Is My Checkerboard Colony Doomed?
In this vlog, beekeeper Laurence Edwards revisits a large, checkerboard‑configured honeybee colony roughly a week after a previous inspection. He notes a puzzling decline in adult bee numbers despite the presence of eggs and brood across three deep boxes and two supers. Laurence explores possible explanations—early swarming, supersedure, or a combination—while searching for the queen, whose location remains unknown. After an extensive frame‑by‑frame search, he finally locates the queen, attempts to mark and wing‑clip her, but briefly loses her when she sticks to his glove. He successfully re‑captures her, applies a distinctive blue‑and‑white mark, and clips her wings. Throughout, he comments on the colony’s unusual behavior, the challenges of queen handling, and the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of his checkerboarding method. He concludes with a management plan: maintain a one‑to‑two‑box lead in supers, monitor the colony’s progress over the coming weeks, and assess whether the colony will thrive or collapse by year‑end.
Chapters
Right, we're back at the checkerboarded colony. I looked into this one yesterday, there was nowhere near as many bees. Ah, I do not believe it! Have they swarmed already? I think I may have found some emerged cells in there as well, but I also saw eggs, so I'm completely baffled, completely confused. I really want to find that queen, so I'm doing this video again. It's only about a week after I did the previous video. I know I'm not supposed to be going in there, but there's no point just leaving them and seeing how they get on without marking that queen. So I'm back here again. I'm going to try and mark the queen. I'll show you how the colony's getting on. I think the numbers have dropped a little bit. I think they might have swarmed. Let's get in, take a look. So these are the extra 2 supers that we put on a week ago. It's been quite a good flow here. There's not that many bees up here. They're not heavy. Things aren't looking good. And then this is the top box of the original checkerboard configuration. And I know it's a nice warm day today and the bees are out flying. I just get the feeling there's not quite as many bees in this one. That's the national deep. Another national deep, 14 by 12, but there's nothing pretty much up in those 2 supers. Let's get in, see if we can see any eggs, see if we can see that queen, and I'll show you the cells where I think there might have been a virgin that's emerged maybe over the past few months. I don't know, there might have been a really early supersedure. Whatever happens, we've got eggs in here, so there is a queen knocking around in here somewhere. But did they swarm early on in the year? I just don't know. So definitely not as much brood in this colony. That could just be a natural timing thing of the year, but I'm still expecting them to be pumping it out. Like, the amount of brood in this colony last week, I'd expect them to be a lot more bees in here than this. However, we've still got brood in all stages, and if you can see there— always difficult to see— we've got eggs. So there's a decent amount of eggs in here. It's turning into worker brood. It's not laying workers. I just get so confused with this colony because it's just not normally what you'd expect to see at this time of year. I'll continue through though. I'll pull out a few more frames. I really want to show you that queen, and I really want to show you a couple of the cells where it looks like something's emerged. Could be something that's emerged last year and I'm just reusing the frame, but with this colony, you just never know. Right, next box down. There was definitely more bees in this box last week. A lot, lot more bees and a huge amount of brood. Like I said, I'd be expecting them to be filling those supers with bees and with stores. The way things have been up here, I think I'm seeing a real decline in numbers, which makes no sense whatsoever because there's eggs and there is a queen in here, but there really does seem to be a lot less bees. So still got some really nice frames of brood in here. There's a lot more frames of eggs and larvae than there is frames of capped brood. Last time I counted 16 frames of all brood in all stages. Now what I'm seeing is a lot less big frames full of brood like this and a lot more frames full of eggs, really nicely laid up frames full of eggs. So it could just be the timing, but where did all those bees go? 16 frames of brood, there's not 16 frames of brood worth of bees knocking around in here a couple of weeks after I did that previous video. I just get so confused with this colony. Not normal, not what I'm used to. I really want to know where that original queen is. I want to get her marked because without getting her marked, I just can't understand what's going on. So this is the bottom box. Again, every time I go a step down, I'm thinking, where have all those bees gone? I know it's a warm sunny day and a lot of bees will be out foraging today, so you kind of have to take that into account. But I think there's a reduction in bees. Let's get inside here, pull out a couple of frames of brood. This is the box where I saw the frames where it had cells where it looked like something had emerged. Let's get in, see if we can find them. So this colony just continues to bamboozle me. I have no idea what's going on. So in this box here, all I will say, this bottom brood box, the original brood box at the bottom, there is a noticeable lack of eggs. I think I found like a small little patch on one of the frames. There's no drone brood down there though. But there was so much brood down there last week. All of that brood's emerged. I do not know where it's gone. I can't find the queen. I can't even find the cell that I saw the other day. So the bees are up to something. They're doing something very strange. And because I'm not coming in week after week checking what's going on, it's very, very difficult to diagnose exactly what's gone on on this hive. If they had swarmed in the last week, and it was only 2 weeks ago that you saw that video which shows you the state of this colony, What I would be expecting to see is numerous swarm cells. I'd come in, I'd see swarm cells, they'd be capped, all the bees would be gone, and I wouldn't be seeing eggs. That's not what I'm seeing because I can't see any capped swarm cells and I've still got eggs. I can't find the queen though. I go through this box again and again and again, and because it's over so many frames without a queen excluder, she can just move around. So when I pick up the box and put it over there, she can