During a typical inspection, it is not necessary for a beekeeper to find the queen. It is fun and useful to recognize her if you come across her, but eggs and young larvae are usually sufficient evidence of her presence in the hive. However, there are some scenarios where finding the queen becomes necessary, such as requeening, when there are swarm cells present in the hive, or when making new colonies.
The most common reason beekeepers must find their queen is that they need to requeen their hive. Requeening requires the beekeeper to locate the queen at least twice: first to find and remove the original queen and second to ensure that the new queen has been accepted. If the original queen is not removed, the worker bees will remain loyal to her and kill the newly installed one.
Even when the original queen is removed, requeening can still go awry. Worker bees prefer queens that are genetically related to them and often attempt to raise replacement queens in lieu of accepting the queen that the beekeeper installed. This is especially true if the new queen is a different breed from the rest of the colony. A colony of Russian bees is less likely to accept a queen that came from Italian lineage, for example.
Sometimes the workers kill the new queen straightaway. Other times they disingenuously allow the new queen to live, while planning to overthrow her once the new queens hatch from their cells. So, a beekeeper will need to destroy any supersedure cells and also physically locate the new queen to confirm that she has been accepted.
A beekeeper should also locate the queen when confronted with swarm cells. If queen cells are built on the edges of the comb, it typically means that the bees intend to swarm. Many beekeepers like to suppress or control swarming behavior. They don’t want to lose their good queen or all that honey the bees will carry with them when they go!
Swarming is most easily controlled if it is caught early, when the queen cells are still cups. Queen cups look like small acorn tops. They are short and may contain an egg, a young larva, or nothing at all. As the larva grows, the worker bees will extend the cup downward and eventually cap it, creating a queen cell, when the larva is ready to pupate.
If weather allows, the original queen leaves with the swarm well after the cells have been built, but before the new queens emerge. It can be tricky to stop swarming once it is underway, but if only queen cups are found, a beekeeper can be pretty confident that their queen has not yet left.
I often pinch off newly made queen cups during inspections and add empty frames to the brood nest to keep the bees occupied with building new comb. But when I encounter a more developed queen cell, I am careful not to destroy it until I have seen my queen. Even eggs are not enough to confirm her presence. She could have laid them the day before and left already. She must be located before any action is taken.
If a beekeeper removes the queen cells and the queen has already left with the swarm, the keeper has not only failed to stop the colony from swarming but most likely rendered it queenless as well. If the swarming process has progressed too far, it’s often better to let the bees sort it out themselves rather than try to interfere, especially if the queen is not found.
If a beekeeper decides to make a new colony, finding the queen is extremely helpful. These new colonies, called splits or nucleus colonies, are made from one large colony. The beekeeper separates out a percentage of the hive’s population to form one, or sometimes many, new hives.
Most beekeepers like to leave the original queen in the mother colony and install new queens in each of the new colonies. If this method is used, however, and the original queen cannot be found, the beekeeper may accidentally place two queens in one hive — a mistake that always results in the death of the newly installed, caged queen.
I frequently take frames out of my hives to fill my observation hive, a windowed travel box designed to hold one or two frames of bees for the enjoyment of the public. It’s useful to be able to spot the queen when doing this because either you deliberately want to show her in your observation hive, or you take special care not to include her, so you won’t risk her being injured.
If you aren’t using a queen excluder, you can’t be sure of your queen’s location within the hive. She may be in the honey supers (where honey is collected). If you plan to harvest, you want to be able to find your queen to be sure you don’t harm her during the process of removing the bees from the honeycomb — and you definitely don’t want her as a honey-super stowaway.
Locating the queen is an especially valuable skill when performing bee removals. The queen’s attractive scent plays a key role in the process. Once you place the queen in your hive box, the worker bees will follow her. I love to watch the workers march excitedly into the box after her. They rush toward the entrance of the hive in little streams, fanning their wings to spread a homing pheromone along the way — a sight that is especially enjoyable because it means I don’t have to laboriously scoop or otherwise coerce them into the hive anymore.
Successfully finding and transferring the queen also ensures that the worker bees you have already moved to your hive box will stay put. If you don’t get the queen in your box, workers are likely to leave it in search of her. On several occasions, I have transferred the majority of the colony’s population to my hive box and left the scene, assuming the queen was among them. When I returned at dusk, with the intention of moving the bees to one of my apiaries, I found that all the workers had left the hive box and gone back to their original nesting site, where their queen must have remained. This frustrating discovery usually means that I have to do the removal again, the following morning.
