Q: I do not see a queen when I look through the hive, how do I know if I have one and if I do, how can I find her?
A: This is a very common concern for most beginning beekeepers and spotting the queen bee can be difficult at first, but normally comes easier with experience. Have no fear, we have a few tips and techniques that can help with this sometimes challenging task. (see more...)
Queen bees are larger and can even have a different color abdomen than her offspring, so why are they hard to locate in a hive? Whether the hive only has a few frames of bees, like a nuc, or is multiple stories high with several boxes and thousands of bees, can make the task more or less challenging.
The younger queens tend to be more skittish and harder to find than older queens that are used to our occasional presence. Aggressive colonies, like Africanized bees, which we can end up with in our area (southern states) when a colony "makes their own queen", tend to be very illusive and can be difficult to find, even for a seasoned beekeeper.
The process of elimination using a Queen Excluder as a "strainer device" works well, but requires understanding how the process works and having and extra empty box available to hold frames as they are removed during the process. (... more to come...)
Swarm would attempt to leave. Queen can’t exit through the excluder and goes up through the cones. She gets confined in the top chamber.