move between those boxes. Just don't know where she is. So the fact that I can't find her and the fact that I can't mark her, I can never prove that they haven't either swarmed or they haven't superseded. I was speaking to John, one of the guys that I chatted to about this manipulation, and he was saying that this can sometimes trigger regular supersedure. This could be what's happened here, in that the cell that I saw was a single supersedure cell. It was emerged, the 2 queens lived in harmony, for a couple of weeks. That new supersedure queen went out and got mated, and then the original queen left, and maybe she took some bees with her. That's not normally what happens with supersedures. Normally the original queen will just get kicked out and she won't take any bees with her. But maybe because it was such a big strong colony, some of the bees got confused and they left with the old queen. That's kind of a mixture of swarming and supersedure. And I'm not saying that's what's happened, I'm saying that is a potential possibility for what's happened in this All I can continue to do is open it up every now and again, look at what I'm seeing, and try and make sense of it. All I know though in the past 2 weeks is that this colony has gone backwards. It's not got bigger. There's less frames of brood, there's less bees, there's less frames of stores. I still can't find the queen, but I've got eggs across all 3 of the big boxes here. So all options are still on the table. We might end up at the end of the year with loads of honey and loads of bees. Or we might come back in 2 weeks and there's just nothing left. You'll have to wait until next time to see that one. I'm really excited because I have no idea what's going on. Absolutely zero clue what's going on with this colony, and I don't quite know how to manage it either because I can't find the queen. I'm going to spend another 5 minutes just going through. You'll see me zipping through the frames. I really do want to find that queen. I want to get her marked, but it really is a challenging situation trying to find her in such a big colony. She's definitely not marked. I'll give it one more go and I'll see if I can find her. You're gonna see the excitement here. There's a lot of excitement going on. I've found my queen and she is there and she is going under a cage. Yes, we found the queen finally after hundreds of frames. That was after the past few weeks. I found the queen and she's not marked. And her queen's not clipped. So is she the queen that started off the year, and is she the queen that went through the winter? Hmm, I really don't know. But I have found a queen in my colony, and I'm going to clip her wing now, and I'm going to mark her. There's eggs in this colony, there's bees in this colony. So okay, beginning of the year, did checkerboarding work? Don't know in terms of has this colony swarmed, has they superseded? I do not know. Has that worked? Not sure. All I do know is that for this stage of the year, to have a colony over still a 14 by 12 brood box, 2 national deeps, and venturing up into the supers, that's a really big colony. Will they swarm later on in the year? No idea. I really hope not. But what I can do, I'll mark this queen now. I'll clip the wing. At least we've got a positive ID. I'm going to mark her half Half blue, a really unique color configuration there that means that there's going to be no confusion as to whether that's the original queen. Finally, these videos are going to make sense. I'll show you the queen now. I'm so happy I found her. So here's my queen cage. You can see the bees are not happy that I've caged their queen. Just going to get in there, take that off, and there we go. There is my queen. You can see her, she's not fazed. She's not fazed. I just want to get in there really quickly and mark this queen before I lose her. Just getting my finger on her like that. Stop talking, get in there. I'm going to mark that queen now. Right, you cannot believe what's just happened. Sticky gloves. I've gone in to mark the queen, hold her down. And she got stuck to my glove and all the bees swarmed around it and she's gone. Oh my God, like, can you believe that? Most annoying thing in the world. I should have marked her before I clipped her. That was my really stupid mistake there. So as always, No Nonsense Beekeeping, I'll share my mistakes with you. I gotta find her again, but at least I know she's in this box now. So with a little bit of luck, I should be able to find her. In fact, I guarantee I will find her. Right, so these bees are so protective of their queen. Look, look what they're doing around that queen there. Very, very strange behavior. Hopefully you can see that though without them going a little bit too crazy on her. She is now marked blue and white. There we go, there's a nice little image for you. Blue and white, really unique marking for that queen. I'm going to clip her wings now as well. I can't believe I nearly lost that queen. That would have annoyed me for days if I hadn't found her. You all know the feeling of not being able to find queens. Absolutely nothing worse than finding her and then losing her. You can see all the bees, they're not happy with the markings. They are so attentive over that queen. Let's get her wing clipped now and Then we stand every chance of not losing that swarm. Right, so I've just gone to clip her and she's decided to come off on my hand. This queen is very, very strange, really is. You don't often see them kind of get so up close and personal. They just want to go away. I'm going to shake her back in now before she goes anywhere. And there you go, you can see how she's just jumped off of her own accord. Very strange, very flighty little queen. I'm going to close this colony back up now. We've clipped the queen, we've given her a unique marking, we've got eggs, we've got brood in all stages, we've got 3 boxes of bees. Let's see how we go going forward. Right, I'm going to put everything back together. I am so, so happy I found that queen. Lost the queen, found her again, marked her, clipped her wing. We've got eggs, we've got brood, we've got loads of bees. I'm going to leave this colony now for at least a couple of weeks and do nothing more than peek in the top If there's no bees up there, I'll leave them. If we've got some bees up there, I'll add some more supers in. I just want to keep one box ahead, 2 boxes ahead of them, and then we will see where we get to at the end of the year. Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about with checkerboarding, check out this video here which shows you exactly how we set this colony up in January of this year.
