In this instructional video, beekeeping expert Laurence Edwards demonstrates a reliable technique for locating a missing queen bee in a strong colony when standard frame‑by‑frame searches fail. He explains why queens can become hard to find, especially when unmarked, and then walks through a step‑by‑step process using only a queen excluder, an empty brood box (shaker box), and a few empty supers. The method involves removing supers, checking the brood box floor, shaking bees from each frame through the queen excluder into the empty box, and using open brood to attract the remaining bees, which leaves only the queen and drones in the shaker box where she can be easily spotted and marked. Edwards also offers practical tips on checking for queen presence, marking queens promptly, and re‑assembling the hive after the operation. He emphasizes that the technique works every time provided a queen is present, and he demonstrates the queen’s behavior as she attempts to re‑enter the brood area.
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It is the most annoying thing in the world trying to find queens in your hives, and I do my very best to give them a good marking, but sometimes they supersede or something goes wrong and you find yourself cursing because you just can't find the queen in a hive. If you find yourself in that position, this is the video for you because I'm going to show you how to find the queen that's in your hive, and I guarantee it works every single time. Now the reason that this isn't just a normal let's go through the frames and try and find the queen video, and I'm not giving you tips on how to do that. Obviously, the first thing you need to do if you're trying to find your queen is go through every single frame front to back, try and find the queen. I reckon nine times out of ten, I will find the queen on the first pass. She's not marked, maybe a couple of passes, but I generally will find her. Occasionally though, you just cannot find the queen, and it always happens when they're not marked. And it always happens on the really big, strong colonies as well. In those instances, you do need another method of finding the queen, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. So I'm going to jump straight into it. I'm going to go and put my bee suit on, and I'm going to go and find the queen in that colony over there. Right, so all you need when you're trying to find a queen and you just can't find her is a queen excluder and an empty brood box. It's a shaker box. It's as simple as that. What we're going to do is we're going to open up this colony, We're going to take off all the supers because we know the queen's not going to be in there, and we're going to shake every single frame through a shaker box, and all of the bees will go down through the queen excluder, and you'll just get left with loads of drones and the queen. And once you've done that, it should be really, really easy to find that queen. If she's not marked, get her marked at that point, and then mission accomplished, you've found the queen. And then all you need to do is look through loads of different drones, and it should be a lot easier to spot than trying to find her on the frames when she could just be carrying at the bottom or on the sides of the brood box. So let's get into this colony and I'll show you how easy it is to set up. So first thing to do, take off all of your supers. You don't need them. The queen's definitely not going to be up there. If she is, you've got more trouble than just finding the queen. Get the box like this, and what you need to do is take off the box Have a look at the floor because that's the only place that she could be really hiding out in this manipulation here. Just double check she's not on the floor. So pick up the whole brood box and just pop that off over to one side. Excuse the flyy bees. Again, it is North Wales summer here, so it's about 15 degrees in the evening and the bees are a little bit annoyed and grumpy. But the first thing you need to do is you need to check that floor and There's not many bees down here, so it should be relatively easy to find a queen if she's just hiding out on this floor down here. Take your time, go over every little nook and cranny, make sure that the queen's not down there. And if she's not down there, you can move on to the next step. So the next step is so simple. Just take an empty brood box, take your queen excluder, put the box onto the hive stand like that, queen excluder onto the top. And then you just want to take an empty super, create somewhere for the bees to go down. So you don't just want to shake them in like that because they'll all go over the edge, and put the box on like that. So you should have something that looks like this now, which is an empty super on top, box underneath like that, and then a queen excluder in the middle. And you are fully set up now, ready to go. This is how you find queens if they're impossible to find. So first one to take off, take off your queen excluder. Don't forget the queen excluder. And you want to shake those bees through like that. And then all it is, really simple, go through frame by frame, shake all of the bees into that box, and then you'll get left with some bees that cluster around it. You need to shake all of the bees into that box down there. Now, once you've shaken a couple of frames off like this, you need to take these frames Slip them back underneath the queen excluder. So you're taking a frame here, definitely not got a queen on it. You've shaken all the bees off, you've shaken them into the queen excluder there. You need to attract the bees to go down through the queen excluder, and that's what's