This Season's Colour

I've mentioned previously that locating the single queen bee amongst a thousands of other bees is a tricky business. At some point some bright spark realised that what really helps is to put a splot of paint on her back and then just look for the dot. The dot of paint is also used to record what year the queen is from. To keep track of this there's a 5 colour cycle based on what number the year ends in.

Year ends in	Colour
1 or 6	White
2 or 7	Yellow
3 or 8	Red
4 or 9	Green
5 or 0	Blue

So as examples the queen of the colony I bought at auction in 2011 was marked blue showing she was from 2010, the one I had delivered for the apparently queenless first colony was marked with white showing she was from 2011. There's only five colours in the range because a queen bee isn't likely to live longer than that, assuming she's not been acidentally squashed by the beekeeper or lost in a swarm the bees will replace her when she starts to fail anyway.

A blue marked 2010 Queen

I hadn't really thought about marking my queens before but when I got my smoker, hive tool and a few other bits from an eBay seller back in 2011 the package included a Queen Clip and an odd looking thing called a Queen Marking Cage and Plunger which has spent the past 2 years languishing in a box in my shed. This year I decided to give it a whirl. At the start of the season the colonies are at their smallest as they've been dying off over winter and the new workers haven't emerged to replace them yet. It's a lot easier to find the queen when there's less bees to lose her in.

I can't be 100% certain that both my queens are from last year rather than the previous one so what colour I mark them isn't necessarily going to be correct. I decided to go with red rather than use yellow for last year. If they swarm and someone else catches them the red marking will be a little misleading but with only 2 colonies to think about at the moment it's not really a problem for me and my main concern is being able to locate them. As time goes on and they're replaced by supersedure or requeening I'll be able to mark their replacements correctly. In hindsight maybe I should've used a colour outside the range to reflect their unknown age.

Umm so today I'm a make up artist for royalty.. never saw than coming. :-/

There's specific insect paints around, believe it or not, but having done some reading people are using paints ranging from enamel to Tip Ex. I opted to use acrylic paint because it's water based, less toxic than a lot of other paints around, low on smell and most importantly I have a box full of the stuff. The paint goes on the large round chitin plate on the back of  the bee's thorax. The 2010 queen I got with a colony from York in 2011 was marked a little heavy handedly, if you look at the picture above you can see paint on her wings but she still managed to head up a colony so I guess she wasn't too concerned about that herself.

The first thing to do was locate their Majesties. Whilst they'ed not been particularly shy in the last two inspections today they proved very elusive. After inspecting every frame with brood on it I was unable to find either queen. Queens aren't keen on light and tend to hang about where there's brood, knowing that a beekeeper can reconfigure the frames narrowing down the places she's likely to be -particularly in a small colony. With a couple of empty frames removed I paired up the frames with brood separating each pair by an inch or so. After a few minutes I checked the inner faces of the paired brood frames and sure enough there she was.

Queen bee in a clip

The next job was to catch her I did this using the queen clip. After trapping the queen and a few attendant workers I then had to isolate her. A couple of workers crawled out through the slots in the clip making things a little easier for me, but it was basically a case of encouraging them out but not the queen being careful not to squish Queeny B with the springloaded clp..

Marked queen in marking cage

After this came the Marking Cage. Removing the plunger and holding the clip open above the open hive so I wouldn't lose her if I dropped her I gave the clip a couple of taps till she fell into the tube and replace the plunger so she couldn't escape. It now occurs to me that I could've probably made things easier if I'd just caught her in the tube in the first place. Ah well we live and learn. The marking cage is a transparent tube with a fabric net at one end, the plunger that goes into it has a soft sponge top. The idea is that you gently push the queen to the netting then dab the paint on her back whilst she held there.

Red paint. They'll all be wearing it this season.

After the paint was applied I pulled back the plunger giving her some room to walk about in the tube whilst the paint dried before popping her back into the hive. To reintroduce her I let her walk out onto the topbars and make her own way into the colony.

The Queen going home again..

Going through the hives it was evident Hive1 is building numbers faster than Hive2. The theory goes that you can stimulate the bees to build up more brood by feeding them thin syrup so this weekend I think I'll put the rapid feeders on and see if the queen of Hive2 steps it up a notch on the egg laying front. Hopefully the paint will stay on them and their colonies will accept them back. Later this season if I find queens in the hives without the red splot then I'll know they've been superseded.