In this video, the presenter takes viewers to an Italian apiary where beekeepers Gaia and Tommaso discover an exceptionally rare event: two mated queens living together on a single frame within the same hive. The dual‑queen situation appears to have arisen from a failed supersedure—an older queen that is declining and a newer superseder queen that has not fully taken over. Both queens are poorly mobile and not laying eggs, and the colony is tending to both without a clear dominant queen, likely as a survival strategy. The beekeepers discuss management options, deciding to wait for the next supersedure attempt and, if that also fails, to requeen the colony in late summer (August‑September), a period known for successful queen introductions. The video highlights the rarity of observing two queens on a frame, the colony’s unusual tolerance of both, and practical steps beekeepers can take when faced with such a scenario.
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Today I'm going to show you one of the most rare events in beekeeping, 2 mated queens living naturally together in a single beehive. Let's go and check it out. So I'm out here in Italy with Gaia and Tommaso. They're going through these colonies searching for the queens, pinning the queens down, and then they're using the young bees to create stock of mini mating nucs. Gaia here has found 2 queens working together on a single frame. Have you ever seen anything like that in your life? So what they think's happened is one of these queens here has failed. They've tried to supersede her with another queen, but the superseder hasn't gone perfectly well. So the bees here have to choose between these 2 queens, and they basically can't choose a good queen. This queen might be the original mated queen, and then this is the superseder queen that's not gone well. So what the bees have decided to do here is to leave both of the mated queens to work together in the colony, because that's going to give them the very best chance of survival. I have to say, I've never seen it before where you just get 2 queens living together in a colony like this. for an extended period of time. During a queen supersedure, you will get maybe a few weeks where the old supersedure queen is kept around to ensure that the new queen is able to provide for the colony. But it's very, very rare to see 2 queens living like this without them bumping off the old queen. Now you can see from this queen here, she's not moving very well. She's not trying to lay eggs. The bees are trying to tend to her and it's not very successful at all. So what Tommaso and Gaia think here is that both of these queens here are going to fail. So what's your plan of action? What would you do? So what Tommaso and Gaia just said there is what they will do is they will wait for the next queen supersedure and hope that that is successful. If that's not successful, they requeen at the end of the year around August, September time because they find the introduction is very successful at that time of the year. But this here is super cool. It's rare to find 2 queens in a hive. It's even more rare to find 2 queens on a frame, but to find them next to each other like that, living in harmony, is very, very strange indeed.
