How to find the queen bee

As a beekeeper, there are very few things as frustrating as not finding a queen when you really have to. This holds true for beginners and experienced beekeepers alike. Although once you have been at beekeeping for a while you would usually have a few tricks up your sleeve to help you deal with elusive queens. Beginners often struggle to spot the queen, and the only remedy here is practice. In this article I will show you a few tricks how to find the queen bee and go through some tried and tested methods for finding those elusive queens.

Do you always have to find the queen?

You don’t necessarily have to find the queen at each and every inspection. You can get a good idea of the state of affairs by the temperament of the bees and whether there are eggs present. But, and this is a big but, you need to be able to find her!

Therefore, if you are a beginner beekeeper, I would recommend that you try to spot the queen at every inspection. Also always look for eggs as they can be hard to spot too, especially on dark comb on an overcast day. (Trick here is to have the sun, or light behind you when you do this. Hold up the frame so that light gets into the bottom of the cell and you should be able to see the egg.) Don’t beat yourself up if you cannot find the queen. Just resolve to get better at spotting her, try a bit harder and be more methodical next time.

How to find a queen

Focus on finding the queen. When doing an inspection, all the other things that you are looking for are static. The queen is the only one that moves. So you should look for her first. The eggs, brood, queen-cells etc will still be there. They’re not going anywhere!

If you intend on clipping and/or marking the queen if you find her, put your crown of thorns or queen catcher within reach. I am right-handed so usually put it on the front righthand corner of the box I am examining. This way I know where it is, and I can keep my eyes on the queen while reaching out for my crown of thorns. A gazillion lifetimes of gathered beekeeping experiences will tell you that if you take your eyes off the queen for even a millisecond, she’s gone. So, keep your tools handy. (And a little tip if like me you use the crown of thorns, put a bit of colour on it so that you can find it when it falls on the ground. I don’t know how many of these I have lost and then found weeks or months later by standing on it.)

A few tips for how to find the queen

1. Open the hive in the middle of the day on a nice day when the foragers are out of the hive. You would do this to ensure that there are less bees in the hive, which makes it easier to find the queen.
2. If you have more than one box, i.e. supers and/or broodboxes, lift off all the boxes bar the bottom one and start your inspection there. Inspect each subsequent box and replace. If you do it the other way around and start your inspection at the top, many of the flying bees will take off and re-enter the hive at the entrance. This will cause congestion in the bottom box making it harder to find the queen if she is down there.
3. When inspecting, remove the dummy-board or last frame to free up space. Prise the remaining frames open using your hive-tool. Without lifting the frames, slide them towards the back of the hive until you come upon the first frame of brood. You can look down between the frames to see this. Then lift the first frame of brood and begin your inspection. The queen is usually on a frame containing brood. If the colony hasn’t been disturbed too much, this is where you will find her.
4. Lift the frame and start by looking at the dark side of the frame, the one that wasn’t exposed to sunlight. First look around the edge of the frame and then move your eyes to the centre. Turn over, and then repeat on the next frame. And remember, look only for the queen and disregard all else.
5. If, despite this, you still cannot find her, lift out frames not containing brood. Check that the queen is not on any of those first. (If you are uncertain, you can shake the bees from those frames into the box.) Then put the frames containing brood in pairs with a space between each pair. Leave the bees settle for a few minutes and then repeat the inspection. Starting again with the dark side of the frame.

Elusive queens

Some queens just don’t want to be found. They could be hard to spot because of being small, unmarked, badly marked, hiding, or just blending in too well. If you have a hard-to-find queen, but have to find her, there are a few things you can do. First, however, you need to be certain that she is in the hive. If you are looking for a queen in a colony with sealed queen-cells you are unlikely to find her there. (Unless cells are just sealed, the weather is really poor, or she is an old queen.) So, take some time to ascertain that she is there, or was there up until at least three days ago, by looking for eggs.

How to know if the queen is not there

As important as it is for a beekeeper to be able to find queens within a hive, it is equally important that they can tell when a colony is missing its queen or when it is having queen-problems. Missing queens are hard to spot because by their very nature they are not there. Hence, you will have to learn to read the signs of queenlessness in order to verify that she really is gone. And then take steps to remedy the situation.

The two first indicators that the queen might be missing are:

1. A change in temperament. (Bees often becoming less settled and more flighty or irritated)
2. The lack of eggs.

However, the bees can become unsettled for reasons other than queenlessness. And of course the queen can go off lay and still be present in the hive for many reasons. Hence, neither indication is a cast iron guarantee for queenlessness.

