In article <[log in to unmask]>, Peter Hutton
<[log in to unmask]> writes in answer to Wolfgang Poehlmann
>I do not know of a method that will discover whether you have a queen present,
>whether fertile or infertile,
 
A fairly reliable indication is to cage the queen of another colony in a
reasonably large shipping cage. Place it briefly on the top bars of the
brood chamber of the colony you are working. If the bees feed her they
are looking for a queen. If they are hostile then they already have one.
Persist for a few minutes if the results are not instant, and only
rarely will you get an inconclusive answer. Quickly put the queen back
to her proper home. However, we generally only do this kind of thing
with the spare queens we carry about with us during the active season.
Doing it in winter with the disruption to both colonies is not something
I would undertake.
 
Finding the queen in the subject colony is an altogether different
matter.
 
>if you have a virgin queen present then uniting
>the colony with a queenright colony will lose you the laying queen. A virgin
>queen will always kill a laying queen.
 
We have found this piece of tradition to be unreliable, surprisingly
often the older queen is left after uniting. If practicable we do always
try to kill the unwanted queen first, but due to time constraints this
is not always possible and we have to rely then on nature taking its
course.
> If your bees are in a beehouse then you
>might be able to thoroughly inspect them to find the queen, kill her and then
>unite them, you can always make up a nucleus next Spring.  Queenless bees are
>recogniseable by experience in the way they move and the noise they make.
 
If they are in a queenless (or perhaps even if not) state one must
always ask if they are worth the effort of persevering with. You are
often a lot better off doing away with such colonies and splitting your
better ones in spring into the vacant hive(s). Buy or breed a new queen
for the queeless half. A lot less hassle than attempting to salvage
anything from a hopeless case. I have tried almost everything to save
colonies like this, and occasionally (and foolishly) still do, it is
hard to make the ruthless decision at times. But it is almost invariably
wrong. Give it the chop and start with a fresh split in spring.
 
If you feel you must requeen it, then southern hemisphere queens are
available right now. Carnica can be got from Australia amongst others. I
would however hazard that the prognosis for a colony requeened at this
time under the described circumstances would remain very poor.
 
 
 
Murray
 
--
Murray McGregor