3.0 PRACTICE OF BEEKEEPING
The candidate will be:
3.9 able to describe the signs of a queenless colony and how to test if a colony is queenless;
NOTES
A colony without a queen will have no brood. However a colony can have no brood and still have a queen if she hasn’t mated yet, or has stopped laying for some other reason.
If there is no queen in the hive the colony can appear agitated and disorganised – but this is rather hard to judge.
The test for queenlessness is to put in a frame from another hive that contains eggs and very young larvae. Inspect the frame five days later and if the workers have started to make queen cells on the introduced frame then you can be sure that the colony has no queen.
In a colony that has not had a queen for some time the workers may start to lay eggs in desperation. See Notes 3.10.