Beekeepers Gaia and Tommaso hunt for a queen in a Dadant hive using gentle methods: tapping the roof, cool fennel smoke, and frame-by-frame searching. They're after a golden Italian Lagustica queen to breed vigor into their colony, and they'll shake nurse bees into mini-mating nucs to raise new queens.
Today we're gonna go queen hunting in an absolutely huge Dadant beehive. So we are here with Gaia and Tommaso, and this colony here is huge. They need to find the queen in order to harvest the young bees for mini mating boxes. But Tommaso's opened up this one and the bees have just exploded into the roof with lots of wild comb and honey. In order to find the queen, Tommaso taps them like that to get the honey down. Tap, tap, tap. and ensure the queen is not in the roof. Tapping a beehive like that is by far and away the safest way to get all of the queens from the roof back into the beehive with minimal disturbance to the bees. The bees aren't keen on the tapping, but it means that there's no manual lifting or no manual movement of those bees. And then Tommaso can clear up all of that honey, checking for the queen as he does it, and place it in a box because otherwise things just get a bit too sticky. Check out how calm these bees are though. That is a full box of Italian Lagustica bees, Continental Gold Star, and even with all that tapping, there's very, very little buzzing. We are in a stunning apiary today. All of these hives here need to be harvested, but the first job, as always, is finding the queen. Pretty much every time I've been here, the queen has been on this frame, so that's going to be my guess. What's your guess, Tommaso? Where's the queen? The second one. Second one, right? So he's going this one. So we'll start at that end. We'll work our way across. We're looking for a beautiful gold Italian Lagustica Continental Gold Star queen. Now these queens are perfect for the activity here. So what they're looking to do is build up lots of young nurse bees in order to harvest the bees and put them in the mini mating nucs. So they feed the bees continuously with protein patties, 7% real protein irradiated to in order to stop any disease. And this stimulates the queen to lay lots and lots of eggs, which turns into lots of young nurse bees, which are crucial for mini mating boxes in order to take care of the young queens when they come back from their mating flights. So as you can see, a Dadant hive there, or a Dadant frame, fully covered in brood. Very few holes in that. An excellent mated queen. These are Dadant beehives, so the frames are not self-spacing. They have castellations in there to ensure that the frames are spaced correctly. So that's the 3rd frame that we've looked at there. All of the frames have got brood. Tommaso using the smoker there with some wild fennel in the top to kind of calm the bees down. A nice Cool, humid smoke. Just check out that brood again. It's truly sensational. So no gloves needed here. Very friendly bees, but they are worked very well. You can see expert hands there with Tommaso. No bees being crushed and lots and lots of bees. So this is the one that I predicted. Third frame from the left is the way that I'm looking for it. This is going to be there, definitely middle of the frame, I reckon. I said it with great confidence and she's not there, is she? Lots of drone brood on that frame. Hey, it was worth a guess. But the next frame coming along is Tommaso's guess. So I think he's going to have got this one right and I'm going to have got this one wrong. So no queen yet on that side. Lots and lots of nice brood though. This is slow work, but we will stay here until we find the queen because the bees need to be harvested. What Tommaso does, he starts on one side, works all the way across, and then if he can't find it, he takes one frame out To give him some space, and then he'll move back across this way until he finds the queen. Okay, so there we go, last one. And there we go, a golden lagustica queen. Very shy. Isn't she a beauty? Very long golden body, desperate just to get on with her business and to lay some eggs. So there we go, as simple as that. Tommaso now is gonna shake all of those bees off into the shaker box to take away and to use them for mini mating nucs. I think you'll agree though, a beautiful golden Italian Lagustica Continental Gold Star Queen, what more could you want?
