Laurence Edwards shows two ways to mark a queen bee: the crown-of-thorns frame method using a Toma marker, and a pinning technique for a cleaner mark. Marking queens makes them easy to spot during hive inspections and prevents you from accidentally squishing them.
In today's video, I'm marking my queen bees. So inside this colony here, we have an unmarked queen. She's in a double brood on 20 frames of Langstroth, so there are loads of bees in here. First thing we need to do is go in and find the queen, but she is big, she is beautiful, she's not marked yet, and I'm sure we'll find her pretty quickly. So there we go, found my queen, got her nice and pinned down there. So I'm just going to put my queen down on the side there, let her walk around again. She's quite happy. And then 2 methods for marking your queen. So the first one is you take a frame of thorns, a crown of thorns like this, and you just want to try and get the queen as much on her own as you possibly can. And the reason that I picked her up there and put her onto another frame, you don't need to do that. You could just kind of move them around. I like to do that just to give myself a little bit of room, and it means that I don't have to have lots and lots of bees in the cage with the queen like that. Much, much easier for me. So next thing I get out is my Toma paint marker pen. Best pen going. Love the Toma. Make sure that you've got it already and make sure that you've pumped it. You need to pump all of the paint out. And then what you do is once you pump the paint out, just test it a little bit. You often get the first kind of few goes, like big globs of paint come out. Just do a few practices. I've done it before. Give it a good shake, give it a little pump, wipe off all the excess. Make sure all of the excess is off. You can see she's trapped there now, not to the point where I've squished her, not to the point where it's going to kill her, but she just cannot move. And then all you're going to do, get rid of all the bees, and you're just going to go in, mark her on the front like that. Now you'll see, see the amount of bees coming through here. This is the reason I'm not a massive fan of this method, because the bees just smother you and it's quite difficult to get in there and actually make a mark on the queen just because the amount of bees that are constantly coming in. Let's get that mark on her and I'm just going to show you, I'm just going to get a half mark on So that's the mark done. I've just put a tiny dot on. I'm going to show you the different method with this same queen, show you how much easier it is. So take that off and you can see on that queen now we've got half a dot. Queen doesn't care. Queen's like, yeah, whatever. The other method, again, check your pen, make sure your pen's right. But then what I like to do, and I'll try and show the camera here in the right direction, is I get the queen moving the right way, I clear a bit of space behind her, and then I just pin her down like that. And you can see, just pinning her down, going in, and the bees don't smother her as much. They kind of smother my pen a bit more. But you can see I've got her pinned down there. Once all the bees get out the way, she's quite happy, she's quite safe. And then all I do is I just let her go, and I've got one marked queen. But this is brilliant, she's fainted! Look, queens do that, they pretend that they've kind of fainted. There we go, she's back on her back now. So there we go, you can see I've got the queen here. Holding her really nice and careful, not squishing her at all. You can see a perfect dot. Now, you know, you could pick the queen up like this and just mark her on her back as well. You can see the queen moving around there. 2 really easy methods, and you could argue that's a 3rd little method. But I'll just pop this queen back down now and she will be on her way. Really happy queen. Super simple methods for marking them. Make sure that you mark your queens because it means that it's so much easier to find them when you need to find them.
