Marking the queen bee

Watch our beekeeper sister Helen perform the task of finding the queen bee inside one of our monastery’s beehives to put a mark on her so that she can easily be recognised in future.

“It’s very helpful for beekeepers to have marked queens,” Sr Helen explains. “It makes them easy to see and find, and the beekeeper can also tell how old their queens are. Each frame of comb must be very carefully scanned to find the queen. She is much longer and often lighter in colour than the drones and worker bees. Once she is found it is simply a matter of gently holding her and marking her thorax with a water-based, non-toxic marker.”

The queen bee plays a vital role in the beehive. Her main role is to lay eggs, producing both worker bees as well as drones, which are male honeybees, thus ensuring the colony’s survival and growth. The queen bee also influences the behaviour of the honeybee colony through her pheromones to maintain its stability and productivity.