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Socia1 insects, especially honeybees, play an essential role in nature, and their recent decline threatens the stability of many ecosystems. The behaviour of social insect colonies is typically governed by a central individual, e.g., by the honeybee queen. The RoboRoyale project aims to use robots to interact with the queen to affect her behaviour and the entire colony’s activity. This paper presents a necessary component of such a robotic system, a method capable of real-time detection, localisation, and tracking of the honeybee queen inside a large colony. To overcome problems with occlusions and computational complexity, we propose to combine two vision-based methods for fiducial marker localisation and tracking. The experiments performed on the data captured from inside the beehives demonstrate that the resulting algorithm outperforms its predecessors in terms of detection precision, recall, and …