Where’s The Queen?

Every time a beekeeper visits a hive, their main goal is to find the queen bee. Indications that she is alive, well, and laying eggs means the hive is alive, well, and growing!

When we first brought the hive home, finding the queen was easy. We just had five frames to hold and they weren’t completely covered in busy working bees. It was easy to see the brood patterns, if they had stored honey and nectar, and the queen stood out – different from the rest.

Coming out of two successful first inspections, I went into the third-week inspection feeling pretty cocky. After 30 minutes of searching, I never saw the queen – and at this point I had the hive open too long and the bees were getting nervous. I closed up the hive, discouraged and worried I had done something wrong.

Seeing my disappointment, my husband said we will try again together the next day. The next day, we searched and searched and never saw her, but we did see eggs. Honey bee eggs are small and look like translucent grains for rice. And thus we learned our first in-the-field lesson in beekeeping – finding eggs is much easier than locating a single queen in a hive containing ten-of-thousands of bees.

Five weeks later, the hive has more than doubled in size. We have almost 10 full frames to hold and inspect, we have added another deep brood box, and the queen has remained increasingly difficult to find – even with help from my eagle-eyed husband. But each week we find more bees, more larva, more eggs; all signs of a healthy and growing colony.