Luckily, you can practice without ever opening your hives by playing Queenspotting! To play, be sure you are following me on Instagram, click here to see my account, where I often post Queenspotting pictures. Many beekeepers still struggle to develop this skill even after several years of beekeeping. If you’re a hobbyist with only a few hives, you might not have many opportunities to practice finding your queen. The longer you have your hive open, the more likely she is to flee into a corner.
Queens tend to hide if the colony feels exposed or disturbed.
If you need to find your queen, you should also be fairly quick about it. For that reason, you should observe brood frames more carefully, especially those with new eggs on them. Although it’s possible, the queen is unlikely to be on frames that are entirely honey. Queens are in the business of laying eggs, so the most likely place to find your queen is in the nursery. It is an almost flower-like shape, each worker a petal facing the queen in the center. A resting queen will have a circle of worker bees around her. The pattern is changed also when she is still. Some beekeepers are able to find their queens just by searching for this disruption. This movement creates a visual break in the pattern of the hive. She charges quickly through worker bees, who often move out of her way, leaving a wake of of empty comb behind her. When the queen makes her way across the frame, she seems to move with a purpose.
What if your colony were to raise a new queen, who is a different color from your original and without a mark? It’s better to look beyond her coloring and study her shape, movement and habits. So, while you may have learned to find your particular queen because she is golden and marked with a red dab of paint, you might not be able to spot a queen otherwise. Searching for your queen based only on the superficial feature of color will handicap your ability to find the queen. Yet, queens can be a range of colors and the paint on marked queens can wear off over time. They may mistakenly believe that queens are a lighter color than the workers or they may only search for the colorful mark of paint on their queens back without ever really studying her true appearance. Her back is bald, black and shiny.Ī lot of new beekeepers try to rely on color for identifying the queen. Her wings are short in comparison with her body and do not reach the end of her abdomen. It’s really her shape that distinguishes her. Queen can vary in size, but she is usually only slightly larger than a worker bee. Often when I show new beekeepers the queen for the first time in person, they remark that they thought she would be bigger. The queen bee can be distinguished from other bees by her appearance, but she’s not as obvious as you would think.
#QUEEN BEE GAME HOW TO#
Read on for some helpful tips on how to find the queen bee. Plus, developing your queenspotting skills is fun and will boost your beekeeping confidence. While it’s true that you don’t always need to find your queen, it is necessary on some occasions (such as when you’re requeening). Initially, I was just having a bit of fun, but as the game became more and more popular, I realized it was actually helping beekeepers develop an important skill: how to spot the queen bee. I post an image of a lot of bees and then challenge people to find the queen among the sea of workers. Since 2012 I have been playing a game called Queenspotting with my followers on social media.
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