season before, picking up bees right on schedule. If you keep bees long enough, you learn that timing does not always work out that cleanly.

What State Bee Inspectors Actually Look For

For the next few hours, Jerry and Dean opened up all eighteen of my hives. They inspected for queens, examined the brood, and sampled each colony by collecting a cup of bees. Then they opened drone cells looking for mites, and "shook" frames from each brood chamber onto a metal pan to collect whatever dropped off. If you have never seen a formal hive inspection up close, this is the rhythm of it: methodical, unhurried, and far more about reading the colony than rushing through it.

A Lesson in Giving Bees Room to Grow

We were all amazed at how many bees were packed into those hives. Dale and I had set them up with a single brood chamber and had not really planned for the next one. By week four, every frame was wall-to-wall brood, and there were somewhere between four and ten queen cells in each hive. That is the bees telling you something. I learned a real lesson that day about checking in more often and giving a colony the space it needs before it decides to make its own. At that point, most of my hives were on the edge of swarming.

Swarming and the Newspaper Method

When a colony gets overcrowded, it "splits." The bees raise a new queen and a portion of the hive leaves to find a roomier place to live. If you want the full picture of what drives this, I wrote about it in why bees swarm. Out in the yard that day, Jerry and Dean walked me through the newspaper method, a reliable way to merge two colonies by separating them with a single sheet of newspaper that the bees slowly chew through, giving them time to accept one another. Using that method, we combined four of my hives that were about to swarm.

Those queen cells were the tell. Learning to read them, and eventually to keep track of my queens by marking the queen, changed how I manage a colony through the busy spring build-up.

What I Took Away From the Study

Going forward, our plan was to get into the yard at least every ten days through the growth season, so the bees always had room to expand. We also decided to run each brood chamber "two deep," meaning we would focus on building a strong, healthy family of bees first and worry about honey second. If you are curious about what all that nectar eventually becomes, our guide to the types of honey is a good place to wander next.

I asked when I would hear back about everything they had gathered, and they told me sometime in August. At the time I shrugged it off. In hindsight, that was the whole season. The truth is, if something had been seriously wrong with my bees or their hives, August is too late to do much about it. So I made my peace with it: whatever the results showed, I would learn from it and fix what I could the following spring. That patience, it turns out, is one of the quieter skills of beekeeping.

This visit was part of the same chapter as my first bee inspection with Dean, and looking back, those early hours in the yard with him shaped how I keep bees to this day.

In loving memory of Dean Burroughs, the original Maryland State Apiary Inspector and a true icon in the beekeeping community. Dean was an EAS Master Beekeeper, a Professor and Coach at Salisbury University, and the founder of the Lower Eastern Shore Beekeepers Association, but to those of us lucky enough to know him, he was a cherished mentor, an inspiration, and a dear friend. He was the first Master Beekeeper I ever met, and I always looked forward to our time together in the apiary. I like to imagine all of my early mentors in beekeeping reunited now, working together to watch over the bees from above.