A few helpful things I’ve learned about bees and beekeeping:

1. When you need a to move a small number of bees from an area of a frame, gently blow on them and they’ll scatter. This trick is particularly helpful when you need to pick up a frame end, or want to inspect an area of cells.

2. Have an extra inner hive cover on hand during inspections to cover any open boxes you have set aside. Helps protect bees from marauders, keeps warmth in and wind out, and makes it far easier to pick up and restack a box - fewer bees in your face!

3. To avoid squishing your little bee friends when re-stacking hive boxes following an inspection, gently rumble the upper box along the lower one as you move it into place. The bees will move away from the vibration.

4. When you see a cloud of bees flying around the hive, particularly in the spring, it’s quite likely a new cohort of forager bees taking an orientation flight (see video below). They’ll do these practice runs over several days in increasingly wider circles to get familiar with their specific hive location. The other alternative, which would be more likely in the fall, would be robbing, where one group of bees tries to loot the stores of another weaker one. For more on that, check out this post from HoneyBeeSuite.

Side Note: A preventative measure against robbing, and keeping out unwanted creatures in general, is having a robbing screen in place. You can see an example of one in the video above. It enables you to close up entrances quickly as needed, vs. a basic wooden entrance reducer. It is also better at keeping out common wasps whose attack pattern is to fly horizontally towards a hive. Robbing screens feature an upper opening where the bees can come and go while wasps remain stymied. Here’s one from MannLake that I’ve been using for the last couple of years.