Method To Test If There Is A Queen In Your Beehive - Simple And Reliable Way To Confirm Queen Status

Today's episode, I'm going to show you how to prove whether your colony has got a queen in it or not got a queen in it. And I'm not saying whether that's a mated queen or a virgin queen, because the test here is going to prove to you whether there is a queen in the colony. Doesn't prove whether the queen in the colony is a virgin, it doesn't prove whether the queen in the colony is mated. So the test is really, really simple. All you need to do to identify whether a colony is queenless or not is to place a frame of eggs into the brood nest. If there is a queen in that colony, whether she is a fully mated queen or she is a virgin queen, the bees will not pull out emergency queen cells on that frame. If there is no queen in that colony whatsoever, they will pull out emergency queen cells on that frame. It's the easiest test in the world. And I'm going to show you how to do that in today's video. Right, so the first thing you need to do is you need to find a colony with some eggs. I know this colony's got loads of eggs in it, so I'm going to find a couple of frames of eggs, take them over to the 2 colonies that I've got that I suspect are queenless. Right, so here are my 2 frames of eggs, and I know that this frame over here looks a little bit crazy with lots of drone brood, but what you're looking for is nice Worker brood, eggs, and larvae. You can see in that one there, got some nice worker brood, and then down here I've got eggs and larvae. Need to make sure that there are eggs or very, very small young larvae. Same with this frame over here, lots of larvae. You can see it brood in all stages. Best way to do it though, pick out a nice frame of eggs. That's what you're looking for. So then take your frame of eggs to your suspected queenless colony, and all we're going to do, really, really simple, we're going to take a single frame of eggs and we're going to put it into the brood nest of the suspected queenless colony. Simple as that, nothing fancy. All we're expecting the bees to do, if they're queenless, they're going to draw out those cells into emergency queen cells. They're going to turn the eggs or the very young larva Into emergency queen cells, and that's going to prove to us that this colony here is queenless. If they don't do that, they prove to us that the colony isn't queenless. Really, really simple. So I'm going to open this one up now, get that frame of eggs introduced. So when you're introducing it, you want to go right in the very middle, pull out that middle frame of brood. We've got an Abelo 11 frame here, so we've got 5 frames on either side. Make a space in the middle, and that's where I'm going to put my frame of eggs. So just take your frame of eggs, straight in the middle, close it back up. Simple as that. So that's it, that is the manipulation complete for the time being. You need to come back in around 3 or 4 days. You can come back in a week if you want. I do weekly rounds, so I'm probably going to come back in a week to this one, but you need to give it at least 3 or 4 days because then that will give you the signs that they're starting to draw those emergency So I'm going to do another colony here today that I suspect has got a virgin in it. So it's a little swarm that I caught. I think it's probably got a virgin in there, but there's no eggs. The colony looks queenless. I'm going to add a frame of eggs into that swarm as well because I don't think they're going to draw them out. I'm going to give you a positive test and a negative test. So I'm just going to go over to this little nuc now, add a frame of eggs to a swarm where I think there is a virgin queen. Right, so this little nuc here, this is the swarm that I caught in the bee inspector video. So if you saw the bee inspector video, you'll see that we found a swarm on the side of that hive. We suspect that there's a virgin in there, and this was the nuc that I housed them in. So this applies to any swarm, and it's quite a good example really, because I think once you find swarms, you just don't know whether there's a queen in there or not. And the majority of the time, there probably is a virgin in there, and she might not go out, she might not get mated, you might not see eggs and you might be asking yourself the question, is my colony queenless? So I'm gonna add a frame of eggs into this swarm as well. And my prediction is gonna be that they're not gonna draw out cells because of the presence of a virgin queen. I might be proven completely wrong and I might prove that there was no queen in that swarm as well. So we'll add the frame of eggs into the swarm, see how we get on. So same rules apply, split the colony, get that frame of eggs into the middle, as close as you can into the middle of What is the cluster? 'Cause there's no brood nest here. We'll close it back up and we'll see, have we got a queen in this swarm? Just double-checking, no eggs in here at the moment. No sign of any queen, although there might be one in here. So this is a really good example of a swarm that's been recently captured that I want to do a test on to see whether there's a queen in there. So I'm just going to take my frame of eggs, pop it into the middle, close them back up, come back in 3 or 4 days for both of these colonies, And I'll see the queenlessness status, the little swarm, and the big colony behind me.

Right, so it's been 7 days since we put the test frame of eggs into this small swarm.

I'm gonna go inside now and check and see whether there is a queen in there.

And remember, if there is cells on that test frame, that means there isn't a queen.

And if there's no cells on that test frame, that means there is a queen.

So this is what the colony looks like. Not much expansion, but you wouldn't expect to see that after a week anyway because there wasn't a mated queen in here. So it was either a virgin or nothing at all. Get inside now and take a look at the frames. And there you go, that shows why this test is so important. This was the colony I thought was probably going to have a virgin queen in there, and I've done the test and look at the amount of emergency cells on there, covered all over. So many emergency cells. It's a resounding no from this colony. Is there a mated queen in here? Is there a virgin queen in here? Are they hopelessly queenless? Well, they're not now because they've got those frames, but they definitely were before I put that one in. So you have a couple of options at this point. So if you just want to let this colony go, you can leave them like that.

I find with really small colonies like this, you don't even need to knock those emergency cells back down to one. You could just leave that and let the virgins fight it out, come back in a few weeks, and there will probably be a mated queen in here. I don't like rearing queens from emergency cells though, and this wasn't the, the purpose of this video, to requeen these colonies with a frame of eggs. I see the test frame as a little bit of a booster for the colony, especially if they're small, but the main purpose of it is to identify whether the colony was hopelessly queenless.

And in this case, Didn't think it would be actually.

In this case they were, so there was no virgin in that swarm.

So for me, what I'm going to do with this colony, I'm going to knock down all of these cells here.

I'm going to put them back to hopelessly queenless, and I'm going to add a mated queen because then I know what the quality of the genetics is like.

So that's it, box number 1 done.

We've done the test and we've proven that there was no queen in the box.

Right, on to the second colony then. So the first one we had a positive result, saying there was no queen in the colony.

I've knocked down all of the cells, they're back to hopelessly queenless, and I guarantee that they're hopelessly queenless now because they've proven to me they are queenless by producing those cells, and then I've taken down all of the cells. So they are definitely hopelessly queenless, can move on to introduction.

This one here, we'll do the same thing again, take a look for that frame. If we see cells on it, it means they were hopelessly queenless. And there we go, same with this frame here. You can see emergency cells on the frame. I squished a few of them down there in the bottom corner as I took that frame up, but again, the bees have showed me here that there is emergency cells being drawn when they're offered eggs or larvae, and that is an indication that the colony was hopelessly queenless. So there you go, you can see from this frame here Loads of emergency cells all over it again.

I was pretty confident that that one was queenless because I found the virgin that had been in there for about 3 weeks, and I took her down because there was no way she was getting mated in the rain. But I just wanted to prove to you that that is a foolproof method for determining whether there is a queen in your colony.