How To Spot A Virgin Queen

In this video, I'm going to show you what a virgin queen looks like on a frame. Now, finding virgin queens is without a doubt the most difficult part of beekeeping, but on this frame here, there is a virgin queen. Now, I'll just talk a little bit in the background, see if you can find the virgin queen on that frame. It's not as easy as it seems. Now, the number one piece of advice that I give to people is you've probably got a virgin queen knocking around your colony somewhere. You need to go inside and you need to find it and you need to kill it. I can see the virgin queen still on this frame here, so I'll just talk a little bit about why you need to kill virgin queens before you do anything else. If you didn't know there was a virgin queen in this colony, you just thought, well, there's no eggs, there's no brood, I'm going to assume that this colony here is queenless, or I'm going to assume it's hopelessly queenless, and I'm going to add a new mated queen in. The virgin queen, which at the last check was somewhere around up here, she is going to kill that caged mated queen that you place in there. She's far more nimble and she has the upper advantage. You know, she's effectively on the top of the hill with the invading army at the bottom of the hill. She can just fire stuff down and kill her. The mated queen is in a cage. Of course the virgin's going to win. But even more than that, the virgin's quicker, she's more nimble, she's not as long, she's probably got more energy as well. She's been fed. So the virgin will win every single time. So did you spot the virgin on there? Let me just double-check that she's still on there before I carry on talking. And she is, she's still on there now. So the virgin that's on here is getting to the point where she is mature. She's not moving around as quick as a virgin that would emerge and then after a couple of days you'd see her on the frame. And for anybody who's not got it yet, she is basically there. Let me see if I can get her to zoom in there. So the virgin is running around up there. And I think you'll agree, she's quite difficult to spot, isn't she? The way that I find it's best to spot virgins is to hold it at arm's length like that, and you're looking for the behaviour of the bees around her. You're not necessarily looking for the individual virgin queen, but if you look for that behaviour, you stand the best chance of actually seeing her. So you might not have got the best glimpse of her previously there, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put I'm gonna put this frame down and I'm gonna give you a really nice close-up shot now of this virgin queen, hoping that she doesn't fly away. So you can see her there in the center of the frame walking around, and I think once I get zoomed in like this, it's not too difficult to see her. She's probably a little bit more elongated than some of the workers there, but when they first come out, she will be the exact same size as all of the rest of the bees in there. You can see what I mean in terms of the behavior though. She's pretty much got a free right of way. And where she wants to walk, she can walk, and the other bees get out of the way. Bees don't respond like that to other bees in the colony. They only respond like that to the queen. The queen gets to walk wherever she wants. Now, this frame here is not completely full of bees 'cause I've taken it away from its hive, and a few of them have flown back now. But there you go, she's walking into a more congested area now. So you can see how it would be very, very easy to not spot her. A real challenge, in fact. Hopefully that is a useful video. Hopefully you get a good indication now of what a virgin queen looks like, and it gives you the confidence and the experience to go and find the virgins in your own beehives.