How To Mark Queen Bees - A Simple Clear Guide To Marking Queens Safely And Accurately

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to show you how to mark a queen. So I've been using marking pens for years now and they've always washed off and it's been a real kind of like frustration for me. That you go to the kind of the hassle of finding the queen, marking her, and then within a couple of weeks they've washed the paint off. It's really, really frustrating. So last year I moved over to an enamel car paint, and this was kind of like a little dipper with a small brush, and then you just put a single blob on the back of the queen and let that dry. And that worked a lot better than the pens, and once you've got a good blob onto the queen, it didn't wash off. It took ages to dry. And because you were using a brush as opposed to a pen, it was a much thicker layer, and then the kind of worker bees came in and sometimes caused a bit of a mess. So it did work, but it was a bit more faff. Recently someone has put me onto these pens. So they're called Toma pens, and they are oil-based pens. So you can get all of the colours for all of the queen marking systems that everyone uses. Obviously it's 2020 now, so we're using a blue pen. They do 2 different types of blue. I found that the dark blue that some people use, I struggle to see in the hive. The same with the red, I struggle to see. I like white and I like pink. I know pink's not a colour of the normal system, but I quite like to use the pink. So I've got blue for this year. Previous seasons, what I've done is I've alternated between white and pink, and then that gives me an indication that I'm never going to kind of use my queens for longer than 24 months. And that's the system that I use, but obviously it doesn't really matter which color you use. So in this video, I'm just going to run you through how to mark a queen using a paint pen like this. And I would recommend, if you're going to go with the paint pens, go with an oil-based pen as opposed to a water-based pen. And it should— I've not tried these yet, but it should last a lot longer than the water-based system. So there's loads of different, like, kind of gadgets and gizmos to catch queens and to mark queens. What I like to use though, and I always have it with me in my top pocket, is a queen cage like that. And I always go for the plastic queen cages. Don't like the wooden metal ones. I find that they can fall out of the frames quite easily. I think it's because the prongs aren't quite as thick as the ones on the plastic ones. So I always use the plastic ones. That's, that's my preference. But like I say, there's probably 10, 15 different ways of catching that queen to mark her. Some of them are good, some of them are not so good. Just finding one that suits you. I think it's a really good habit to get into though, marking your queens, and it's a really good habit to do it early in the season as well, as opposed to waiting till later on in the year where you really need to find the queen. It makes finding the queen so much easier if she's marked, and it makes it even easier if she's marked with a pen that lasts, but there's a pen that's a bright colour as well. So always go for the brightest variant you can get. Like you can see there, it's kind of like a Almost like a fluorescent blue, this one. Um, so yeah, so I'm just going to show you how to find the queen, how to get her into that cage, and then how to mark her. So what I like to do is lay the frame down on the top like that, identify the queen, and then what you want to do is you want to get the cage around her with as few attendants in it as possible. So if you just brush a few attendants away. So that's it. So I've got the queen now in the cage. Make sure the cage is securely in, and I've only got one attendant in there with her. Now I'll re-emphasize, the point here is not to kill the queen. So don't kill the queen when you're marking the queen. Um, the, the worst case scenario is that you kill the queen. Um, the middling case scenario is you don't get to mark her. And she stays alive. And the best case scenario is you mark her. So like I say, just don't kill her. So what you want to do once you've got, got the queen captured in there is you want to progressively move this cage down. And take, take your time doing this. You just want to push it down slower and slower, and the queen's movement will be restricted. And ideally, you want to get to the point where she can't move anymore, but she's somewhere in the middle of your cage. It's a lot easier to do it if she's in the middle. So just keep on pushing it down, and then when she makes a bolt for the middle, you do the final little push. And like I say, don't kill her. Then you want to take your pen And do a few test strokes on something. Now, you don't want to plunge, you don't want loads of pen, loads of paint coming out. You just want to, just want to get the tip on that queen. Now, if you find that the pen is too thick to get through the hole, what you want to do is take a knife And you just want to carve that down a little bit. Now you don't need to do that to a point, you just need to do it just to be able to get it through the holes. Okay, so once you've done that, the pen should look pretty similar to what it did before, but now it can kind of access through the holes. So this is the position that you want to get it in where you've got your dot on the queen. The queen can't move. And then what you want to do is put that back there and just loosen it up. So don't squish her, you just want to come upwards, but so she's still contained. And then what I do at this point is I leave her and I give her 5 minutes for that paint to dry. If you leave it— if you take the cage off straight away, the workers will go straight back in there. And they will, they will clean that paint off her. You need to give it a chance to dry, so I'll leave it like this for about 5 minutes, make sure that oil-based paint is completely dry, and then all you need to do is just take that cage off, put the queen back in the colony, and she'll be fully marked then. So after 5 minutes or so, you can safely take that cage off, and that's what the queen should look like. Nice blue dot right on the thorax. Nothing on the face, nothing on the wings. You can see I've got a tiny little bit there extra on the back, but that's absolutely fine. I mean, she's straight away there kind of looking, looking for somewhere else to go and lay some eggs, so she's not bothered by that at all. Everything's good there. You can see the attention that she's getting from the other, the other guys in there now, the other ladies I should say. They're going to try and clean her, but hopefully with this oil-based paint, that'll make it a lot easier and they won't kind of clean all of that off. So there you can see the queen, all of the bees coming to make a bit of a fuss of her. That paint there, you can see a tiny little bit reaching over the back, that's absolutely fine. What you don't want is any paint on the wings, you don't want any paint reaching down the front of her face, and obviously you don't want any damage to the queen whatsoever. But this has gone really, really well. As you can see, the blue there, it's a really, really nice colour blue, really bright, going to be easy to spot her within the hive. Make sure you put a nice big splodge on her, but make sure there's no overrun and no damage to the queen. Like I say, I mean, the main operation here is to not kill the queen, so don't kill the queen. It's much better to have an unmarked queen that's alive than a dead marked one. And I've damaged queens in the past, so don't think that you're the only one if you've tried to mark your queen and you killed it. But yeah, So we're going to pop her back in the colony now. She'll be absolutely fine, um, and we'll see how well this paint lasts throughout the season. So that's it for today's video. Really, really quick one, really simple one, but it's a, it's a method that I think everyone should use. Simple way to mark your queen. So like I say, good habit to get into. Mark your queens, don't damage them. That's the aim of it today. It's find a queen, make sure you don't damage your and try and get a blob of paint on her as well. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.