Queen Marking

When inspecting a hive it makes a huge difference to be able to quickly see the queen, so beekeepers generally paint a coloured dot on the back of the queen’s thorax. This is either a blob of paint or a coloured dot attached with glue.
We have new queens now that we have reared following splitting our hives at the end of April. We have now marked two of them.
The colour of the dot is used to show which year the queen was born.

• Years starting with 0 or 6 have a white dot.
• Years starting with 1 or 7 have a yellow dot.
• Years starting with 2 or 8 have a red dot (our two original queens, born last year, have red dots)
• And so on with green, followed by blue.

So our 2019 queens have been marked with a green dot.
Catching and marking a queen is tricky. She is delicate and the last thing you want to do is damage her. Fortunately our beekeeping mentor Mark was on hand to help.
There are various ways of catching your queen. Experienced beekeepers just pick her up and hold her by the legs. We used a “one handed queen catcher”, which is a plastic tube that is placed over the queen on the honeycomb. A slotted screen is then rolled across the tube entrance to catch her in it. A foam-coated plunger is then pushed up the tube, which allows you to secure her between the screen and the foam top of the plunger. Then she is held firmly and can be marked with a paint pen. The photos below hopefully make it a bit clearer!