Bee Brood Hygiene Tester – Pin tester

The needle tester is designed to simplify testing of bee colonies for hygienic properties by piercing bee brood of a certain age.

The tester has 50 thin (0.38 mm) stainless steel needles 12 mm long, which allows making 50 punctures on a frame with sealed brood in one movement. This significantly reduces the testing time for the breeder, especially when there are more than 10 families, and the test must be carried out twice per season. The tester handle is made of polyurethane resistant to wear and detergents.

There are different sizes of matrix shafts on which wax foundation is made. Therefore, wax foundation and printed brood cells will have slightly different sizes, which entails different distances at the needles on the tester. The needles must hit the target exactly, allowing an error of no more than a millimeter. I have developed three sizes of needle testers with distances between needles of 5.0 mm; 5.2 mm; 5.4 mm, which covers the main ranges of cell sizes at the wax foundation used by the breeder.

To select a tester that will suit you, you need to make a simple measurement of the wax foundation that you use in your apiary. Measure with a regular ruler, or a more precise tool, if you have one, the length of twenty cells, from the beginning of the first cell to the end of the last, as shown in the picture.

Then divide the obtained result by 20 and get the diameter of your cell, with which you select the required size of the bee colony hygiene tester. If your cell size after measurements is 5.3 mm, then 2 size options will suit you (5.2 or 5.4), and if the measurement showed 5.1 mm, then you can take 5.0 or 5.2.