How to find elusive queen bees

1.  Shake the bees into a box through a queen excluder, see below.
2. Engage the help of a child (they are usually phenomenal queen-spotters)
3. Ask a more experienced beekeeper for help.
4. Go to Specsavers. (I still smile at the memory of my beekeeping buddy Leo, who after grovelling over having to fork out money for new glasses forgot all about his recent aversion of said glasses, and excitedly exclaimed ‘I can see eggs!’ It was a proper Eureka moment!)
5. If you have a virgin queen in a cage, you can place the cage (with the queen) on top of the brood frames and leave it for a while. Sometimes the old queen will seek out the new queen, but not always.
6. If all else fails, you can bleed off the flying bees. See instructions below.

Shaking bees through a queen excluder

In this method, all bees are shaken through a queen excluder. Because the queen won’t fit through the gaps, she will be easy to find. Although it takes a bit of organising to get the setup right. If doing this, don’t use too much smoke or spray with water as this will upset the bees.

Method

1. If the colony has supers on lift off the stack of supers and place to one side on an upturned roof. Cover the supers.
2. Lift the whole remaining hive (A) containing the queen and brood, including the floor, and move it to a stand a couple of meters from the original location.
3. Place a new floor and broodbox (B) in the original location.
4. Take one frame of open brood from box A. inspect thoroughly for the queen. If you do not find her, gently shake the bees into box A.
5. Place the frame containing open brood in box B. You can add a few frames of comb as well if you like, but this is not necessary. Place a queen excluder on top and on top of that you place an empty brood box.
6. Take a frame of bees and brood from box A. Inspect for queen and if you cannot see her, shake bees into the empty brood box.
7. Place the empty frame leaning up against the entrance of the hive.
8. Once shaken into the empty box, the bees will go down to the frame of open brood below the queen excluder. Look for the queen. She will be too large to fit through the gaps and will be left on top along with any drones who are also too big.
9. Repeat the procedure with the remaining frames until you have found the queen. Place the empty frames on the side of the hive.
10. Do what you have to do with the queen, clip, mark etc.
11. Reassemble the hive, with frames, queen excluder, supers, crown board and roof.

TIP

Mike Palmer of French Hill Apiaries has some excellent tutorials on this. A great tip from his operations is to make what he calls a ‘Shaker box’. It is essentially an empty brood box with a queen excluder attached to the bottom of it. To make sure the bees don’t walk up the sides of the box once shaken in, he puts a strip of duct tape around the inside of the top of the box.

Bleeding off the flying bees

The process of bleeding off the flying bees is one that essentially splits the colony in two, leaving the queen with the younger bees in the brood box and removing the older foragers. You can do this either as a temporary or permanent measure, depending on what you would like to achieve.

Method

1. If the colony has supers on lift off the stack of supers and place to one side on an upturned roof.
2. Lift the whole remaining hive (A) containing the queen and brood, including the floor, and move it to a stand a couple of meters from the original location. Place a new crown board and roof on top. (If the colony does not have supers on, simply move the whole colony.)
3. Place a new floor and broodbox (B) in the original location. Then place one frame of open brood in the box. You can add a few frames of comb as well if you like. Place a queen excluder on top and replace the supers, crown board and roof.
4. Leave for a couple of hours or until you need to inspect or manipulate the colonies.

How it works

What happens after the split is that the flying bees from broodbox (A) containing the queen will return to the new box (B) in the original location and leave the younger bees in broodbox (A) with the queen. The supers stay with the older bees in the original location as otherwise there is a risk of robbing. The reason why you may give the flying bees a frame of open brood is so that they can set in motion the process of queen replacement (even if you are going to interrupt it later). This is because they then consider themselves queen right and should stay calm.

Once a lot of the bees have returned to the Brood box on the original site, you can go ahead and inspect box A containing the queen. Once you have found the queen and done what you have to do, you can return the queen and brood to the original spot, replace the queen excluder, supers etc.

I hope you enjoyed reading, and that you picked up a few tips for how to find the queen bee! You might be interested in other beekeeping articles, which you will find here: Hanna’s Bees Beekeeping Blog

If there are any particular issues you’d like me to cover in future blogs, please comment below or email me. Happy beekeeping!

/Hanna

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