going to leave you with just the queen and the drones. So slip the queen excluder off, put back in 2 or 3 frames with some open brood, and that's going to attract all the bees down. So then once you've got a few frames in there, 2 or 3 frames as a minimum, Go through, shake every single bee into that box there, and then we're going to put the roof on, give them a dark space, and let them move down to that brood. So then you'll probably end up with loads of bees on a box like this. Make sure she doesn't fall out if she's in there. Take the box over and you just want to do one sharp tap to drop all of the bees in the box into your hive. And then if there's any bees left over on your roof as well, same again, little tap. Clear all the bees off. And then you want to get the roof on, and the roof's really important. Gives them a nice dark space and they'll just work down towards that brood. Now what you do at this point is you take all of the rest of the frames, all of the brood frames, and you put them back in the original brood box. So I'm just going to get those in now. Now, once you've got all of the brood frames back in the brood box, you want to lift the entire beehive minus the floor. And you know that the queen can't be down in the brood box now because you've shaken every single bee up into that top super. So the queen is going to be stuck somewhere in the middle here, and then we're going to place everything back on the original site. So it's as simple as this, you go and lift up this hive Put that back onto the original brood box and then lift the whole hive back onto the floor again. Now I know this seems like a faff. This is for when you need to find the queen, absolute urgency, nothing else will do, you need to find the queen. Otherwise I would just suggest just going through the frames again and again and again. But you can leave that now, leave it 5, 10, 15 minutes, all of the bees will calm down. They'll all go back into the original entrance. Any bees that are in the air, they're not a queen. The queen will be in this super here. We'll open it up, we'll find the queen. She'll be stuck on that queen excluder because she can't get through. So I'll fast forward 10 minutes, we'll look inside this box, see if we found the queen. So this is what it looks like. You've got bees up the side there. Does seem like chaos doing this, but it is a Foolproof method. You do find the queen every single time, assuming that there is a queen in your hive. So I've done this before and there hasn't been a queen in the hive, and then I've put a test frame in and they've drawn out emergency cells. So probably best to test, see if there's a queen in there first by doing a frame of eggs, frame of young larvae, see if they draw emergency cells. If there is a queen in your hive, or if there is numerous queens in your hive, this is the method to find them. And there you go. I told you it works every single time. And I've just watched this queen here. She is desperate to get that down to that brood. She keeps on getting her head stuck in the queen excluder. She can't get through. So I'm just going to film for a little bit longer because she'll probably do it again. But it really is the best method in the world. And you'll see not all the bees have gone down yet. If you're opening up the roof and they're still there, you could just use a hive tool and just kind of like Start scraping them down gently, but the queen cannot get through, and it just makes it so much easier. You know, if you're looking kind of on a single frame and the queen's not on it, and then you put that frame back down and she just jumps back on it again, it's really, really annoying. This is the method that I always use if I am desperate to find that queen. And you can see here, in this instance, not marked, so very, very difficult to find. If there's any doubt, that, that's the queen there in the middle of the frame, just for anyone who's not seen a queen before. But I do find trying to find queens, it's really, really difficult, but really frustrating as well. So I do, if I don't find it on the first pass, second pass maybe, and then if I'm desperate to find the queen, need to do a swarm manipulation or something, then I'll just do this. And the perfect timing, you can see the queen there. She is so desperate to get back down to her brood. She won't hide away in the corner because she wants to get back down. She'll walk around, she'll try and find how she can get through. The smell of that open brood is luring her down. She's trying to get back down there again now. I'll probably stop teasing her now because it is a little bit cruel, but let's reunite the queen with that brood and let's get her marked at the same time. Now, one of my beekeeping mantras is never let an opportunity pass to go and mark queen. Don't think, oh, I'll do that later, because then you can't find the queens. Anytime you see a queen, if she's mated and she's not marked, get your pen out. Saves you doing it when you really do need to do it and you haven't got the time. So then putting it all back together again, easy as you like. You pick up the queen, she's on my hand here now, lift up the queen excluder and just pop her back underneath. So there we go, it's as simple as that. That is a foolproof method for finding any queens that you have downstairs in the brood box. If you really, really do need to find them. Like I say, it's not for every single hive inspection, that one, only for when you really do need to find the queen. But it is a pretty much guaranteed method to shake out any queens that are in that colony. Hope you enjoyed that one though. 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