In this instructional video, beekeeper Laurence Edwards explains why he abandoned water‑based pens (like Posca) for marking queen bees and recommends a specific oil‑based paint pen set (Zayer) for 2022. He describes the problems with water‑based paint—its tendency to rub off, making queens hard to locate later—and outlines the benefits of oil‑based pens: permanent, non‑removable markings, an ultra‑fine pump tip that prevents splodging, and a broad color palette including fluorescent and metallic shades. Edwards reviews the Zayer pack (18 pens for £17.99), detailing each color category, the visibility advantages of neon orange, hot pink, etc., and the safety features (xylene‑free, non‑toxic). He demonstrates how to prime the pen, apply thin lines, and avoid over‑pumping, and shares his personal marking system—changing colors every two years and using bright, high‑visibility hues rather than the traditional five‑year color rotation. The video concludes with a recommendation to adopt oil‑based pens for reliable, long‑lasting queen identification and a link to a separate tutorial on marking mated queens.
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Do you ever find yourself in the season going and marking your queen, and then 2 weeks later you're looking through the colony and you just can't find her? You give up, come back a few weeks later, and you find a queen that's not been marked. Or even more of a giveaway, you find a queen that's got that little tiny rim of blue or yellow left on her where it clearly was the queen that you marked, but the bees just decided to rub it off because it was water-based paint. I did that for years. It was the most annoying thing in the world. I moved away from water-based pens for marking queens a couple of years ago now. Best thing I ever did, because you mark the queen, You mark her once and she stays marked. I've tried pretty much every single brand of oil-based paint pens. In this video, I'm going to show you my favorite and the one I'm using for 2022. So these are the paint pens that I'm using for 2022, made by a company called Zayer. And there's a few reasons that I really, really like this brand of paint pen. First one, obviously, it's an oil-based paint pen, which means that when you mark your queen, takes a little bit longer to dry, but once it's done, it's completely permanent. The bees can't rub it off. Once that queen is marked, she is gonna remain marked forever. Next thing I really like about this one is they come with an ultra-fine tip. It's a really good tip based on a pump system. Means that you don't end up splodging your queen with loads of paint. Stick it in the comments if you've done that. I'll be number one on the list. I've done that so many times. Really, really annoying. What I really like about that ultra-fine tip though is the ability to do duplicate colours. Breeder queens do this all the time. I'm gonna do this on some of my queens this year as well. Not gonna do it on all of them, but it gives you the ability to do kind of like 2 different colors on the queen to give them a really unique individual marking. The final thing, and the biggest thing that I like about this set of paint pens, is the color range that it comes in. Now, I don't know who came up with this system of using red, yellow, white, blue, and green. Forgot that last one there. Obviously, they're very basic colors, and someone's just chosen them thinking, well, they're very distinct, they're very different. But I don't know about you, I really struggle to see any queen when she's marked in red. Just can't see her. I like queens that are marked white. Really do like the white marking system. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move to a system that just completely abandons the standardized system of changing the color every 5 years. What I'm doing is I'm moving to a system that changes the color every other year, and I'm not going to stick to a specific color either. I'm just going to change it up, and I know that if 2022 is going to be a certain color, then I can kind of reference that back. And I know you're going to kind of think, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and I'll probably align a little bit to the colors where applicable, but I want to use neon orange, I want to use shocking pink, I want to use a kind of bright white or silver. I want something that's going to make the queen stand out and make my life as a beekeeper so much easier. As opposed to saying, oh, it's 2018, I've got to use red, going to use a water-based red pen, and it's going to rub off. And even if it doesn't rub off, I'm going to probably struggle to see that queen anyway. I know I'm being a little bit harsh, I'm talking tongue-in-cheek, but the colors in this pack here are amazing. So as you can see here, we got all of the standard colors. This pack here costs about £17.99, so it's really, really cheap. You're normally paying like £4 or £5 for a single Tosca pen. I do not like Tosca pens at all, just got no time for them. But this one here, you're paying £17.99, you're getting 18 pens, so they're about a pound each. In terms of colors, you get your basic colors, so you get black, white, blue, red, yellow, pink, violet, orange, brown, and green— all of the standard colors if you want to go with that 5-year system, no problem at all. But then you get these fluorescent colors down here, and it's quite good. The fluorescent colors down there are pretty much lined up to where you want to be. I know there's a couple of different ones in there, but you get brilliant blue, hot pink, glowing green, flaming orange, and lemon. Those colors are so much brighter when you actually mark up the queen and see her in the hive with like a hot pink or a flaming orange. Makes it so much easier to find the queen. You also get some metallic colors as well. I, I find the metallic colors not quite as easy to see, but it's nice to have that additional color palette in there as well if you're going to do 2 different colors on the back of a queen. So this is what the pen looks like. You can see they're nice small pen. They're not quite as big oil-based ink, opaque ink with an extra fine point, xylene-free, non-toxic and safe, which is really important. And it writes on any surface. You can write on your beehives as well. I'm going to show you on a frame down here, but as you can see, nice thin tip. And I just love that color. This is probably the one that I'm going to use for this color's queens, but I'm going to make a decision on that at a later date. In terms of the thickness though, you can see if you just do like little thin lines like that, you can get a really nice thin line, much thinner than you can get with a Tosca pen. If you need to though, you can get plenty of paint out on it. I'm always really careful to never pump it when you've got a queen nearby. All of the pens do this. If you go down, you can see the amount of paint that comes out like that. You're going to absolutely splodge your queen. So what I'll do is I'll kind of go away, splodge it somewhere, get some paint out, and then you can go straight in and you can use it on a really thin basis like that. And as you can see, as I'm writing away there, you're not getting any big splodges coming out. It's very controllable. paint flows really, really well, and as you can see, it's a really good color to be able to look at. So looking at the pens in the pack there, you can see the ones that stand out. That yellow there is a lot darker than, say, the neon yellow. The orange looks like a very good one for me. My personal favorites there, I think, is that white, that light green, the shocking orange, and then that pink as well. Really nice range of colors though. They're going to last you for years. So there you go, that's my tip for oil-based pens. They're the ones I'm going to use in 2022. Highly recommended by me. If you've never marked a queen before, check out this video here where I show you all the steps to successfully mark your mated queens.
