A beekeeper needs to know how queens are labeled. The marking of queen bees in color by year will help the beekeeper not to get caught by fraudsters, who often mark queen bees as they please, or sell old queen bees together with bee packages instead of the declared young queen bees.
Colors for marking queens
Five colors are traditionally used to mark the queen bees: white, yellow, red, green, blue. Other colors are not used for marking queen bees. If you anywhere met a mate, which is marked with a different color, you can be sure that you are facing a non-professional queen breeder, and amateur who is trying to sell you not quite a quality product.
Often amateur beekeepers who breed for themselves do not bother with the colors of marks or can put colored marks of any color and shade on the queen. Moreover, they can put colored marks on the queen with anything, from nail polish and ordinary paint to a normal marker.
How to choose a color for marking the queen
The color of the queen mark is not taken randomly, but in strict accordance with the internationally developed system of marking the queens, which is presented in the table, so the color of the mark should correspond to the year. Thus, it is easy to understand the age of a queen by the color of the mark.
The color system is designed for a maximum age of 5 years and is organized as follows:
White color – 1st or 6th year;
Yellow color – 2nd or 7th year;
Red color – 3rd year or 8th year;
Green color – 4th or 9th year;
Blue color – 5th or year 0.
For example, if you see a red-marked queen in 2024, that queen was bred in 2023. It is clear that 2028 is not suitable, because this queen would be from the future and 2013 is not suitable either, because bee queens do not live that long.
In order to determine what color to mark the mothers, it is enough to look at the table and use the color marker that corresponds to the year.
Additional marking
Sometimes the mark that a beekeeper sees on a queen bee is marked with the letter F in addition to the color. What does it mean? It is generally recognized that the letter F stands for purity. If the queen is purebred, it is considered to be F0, if the queen is not purebred, but crossed with other breed and if it is the first generation it is F1, if the second generation it is F2 and so on.
Benefits of marking queens
The marking of the queen is intended to enable the beekeeper to find the queen in the hive as quickly as possible among many bees, as well as to enable the beekeeper to understand her age and other information about her as quickly as possible. It is not a secret that the most productive bee queens are 1 to 2 years old, after which they need to be replaced, if it is a commercial apiary. Therefore, looking at the color of the mark, the beekeeper instantly understand how many years the queen should be replaced or not, in order to understand this information he does not need to look through the apiary journal. In addition, on some types of marks, it is possible to apply letters and numbers, which gives the beekeeper the opportunity to encode in them a lot of different information, for example, the purebredity of a bee mate, as well as information about its parents, ie its family tree.
With what to mark the queens
There are several ways to mark the queen bees. The easiest way is to mark the queens with a marker. But do not take the first marker from the stationery. In order to make a colored mark on the bee queen it is necessary to use special markers.
Also the bee queen is marked with special markers, which are glued to the queen on the back with a special glue, such a colored marker has both advantages and disadvantages. From the advantage of colored mark on the bee queen, we can highlight the fact that on such a mark can be encrypted a lot of information that relates specifically to this bee queen. As for the disadvantage of such queens, there are cases when after a few months the colored mark of the queen is lost by the queen or the bees chew it off either completely or partially. In this case, almost all information on the queen is lost, unless of course the beekeeper keeps a journal and makes regular entries in it.
A popular way of putting colored marks on the queen with the help of paint. Again, it is not any paint from a building store, but a special paint that can be bought in a beekeeping store, where all five colors are sold at once, and each bottle comes with a special brush, with which it is convenient to apply a colored mark on the queen.
