On Wed, 29 May 2002 18:21:37 -0400 Coleene Davidson
<[log in to unmask]> writes:
> > Requeening was my first thought, however, this hive is HUGE.
> There is no
> > way to find the queen with the current population.

Coleene,
I had a similar problem this past weekend, huge hive and the need to find
her majesty. After spending too much time looking over frame after frame,
I remembered a method I read about in an old Bee Culture. The author
(sorry I don't remember your name) set each full body aside, off the
bottom board. He then set an empty body on the bottom board and covered
it with a queen excluder and then another empty body on top of the
excluder. He then proceeded to brush all the bees off each frame, one at
a time, into the empty top body. When a frame was clean of bees, he would
slide the top body and excluder aside and slip it into the empty bottom
body. The workers "tended" to work their way DOWN through the excluder to
get back to the frames. The drones and yes, the queen remains on the
excluder.

It was my savior. The queen just happened to be in the first body I used
this technique on, and it didn't even take 10 minutes! Normally I don't
have to resort to such measures, but I couldn't find the old gal by just
looking over all those workers.

If you give it a try, I hope you experience similar success!

Ed Heinlein
Helena, MT