A queen in a colony must be productive. One doesn’t need to find the queen in order to determine if she is performing well. I mark my queens as shown above so she is easier to find. I will only need to find her if I must replace her for some reason. By the way, finding the queen is a rewarding experience when you check frames. It can be very frustrating if you can’t find her. I can remember a statement made by Steve Taber back in the 1990s when he remarked that beekeepers are the common reason many colonies fail. Failing to understand the life cycle of honey bees and apply that know-ledge to beekeeping practices results in failure.
It is not hard to spot a bad queen
One might look at a queen honey bee and say something like, “She is beautiful.” A queen needs to be judged on what else you can see. I have listed below two queen issues easy to spot when examining a hive. Not one of them has to do with
the physical appearance of the queen — not the size, not the color and not the age.
Aggressive bees
It is not fun to work with aggressive bees. This is an issue with a solution — find the queen and kill her. It is important to have a replacement queen ready. It is not easy to find a queen in a strong colony and many aggressive colonies have large populations. Note how the beekeeper in Photo 1 is dressed and note the number of bees in the air and on his suit. It was necessary in his situation to find the queen by taking all frames out of the brood chamber …
