Hello All

We had a very useful exchange of stratagems on avoiding the need to find the
queen, and I thank all who assisted in developing the idea.

I have been thinking some more on this. Many beekeepers recognise that
having a marked queen is better than not, and so do I. I am going to try out
an approach, which if it works, will assist me to mark the queen by cutting
down the number of frames to be searched to just one.

Suppose I create an artificial swarm using the 'Queen Isolator' so that the
parent hive ends up with the queen (unmarked), one frame of brood and the
rest  empty frames (standard procedure). This hive will be some distance
from its old stand to reduce the number of bees in the hive. I then close up
this hive and wait say half an hour or so. Will not the queen be on the
frame of brood?.

If this works it should give me confidence in finding the queen on a limited
search and then as confidence builds, who knows that maybe next year I can
dispense with this procedure and search the entire hive.

Any thoughts please?

Sincerely

Tom Barrett
49 South Park, Foxrock
Dublin 18
Ireland
Tel + 353 1 289 5269
Fax + 353 1 289 9940