Gaia shows how to mark queen bees with automotive body-shop paint. Dab blue paint on the queen's abdomen, let it dry for 2-3 minutes, and the mark stays for life. Different colors work too, making it easy to spot queens during hive checks.
In this video, Gaia is gonna show you how to mark a queen using body shop car paint. So the first thing Gaia does is she picks the queen up by the wing, takes the queen in her hand like that, and then holds the queen by the legs. She then takes her little container of blue body shop paint and just dabs a tiny bit on the queen. This paint doesn't dry instantly, takes maybe 2 or 3 minutes. So you need to make sure that you hold the queen. You can hold her by the legs or you can put her in a cage whilst that paint dries. But once it dries, it forms a really strong bond and it means that it won't come off for the lifetime of the queen. It's a really, really good system. To speed things up, Gaia just blows on the queen there to dry that Body Shock paint. But the beauty of this system here is that you can choose any color that you want. Maybe you don't want blue, maybe you want pink, maybe you want a different shade of blue, something that's nice and easy to see. They've given me some of this paint and I'm going to take this back and use this on my queens as well. Because this really is an excellent way of marking queens.
