In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards walks viewers through a spring hive inspection that reveals a complex queen problem: a drone‑laying F0 queen and a supersedure queen co‑existing on the same frame. He demonstrates how to diagnose a drone‑laying queen by spotting spotty drone brood, searches for and identifies both queens, and explains the decision‑making process of whether to kill the original queen, the supersedure queen, or both. Concluding that neither queen is viable, he removes both, cages them for testing, and requeues the colony with a newly mated F1 Buckfast queen. He outlines the requeening technique—placing the queen between brood frames, then checking at 7 and 14 days for eggs and worker brood to confirm a successful introduction. Throughout, he emphasizes careful observation, practical hive management, and the bees’ own decision‑making in supersedure scenarios.
Chapters
Right, clean hive tool, clean gloves. Let's get inside the colony and see if we can find this drone-laying queen. If you look at this hive from the front, you wouldn't think there's anything wrong with it. Loads of pollen coming in, loads of bees coming in, a strong, heavy, active hive in April. All is not well though. Let's get inside and see why. So if you opened up your colonies in spring and this is what you saw, you'd be thinking, yep, I'm happy with that, a box full of bees. And the drone layers, they do deceive you a little bit because As I said, there's not anything good in here. We've got a drone-laying queen, but the problem that we've got with a drone-laying queen is that you can't do anything unless you can find the queen and kill her. I'm going to do that now. I'm going to go through every single frame, see if we can find that queen. If we can find her, if we can kill her, it's the easiest manipulation in the world. The difficult bit is finding that queen. Let's get into the colony. I'm going to start in the middle, see if we can find that queen, and show you why this is a guaranteed failed queen that's turned drone layer. So a really, really easy one to diagnose there. You can see spotty drone brood all over that frame. The queen is struggling. Every single frame in the hive is exactly the same as that. I'll shake the bees off now and I'll give you a close look at this drone laying frame. So you can see there, bees on the frame. I'm going to shake it off now and you'll be able to see exactly what I mean. So there we go, really simple. If you're seeing this, highly likely that you've got a drone laying queen. I would discount laying workers at this point in the season, treat it as a drone-laying queen, and now all we need to do is go in, find the queen, kill the queen, and then we're going to requeen this colony. So I've got to find the queen now. As I said, this is the biggest challenge. Go through here. Luckily, the queen in here is an F0 badged-up queen, so I should be able to find her okay. Just a case of going through, taking your time, making sure you don't miss her. So there she is, easy to find with the badge on. Unfortunately, she has turned drone laying. Even artificial insemination can go wrong sometimes. But unfortunately, the only fix for this is to take that queen out, kill her, and replace her with a new freshly mated queen. Now, an interesting observation is there is a little bit of worker brood on there. Not a huge amount, but just a little bit. I'm going to show you why I'm going to discount that as anything that the bees are working towards, or the fact that the queen's okay. And I'm going to pull out every single frame and show you why. So again, on this frame here, you can see got a little bit of worker brood there, quite spotty, but lots of drone brood coming through as well. Now, if all of the frames were like this, I'd be inclined to say, okay, maybe she just missed firing a little bit early in the season. I'll give her a little bit longer to resolve it herself. But wait till you see all of the rest of the frames. So you can see on this frame lots of visible drones, actual drones walking around the frame, very Spotty drone brood as well, and then we're into nothing as well. So I'm going to go back through, find that queen, and I'm afraid she's going to have to get the chop. So I've been looking for ages. I can't find the queen again now. When I had her, I should have caged her up. I'll continue looking through, see if I can find her. Right, there's never a dull moment when it comes to beekeeping. See if you can spot what's going on on this frame that's thrown me a little bit. Really has thrown me. I know what's going on, but I have to say I wasn't expecting it. If you haven't spotted her already, look, there is another queen there. She looks like quite a well-mated queen, but that is not the queen that was in this hive before. So where does that leave us? Almost certainly what's happened here is that we've got a late season superseder. The superseder has almost certainly failed, and if I'm going to give one of these queens the chop, I'm definitely giving this one here the chop because the other one was laying well. And the fact that we've still got a little bit of worker brood in here, and then you've got some drone brood in here as well, this is going to be a difficult decision to make. Right, so there we go. Spot the awkwardness. One F0 mated inseminated queen, one supersedure queen, both on a single frame. So I've got a really difficult decision to make here. Do I kill the original queen? Do I kill the supersedure queen? What this hive is telling me here is that the original queen was either no good or they didn't like the pheromone and they've superseded her. They're living at the moment with 2 queens, but from the look of the state of the frames, neither of them are any good. And I know I said I might have to make a decision, I might have to kill the superseder queen or I might have to kill the original F0 queen, but all I know at the moment is that with the resources the bees have got, They're not able to thrive. Now that might be because they're only recognizing that, say, the supersedure queen is the queen and they're just waiting to kick out the F0 queen, or it might be the other way round. But regardless of that, if they're recognizing one of them, they've made a choice and they've made an informed decision on which one is best. They're going to make a much better decision than me. Mine is going to be potluck. So unfortunately, there's only one real way to fix this. And that is killing both of them. Kill the F0 queen, also kill the super seiger queen, and then we're going to introduce a newly mated queen. Okay, I wussed out. I put them both in cages. I might test to see which one of them is actually mated. I'm going to send the F0 queen back to the breeder. He can do some testing and see if there's anything wrong with her. What we're left with now though is one hopelessly queenless colony. I know there was a tiny bit of capped worker brood, but there were no viable eggs anywhere by the looks of it. So I'm going to go straight in and do an introduction. So really simple now. All I'm doing, putting the colony back together again. Not worrying about the fact that they've turned some of those cells a bit droney. Not ideal, but they've not wrecked them. Hopefully the new colony and the new queen will fix it. And then all I'm doing, taking a newly mated queen, F1 Buckfast queen. We're going to pop the tabs immediately and we're going to pop that into the colony. So we're just placing that down in between a couple of frames of brood in the middle, and then we'll leave the bees to it. So as you can see, immediate attention. We'll just leave that now for 7 days, come back, and hopefully we will see some eggs. And then after 14 days, we'll come back again and hopefully we will see some worker brood. So I'm always keen to finish these videos off and not leave you hanging. After 7 days, this is what you should see: eggs, good pattern. That doesn't mean anything though. We come back after 14 days, and what you should see then is worker brood in a nice pattern. And what that means is that you've had a successful introduction.
