Beekeepers are vital to the success of a hive

What marks a queen out from a crowd of other bees? A beekeeper’s skill, says Mary O’Riordan

efore I took up the hobby of beekeeping nearly 28 years ago, I used to read a beekeeping column in the Cork Examiner as it was then known, by Michael Woulfe, an established and successful beekeeper of many years, who continues to tend to his bees even in his older years. One of the things that used to fascinate me was, when he wrote about looking for the queen, I remember thinking to myself ‘imagine looking for one particular bee not hugely different from maybe the 40,000 or so other bees’.

It is important for the beekeeper to be able to find the only queen among the other bees. She dictates everything that goes on in a hive and once there is more than one queen in a hive, the beekeeper is going to lose about half of the bees, as one queen will swarm and take a load of bees with her.