Not sure if your colony has a queen? Here’s how to find out for certain.
Laurence walks you through the test step by step, including a positive and a negative result, so you know exactly what you’re looking for.
- One frame of eggs is all you need
- Works whether the queen is mated, unmated, or absent
- Results in three to four days
Worrying about a queenless colony is something every beekeeper goes through. The bees look unsettled. There are no eggs you can find. You’re not sure whether there’s a queen in there or not, or if she’s mated. It’s one of those situations where you can convince yourself of almost anything if you stare at the frames long enough.
This test cuts through all of that. It won’t tell you whether you have a mated queen or a virgin queen. What it will tell you, definitively, is whether there’s any queen at all. And that’s the information you actually need before you take any further action.
What the frame of eggs test actually proves
Bees have a strong instinct to raise a new queen when they sense they’re without one. If you place a frame of eggs (very young larvae included) into a queenless colony, the bees will immediately begin drawing out emergency queen cells on that frame. They can’t help it. It’s what they do.
If there is a queen in the colony, whether she’s fully mated and laying, or an unmated virgin wandering the frames, the bees will not draw out emergency cells. The queen’s presence suppresses that impulse.
So the result is binary:
- Emergency cells appearing on the test frame = the colony was queenless
- No emergency cells on the test frame = the colony has a queen
It doesn’t matter if you can’t find the queen yourself. The bees will tell you.
What you’ll need
You only need one thing: a frame of eggs from a healthy colony.
When you’re selecting the frame, look for:
- Nice worker brood with eggs and very young larvae (larvae no more than three days old)
- A mix of eggs and small larvae gives the bees more to work with
Avoid frames that are mostly capped brood as the bees need access to young larvae to produce queens using the emergency impulse.
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Step by step: how to run the test
1. Find your frame of eggs
Go to a colony you’re confident is healthy and queenright. Find a frame with good worker brood, eggs, and small larvae. You want to be sure the eggs are fresh, ideally from a colony you know has a productive, well-mated queen. Shake ALL the bees off and back into the hive. We just want the frame of eggs/larvae and no bees (few bees is fine though!)
2. Introduce the frame into the suspected queenless colony
Open up the suspected queenless colony. Find the brood nest. In the case of a small swarm with no brood yet, look for the centre of the cluster. Pull out a frame to make space, then place your test frame right in the middle.
There’s nothing complicated about this. You’re just putting a frame of eggs into the centre of the hive. Close it back up.
3. Leave it alone for three to four days
This is the hardest part. Don’t go back in too early. You need to give the bees time to respond.
Three to four days is the minimum. You can leave it a full week if your inspection schedule works that way. By day three or four, if the colony is queenless, you’ll start to see emergency cells being drawn out. By a week, they’ll be well developed and hard to miss.
4. Read the result
When you go back in, look at the test frame:
- Emergency queen cells present. The colony was hopelessly queenless. The bees have confirmed it for you.
- No emergency cells. The colony thinks it has a queen. She may be a virgin who hasn’t started laying yet, but she’s there.
What to do when the result is positive
If you see emergency cells on your test frame, you have options.
Option one: let the bees raise their own queen. If you’re happy with whatever genetics come from the emergency cells, you can leave the bees to it. For small colonies, Laurence often doesn’t even knock the cells down to one. He lets the virgins fight it out. Come back in a few weeks and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll have a mated queen.
Option two: introduce a mated queen. This is Laurence’s preferred approach when he wants to control the quality of the genetics. Knock the emergency cells down, leaving the colony definitively hopelessly queenless (no queens AND no resources to make one), then introduce a mated queen. You’ll know exactly what you’re getting.
If you go the introduction route, read our guide to requeening your beehive before you start. Getting the introduction right makes the difference between success and the bees balling the new queen.
A note on virgin queens and swarms
This test is especially useful when you’ve recently caught a swarm and you’re not sure whether it came with a queen. Swarms almost always contain a mated or virgin queen, but not always. And virgins don’t lay, so you can’t check for eggs.
In Laurence’s video, he runs the test on exactly this scenario: a freshly caught swarm he thought probably had a virgin. He was wrong. The bees drew out a full set of emergency cells, proving the swarm had arrived with no queen at all.
Don’t assume. Run the test.
When to use this test
This test is worth running any time:
- You can’t find eggs on inspection and you’re not sure why
- Your colony has been queenless for a while and you want to confirm before requeening
- You’ve caught a swarm and want to verify it has a queen
- You’ve recently removed a queen (for example, a failing virgin) and want to confirm the colony is now queenless before introducing a replacement
- Your bees are behaving unusually: more defensive, less productive, noisy
It’s a low-risk, high-information manipulation. The frame of eggs costs you nothing except a brief disturbance to your donor colony, and the result is definitive.
