With thousands of bees in a hive, how does one fine THE queen in all that activity?
In: Biology
My father was a bee keeper. The queen is a bit larger, so you look for that. With time it gets easier. And sometimes you just put a tiny drop of paint on her. It isn’t really that hard to find her.
Sometimes, if you have a big hive, as in many floors, you can put a queen excluder which is like a mesh where the queen can’t pass through (she’s wider and longer than a worker bee. Also the drones can’t pass as they are a lot bigger than workers). This excluder exists so that your top floors only contain honey/pollen and the lower ones may contain honey and eggs/larvae… And you only look for the queen on the lower floor. Also, they are usually around where the new eggs are. These eggs are freaking small, like a white dot at the bottom of the cells. After a day they are a tad bigger, the queen stays near the newest ones.
The comment where they say the bees ball up on the queen is wrong, that only happens when they want to kill her (for being a second one or from another hive) and there are tricks to make them “adopt” a new foreign queen. Ask if you wanna know more.
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