Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells Branch

Finding the Queen

For beginners, this can prove to be quite difficult and is rarely as easily found as the one in the picture, so here are a few tips.

• Use minimal smoke, 1 – 2 puffs, take off the honey super and queen excluder;
• Take out the 2/3 outer frames as these will usually have no brood cells and this allows you to space the remaining frames sufficiently wide apart to reduce the risk of the queen moving from frame to frame.
• Carefully lift one frame out of the middle, taking care not to squash the bees; this is chosen because it is the most likely place to find her, at the centre of the brood nest, on a frame with eggs. Briefly scan over each side of this frame, starting at the outside to reduce the risk of the queen going over to the darker side of the frame.
• Having scanned both sides, place this frame in a spare box and continue with the remaining frames, placing them all in the same spare brood box, close together to keep up the temperature of the brood.
• If you fail to find the queen at this first attempt, check the walls & floor of the now empty brood chamber.
• If you still have not found the queen resort to the ‘Divide & Conquer Method’.
• Take out half the frames from brood box next to the hive; and place them in the original brood chamber. Having fewer frames with a lesser number of bees, should make it much easier to repeat the operation again.
   

Marking the Queen

If you do not plan to replace the queen when you have located her it is a good idea to mark her thorax with a bright colour so that she is more easily located in the future. You could also clip one of her wings. This does not prevent swarming but if they do swarm the queen will drop into the grass and the ‘swarm’ will eventually return to the hive.

This will only give you extra time as they are most likely to swarm when a new queen is mated some 21+ days later.

There are various queen bee traps available that are used to constrain the queen bee while you mark the queen bee’s thorax with, say a non-toxic marker.

For ease, I use a ‘Tipex’ type white marker, which comes with its own brush.

However the convention is to mark the queen bee with a different colour depending on the year that she was born.

The colour codes are:

Year ending in 0 or 5 (e.g. 2000 or 2005): blue

Year ending in 1 or 6 (e.g. 2001 or 2006): white or grey

Year ending in 2 or 7 (e.g. 2002 or 2007): yellow

Year ending in 3 or 8 (e.g. 2003 or 2008): red

Year ending in 4 or 9 (e.g. 2004 or 2009): green.