Mike,

Queens from aggressive hives have a tendency to exit the hive and 
crawl under the bottom board if there is sufficient space.  I 
personally had this happen to a queen from a very aggressive hive 
which would completely cover my vail obscuring my vision while 
searching through the hive.  Also, I received numerous stings on the 
back of my hands through the wet leather gloves.  The hive had three 
deep hivebodies and each was set on an individual bottom board with a 
top cover about 10 feet removed from the original hive location.  A 
new deep hivebody with frames of foundation and a frame of eggs from 
a gentle hive was set on the original hive location.  The foragers 
bees returned to the original location and reared a new gentle 
queen.  A week later, each of the other three splits were checked for 
queen cells which were destroyed and a frame of eggs from a gentle 
hive was given to the split.   The split with brood and the queen 
were still too aggressive and covered my vail while searching for the 
queen.  This 10 frame split was split again into two five frame nucs 
and checked again a week later to determine which nuc contained the 
queen.  The bees were still aggressive but did not cover my vail 
obscuring my vision.  Each of the five frames was inspected and I 
could not find the queen.  Then, the bees on each frame was shaken 
into an empty deep hivebody sitting atop a queen excluder and still 
no queen.  When I picked up the nuc, the queen was outside the box on 
the underside.

Jim Young
McAlester, OK

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