Rarely is it important to actually find the queen as long as you can find
clear evidence that she is present, healthy, and doing her job.
The easiest way to do this is to check the brood pattern.
If you find eggs, you know she was present within the past 72 hours.
If there is a solid pattern of worker brood with a minimal number of empty
cells scattered through it, you know she’s fertile and working.
The size of this brood pattern depends somewhat on the season,
but in this area (central California), Italian queens lay some brood all year,
and if the weather is
good enough to open the hive, there should be a little fresh brood to look at.
