Beekeeping is a craft of timing. The colony runs on its own calendar — build-up, swarm season, the main flow, the long taper into winter — and most of what goes wrong at the hive goes wrong because something was done too late, or not written down at all.
These guides cover the questions we get most from hobbyist beekeepers in the Low Countries. They assume a temperate Western European climate, standard movable-frame hives, and a beekeeper with somewhere between one and a dozen colonies.
Reading this in July or August? Start with the varroa guide. The weeks right after the summer harvest are the single most important treatment window of the year — the bees being raised now are the ones that must carry your colony through winter.
Varroa treatment: when and how to treat
Monitoring with alcohol wash, sugar roll and sticky board, what the 2% and 3% thresholds actually mean, and a treatment calendar for Belgium and the Netherlands — formic, thymol and oxalic acid, each in its right season.
Read the guide →The hive inspection checklist
What to check every time you open a hive — queen evidence, brood pattern, stores, space, disease signs — how often to inspect through the season, and what is actually worth writing down afterwards.
Read the guide →The beekeeping year, month by month
From midwinter cluster to swarm season to harvest and back again: what the colony is doing each month in Western Europe, and the handful of tasks that matter most while it does.
Read the guide →Voice inspection logging: how it works
How HiveTrack turns "queen spotted, five frames of brood, calm bees" into a filled-in inspection form — plus tips for recordings that extract cleanly, and an honest look at what the feature can and cannot do.
Read the guide →