Hi All Enjoyed this thread especially the bit about the excluder box - will be making one soon. I worked out a little trick for finding queens that seems to work reasoably well if you don't scare the bees. If you have an empty frame with nothig in it handy, just place it betweenn two frames of uncapped brood. I use mainly single brood chambers so it is easy to work out the direction the queen is movinng the nest in. Close the hive up, come back in half an hour annd very genntly open the hive, put one small puff of smoke onto the top of the hive, place the smoker nearby so the wind wafts the smoke through and remove the new comb - most of the time the previous disturbance seems to have made the queen hide, and the vast new laying space provided by the empty comb attracts her and she will be on that frame. Another thing that is quite handy, and I have absolutly no knowledge why this is, but the bee louse, Braulo coece (I think) often seems to infest the bees near the queen, so if one has bee lice in the hive, looking for many bees with them is like looking for the queen. Of course there is the newly hatched queen problem - I don't know if anybody else has had that dissapointing sinking feeling when you lift out the frame, find the queen and she flies away - and never comes back! Keep well Garth --- Garth Cambray Camdini Apiaries 15 Park Road Apis melifera capensis Grahamstown 800mm annual precipitation 6139 Eastern Cape South Africa Phone 27-0461-311663 On holiday for a few months Rhodes University Which means: working with bees 15 hours a day! Interests: Fliis and bees Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post in no way reflect those of Rhodes University.