In this concise tutorial, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks viewers through the essential skill of locating bee eggs within a hive. He explains why seeing eggs is a fast indicator of queen activity and swarm status, then demonstrates a step‑by‑step inspection method focused on the central frame of a small, newly‑installed colony. Edwards shows how to identify the queen, recognize capped brood, larvae, and eggs, and describes the typical radial pattern of brood development (capped brood in the centre, larvae surrounding it, eggs on the outer edge). He offers practical tips for beginners: use fresh foundation to make eggs more visible, shake bees off a frame when the queen is elsewhere, and employ magnifying glasses for better visual discrimination. The video emphasizes a rapid 3‑4‑minute inspection that can confirm the queen is laying and help decide if a swarm has occurred, all presented in a no‑nonsense, instructional tone.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to do the most simple of beekeeping videos. I'm going to show you how to spot eggs within your colony. So this video is part of the series of getting started in beekeeping, and one of the things you need to learn how to do is to spot eggs. Eggs within your colony. It's an essential part of beekeeping being able to spot eggs. It means that you don't have to go through your colony and check to see if your queen's there. You know if there's eggs there, the queen was there within the last couple of days. It saves you a huge amount of time. It's really good for kind of indicating when a swarm has left the colony, so if you find kind of capped cells with eggs, chances are the queen's probably still going to be there, If you find a swarmed colony with capped cells and no eggs, then you can make a judgment, and I mean, 99 times out of 100, that swarm will have left the colony. Also though, when you're kind of just doing your weekly inspections, like, I'm really, you know, we're no-nonsense beekeeping here. We don't want to go through the colony, do a 45-minute inspection looking at every single cell, looking at every single bee and giving them a high five. We want to be as minimal as we possibly can. And if you can learn how to find eggs within your colony, then you can do these inspections in 3 or 4 minutes. You really can open them up, check to see they've got eggs, check to see they've got space, and then you're on your way. So this video, all I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how I find eggs within my colony, give you a couple of tips and tricks to show you the way. So these colonies we've got here, they're very, very small colonies. So these are packages that were installed recently. I'm not expecting to see any capped Brood in these colonies, so it should be really, really good to show you how to find eggs in them as well. One thing I will say though is finding eggs is a lot easier finding eggs on new comb. So if you're really, really struggling, a good tip for you is put a new piece of foundation in the box, give it a few days for them to draw it out. The queen will go and lay eggs in it, and then you can kind of see straight away if you can see those eggs. So that's a good tip or trick if you're struggling to find eggs. Put that piece of foundation in and it'll make it a lot easier. So let's get into the colony, see if we can see some eggs. Right, so if you're doing an inspection where the prime reason for that inspection is you just want to see some eggs, then the best way of doing that is just to go straight for the centre frame. Chances are that's where the brood's going to be. You might not find eggs on the centre frame, it might be completely brood, but very, very unlikely to find brood on the outer frames of the colony. It definitely happens, you know what I mean, when the colony gets big and is spread over all of those frames, sure, you're going to find eggs on the outer frame, but while they're building up, no point going for the outer frames. Might as well just go for that middle frame and your likelihood to find brood and hopefully see some eggs. So as you can see with this colony, we're on a 14 by 12 here, they're only covering 4 frames, probably equivalent of about 6 national frames, but I only installed these and released the queen about a week ago, So there's not really going to be any much capped brood in here. Might have got the timings a little bit wrong, but we'll definitely, definitely see eggs in here today. So what we'll do is we'll show you how to find the queen, show you how to identify the eggs, and then we'll call it a day. So we've got loads of unused foundation in here. Let's pop out a couple of frames to make it nice and easy. Slide them along. Like I say, no need to go for these outer frames. Let's get straight in. I've got 5 frames of bees here. I'm gonna go for that middle frame. Hopefully we'll find eggs. So first thing is we've found the queen. So it doesn't always work like that, but there you go, there's the queen. We'll do a little close-up on her. So she's just there. So for the purpose of this video, I'm going to do it on a frame that hasn't got the queen on. So the queen's on the 3rd frame. I'm going to now take out the 2nd frame. And must have got my timings a little bit wrong because we've got capped brood on this frame. So they'll always kind of start the capped brood in the centre, and then it should progress outwards kind of through larvae and eggs, and then they're going to have honey all the way around the edge with pollen intermixed in that as well. So if you're seeing capped brood here, you want to be looking kind of around here for the eggs. It's a really, really good indication, that. So if you find the capped brood, that's easy to see, then you look for eggs around here. So again, for the purpose of this video, I'm just going to shake the bees off. If you know that the queen is on another frame, it's much, much easier to kind of find the, find the eggs by shaking the bees off. So just shake them into the box, it doesn't do them any harm whatsoever.
So starting off in the middle, we've got capped brood. And this queen, this is the first capped brood that she's laid, so I'm not too worried about the fact that it's a bit patchy. Um, the queens kind of come into lay and they improve the pattern of their brood over time, so don't worry too much about that as a first thing. And then around the outer edges, so around here, you can see larva. So these are eggs that have hatched, they've been fed, and then they're ready to be sealed over by the bees. So if you were to come in here in kind of 2 or 3 days, that patch of brood will look a lot bigger than that, and they would have sealed it over waiting for new bees to emerge. Then as you get further, further out here, you can see more larva. So these are eggs, these would have been eggs a good few days ago, they're no longer eggs, they've been fed and they've turned to larva, and then we jump straight to nectar there.
So along here we've got no eggs and you can quite clearly see that.
So we'll jump over to another side. So if you look here, like I say, we've got the capped brood, you can see the stages all the way going back. And then if you look into this corner, you can see the eggs. It's really, really easy to see those eggs on nice new foundation. That's what you want, nice new foundation makes the process so much easier, and that's what you're looking for. Just helps to know though.
Remember, you mean you've got your capped brood in the middle and then it progresses out like that. And then that's not always the case because once this capped brood emerges, you're going to have a ring of capped brood and then the queen will come back and lay that up again.
So this is the very first cycle will always be like that.
But then after that cycle, the eggs could effectively be anywhere.
But if you've got capped brood in the center and no capped brood on the outer, that's the way it all works. You've got capped brood. Larvae on that bigger diameter and then eggs all around the perimeter like that.
That's the perfect frame, and then you've got your pollen and your nectar as well.
So let's do a couple more close-ups of those eggs. You can see them there, do you know what I mean? I always kind of describe them as little Tic Tacs. That's what I think they look like, tiny little Tic Tacs. If you struggle with your eyesight, you can always go and get some kind of magnification glasses. That's really, really good for identifying eggs as well. You can just see them there, I mean, right at the bottom there. There's eggs in each of the bottom of these individual cells.
So that's it for the video. Really, really quick one, do you know what I mean? We're No Nonsense Beekeeping here. We want to give you the simple videos. To help you kind of with your journey into the beginning of beekeeping. So we'll do complex stuff as well, but we feel we need to do the simple stuff just to help people along when they're getting their first colonies of the season. In this video, we've showed you how to find capped brood, we've showed you how to find larvae, and we've showed you how to find eggs. And we've given you a couple of tips and tricks as to how to find eggs if you're struggling. Use magnification glasses, do it on nice new fresh comb, And that should really, really make finding those eggs easy and give you a couple of examples as to when you need to find eggs. So like I say, when you're doing the inspections, just to see that the queen's laying well and to see whether they've swarmed or not as well. It's a really good indication for that. So that's it for today's video. Quick, simple video. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
