> As I wrote earlier that there was no sign that there was ever a queen in the > hive, I forgot to mention one detail I noticed. There were cup cells all over > the place as if the bees had "hope" that somehow an egg would magically > appear from somewhere. You just said the "magic words", cell cups all over........ ;-) That's a pretty reliable (if there is anything reliable with bees...) sign of queenless hive. Often combined with a nervous behaviour among the bees, sometimes roaring. Just want to mention what I often do if I suspect there is a virgin running around (virgins often hides on the bottom board and generally try to make it as hard as possible for the beekeeper) and I want to introduce a queen of known origin instead. I use the excluder as a sieve. Just put a box, with or without frames, on the bottom board. An excluder on the box, and another empty box on that. Then shake bees from the frames into the empty box and smoke them down through the excluder. All drones and queens will bee found in the empty box. Doesn't take more than a few minutes, a lot quicker than looking all over the frames...... Disadvantage; bees will get "slightly" upset over that procedure and not work much more that day. So not so good during a flow, but if you want to find that queen...... And, as it has been found necessary to point out again, virgins DO NOT get through excluders easier than mated queens. The limit is the thorax (middle part of body) that prevent queens, and drones, from getting trough. Of course there will be some tiny queen that makes it, but she will go trough even when mated. -- Regards P-O Gustafsson, Sweden [log in to unmask] http://www.algonet.se/~beeman/