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Where this comes from. The waiting times and the test frame method are Wally Shaw’s, from two free Welsh Beekeepers’ Association booklets. The seven day version of the test is the National Bee Unit’s, from its fact sheet on swarm control when you cannot find the queen (January 2019). The laying worker signs and the shake-out are Ian Craig’s, from two sets of Scottish Beekeepers’ Association notes. Sources at the foot of the page.
No brood does not mean no queen
An empty brood box looks like a disaster, and quite often it is not one. A colony can be queenright and have nothing in the comb, and some of the reasons are things you did on purpose.
- An artificial swarm. Both halves start broodless. The half holding the old queen is broodless only briefly, because she carries on laying. The half that keeps the young bees goes much longer, because it has no laying queen until the new one gets going. 7
- Winter. A colony in January has little or no brood and is perfectly well.
- A colony that has re-queened itself. The old queen went with the swarm and the new one has not started. That gap is normal.
So the question is never whether there is brood. It is whether enough time has gone by that there should be.
Work out the dates first
Do the sums before you take a frame out.
- Sixteen days from egg to a queen emerging. 4
- A few days in the hive, then orientation flights. She usually mates within the first ten days of her life.
- Three weeks from emergence is a fair time to expect a laying queen. Four weeks is the absolute limit. 1
Shaw also warns that queens which come into lay late fail more often later on. So a queen who only just scrapes in at four weeks is one to watch.
Three weeks from emergence, mind, not three weeks from the day you started worrying. None of it works without a date, so write down the day the swarm went, or the day you split the hive.
What the bees tell you
Take the queen away and the bees know within ten to fifteen minutes. They wander about at the entrance and on the sides of the hive looking for her, foraging drops off sharply, and the colony gets shorter tempered. 5
The hopeful signs are worth reading too. A settled colony, and an arc of polished empty cells in the middle of the brood nest, both suggest a queen is on her way. Bees running about, fanning their wings and making a roaring noise suggest she is not.
None of it is proof. A calm colony with a laying arc is encouraging and nothing more. If you want an answer rather than an impression, you have to test.
The test frame
A test frame is a frame of eggs and young larvae borrowed from another colony. Take a frame out of the doubtful hive and put the test frame in its place, near the middle of the box. 1
It has to carry eggs and young larvae. The bees build an emergency queen cell around a young larva, so a frame of sealed brood tells you nothing at all.
Do it sooner rather than later. If there is no queen in the box, every day you wait is a day wasted.
One warning. You are carrying comb from one hive into another. Clean the hive tool between the two, and do not use a colony you have doubts about as the donor. Hive tools, and keeping them clean has the routine.
Reading the result
Queen cells on the test frame mean there was no queen. The National Bee Unit uses the same logic in its method for swarm control when you cannot find the queen. Leave it seven days. Emergency cells in a box mean she is not in that box, and no cells with eggs coming through mean she probably is. 3
No queen cells is the awkward answer. It means the colony thought it had a queen when you gave it the frame. Usually that is a queen who is about to start laying. Just occasionally it is a queen who never will, and a colony like that cannot be re-queened until she has been found and removed. 2
If you do get cells, start counting again. A cell built on a one day old larva can give you an emerged queen by day twelve, counted from the day you put the frame in. That larva was already four days on from the egg, so day twelve of the test is day sixteen of the queen. The mating comes after that.
Shaw warns that a queen mated from July on is less likely to get through her first winter than one mated in May or June. So a test frame in June is a rescue, and one in September often is not.
A drone-laying queen
Domed cappings on worker sized cells. That is the sign. A worker cell is capped flat and a drone cell is capped raised, so a domed cap on a worker cell means the egg in it was never fertilised. Either she never mated properly, or the sperm she stored is used up. A defect inside her does the same thing. Early on you may see good worker brood among the drone brood, and the good share only shrinks. 1
The drones she raises in worker cells come out small and stunted. Her laying pattern can look tidy enough, so it is the cappings that give her away, and unlike a non-laying queen she is still in there to be found. 5
You cannot re-queen over the top of her. She has to be found and taken out first, and then the colony can have a queen cell, a mated queen, or a colony that already has one.
Laying workers
Workers start laying once a colony has been queenless for at least three weeks with no way of raising a replacement. The ovaries of a few of them develop far enough to lay. Every egg is unfertilised, so every one becomes a drone, and those drones come out small and stunted. 5
- More than one egg in a cell, often several.
- Eggs stuck to the cell wall rather than standing on the bottom. A worker’s abdomen is too short to reach the base of the cell. 6
- Domed cappings on worker comb, in patches, with no pattern to them.
- No queen, however long you look.
One thing catches people out. A young queen who has just started laying sometimes puts more than one egg in a cell, and she settles down within a short time. Hers sit at the bottom of the cell. So several eggs on their own are not a verdict.
The shake-out, and the argument about it
The usual answer is a shake-out. Ian Craig’s own routine is to move the hive a hundred metres off, tip every bee onto the grass there, and set the empty hive back on its old stand. The bet is on weight. A laying worker cannot get airborne, and the rest of them are field bees who know the way home. Twelve hours later, unite a queenright nucleus with the bees that flew back, or put that nucleus over the feed hole of a different colony. 6
His notes for the Scottish Beekeepers’ Association certificate take the hive away instead, so the bees have to get into another colony or not at all. The reason given is blunt: the bees left in a laying worker colony are too old to be worth keeping. Those notes also set one hard rule. Do not shake a colony out if you suspect disease. 5
Shaw does not settle the argument. He never discusses shaking a laying worker colony out at all. What he does say is that where the bees are worth saving, uniting them with a queenright colony is the safe option. He adds that these colonies are said to reject a mature queen cell or a laying queen, and that in practice they usually take one. 1 So the disagreement is about the bees rather than the method. Work out whether a box of old bees is worth the trouble, and the answer follows.
When it is not the queen at all
Patchy brood is not automatically a failing queen. Inbreeding gives you the same picture. A diploid drone egg is spotted by the nurse bees as it hatches and eaten, so the gaps are all you ever see, and the result is the pepperpot look. In an isolated apiary it can affect up to half the brood, and those colonies fail to build up to full strength. It is not a brood disease and should not be taken for one. 6
So read the brood you do have before you condemn the queen who made it. Reading a frame covers what a good pattern and a patchy one look like. If the brood itself looks wrong rather than thin, the foulbrood duties come before the queen question.
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Rules change - always check the current guidance on GOV.UK before relying on it.