In this YouTube video, Laurence Edwards leads a hands‑on beekeeping demonstration with assistants Gaia and Tommaso, turning the search for a missing queen bee into an interactive game. They inspect nine frames and a feeder, guessing which contains the green‑marked queen. Throughout the inspection they comment on brood quality, presence of swarm cells, and the likelihood of swarming. After a systematic review—including checking the ventilated floor and shaking the feeder—they ultimately locate the queen on the wall of frame 9, mark her with green enamel paint, and explain how the find supports their plan to harvest young bees for mating nucs while preventing a swarm. The video blends instructional beekeeping techniques with audience engagement and a celebratory “happy ending.”
Chapters
So Tomaso and Gaia are looking in this colony here, trying to find the queen. They've already been through it once and they couldn't find her. Let's see if we can find her this time. So here are your options. She's in the feeder. Frame 1, frame 2, frame 3, frame 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I'm gonna stick with my lucky number 7. Your guess, Gaia? 4. Tomaso? 9. Okay, and then there's the other option is that they don't find it. That's definitely not going to happen. We are going to find this queen, right? So frame 1. Frame number 2, beautiful brood. You look on the inside as well, on the walls. So before we find this queen, stick it in the comments, what's your guess? 1 to 9, on the walls, she's not there. It's got to be one of those. Stick it in the comments. Nice system here, take out frame 3 before frame 2 goes back in. Good system for 2 people. So the possibility is she's not marked, but we think we're looking for a green-marked queen. So frame 3, frame 4, lots and lots of bees in this colony here. So Gaia thinks that it's because that I'm filming that's giving her bad luck. Probably is. So frame 5 coming out now. There's a snail on frame 5. Love it. Frame 6 coming out there. Beautiful frame of brood. No swarm cells. So it doesn't look like this colony swarmed, which would mean that the mated queen would not be there. Right, this is my guess. Frame 7. Come on. Come on, frame 7. All right, Tommaso taking out frame number 8. Remember, if you see the queen before we get to the end of the video, stick it on the comments. Frame number 9, there is another snail. So no sign of that queen. There is a small cluster of bees here. I'm just going to kind of have a look inside there. It's stung at the same time. When we can't find a queen in the UK, do you know where we look? Underneath. Is the ventilated floor? Yeah, so it would have to be an open ventilated floor. So if you guessed no queen, you might be right here. Frames are going back in the same position as before. So Tommaso is looking in the feeder, shaking out all the bees in the feeder to see if she's gone down in there, but no sign of her. Okay, yeah, the feeder is full with wild comb as well, so impossible to get them all out. So the correct answer was they could not find the queen. So what they're trying to do here is find the queen. Put her away, take some young bees and harvest them for mating nucs. And when they say when they can't find the queen, it's much better for them just to shake all of the bees in because this colony here will swarm otherwise and leave that single queen in the mating nuc. It means that one mating nuc will fail, but ultimately they'll get that mated queen back at some point. So it's really not an issue. And there we go. Oh, that was last ditch. Look. I found it! She was on the wall. So I take it back, everybody who thought it wasn't going to be found, you lose. Gaia wins, definitely. Tommaso is not so good, and I did not get it right either. On the wall. So we'll finish off now by marking that queen, remarking her with some green enamel paint. Don't you just love a happy ending?
