Comparison of Three Queen Finding Methods in European and Africanized Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.) Colonies

The objective of this study was to compare three different methods of finding queens in Africanized and European honey bee colonies: 1) the regular method, when combs were individually examined until queens were found, 2) the "shaking method", when combs were shaken inside a queen filtering device, and 3) the smoking method. The smoking method was significantly faster than the other methods. The regular method was the slowest. The mean queen finding times were 225.5, 149.5, and 78.9 s for the regular, shaking, and smoking methods, respectively. Queens in Africanized colonies were found significantly faster than queens in European colonies when the shaking and smoking methods were used, but not when the regular method was utilized. The combined use of the smoking and shaking methods is recommended, with precautions. The average time invested in finding the queen in a colony, could be of less than 2 min. with a combination of these two methods, which is over 50% faster than the regular method.