In this Betterbee video we’re going to show you some good ways to find your queen, and
two ways of marking the queen. We want to mark our queens because it makes it easier
to find them later on, and also it helps us to be sure of how old the queen is, in case
we want to requeen a hive.
Finding a queen may be easy, if the bees around her are all forming a retinue, or if she's
already marked. But sometimes even a queen with a mark is hard to see. This one is laying
an egg. Her whole abdomen is down in a cell. This one is putting her head and thorax into
a cell, to check out if it's ready to have an egg laid in it. Here's another one who's
crawling under some workers.
What we're looking for is the large abdomen of the queen. It wags back and forth as she
stalks around searching for empty cells. But where do we look for the queen? The brood
chamber is where we look. Specifically, on brood frames in the brood chamber, and even
more specifically, on frames that have tiny, young larvae and eggs.
The first thing you can do to help yourself find the queen is separate the two brood chambers.
You don’t want her to retreat from the top one and then go into the bottom one as you're
working on the top one. So separate them. The second thing you could do is use your
smoke very little. Excess smoke might make the queen move off of the brood frames where
you normally expect to find her.
When you pull out the frame by the wall, in all likelihood the queen will not be on it,
so don't spend a lot of time looking at it. The next frame will be a pollen frame (probably),
and she's also unlikely to be on a pollen frame, but a little more likely than on the
side frame or honey frame. After you see a pollen frame, the next frames inwards are
likely to be brood frames. If they're completely capped brood, you can probably just give them
a quick look and replace it in the hive.
We're looking for frames with small larvae, like this. Here's some larvae, and a few eggs.
The larvae are small, so they're not very old. If you have trouble seeing eggs, you
may have to get a pair of glasses, or change the focus of your eyes. The cells are about
three-quarters of an inch deep, and we're looking deep into them. Scan brood frames,
and a moving queen will catch your eye. Another thing you can do is hold the frame up so that
the sun is at your back, and the sun is shining right into the cells, to help you see deep
in the cells.
Well, here is a lovely looking queen. We're going to use a device called a plastic queen
marking tube. After you put it over her, you might wait for her to crawl up the side of
it, or you might creep it to the edge of the frame. And you're holding the foam plunger
at the edge of the frame. Just slide her over onto it and slide the plunger in gently. Be
aware that this plunger may slip out again, so hold it with your fingers or rest it gently
against the surface of the frame.
Always shake and test your queen marking pen before marking a queen. And be sure you're
holding the stick of the plunger, so the queen and the plunger don't fall on the ground.
Don't press it too tight! Let her move a little bit until her thorax is perfectly in one of
the openings. Just dab her thorax - one or two drops of the marking ink, and then let
her go. Don't get paint on her head, her wings, her body. Just on her thorax. That's a very
good mark.
Let's check out another queen. And notice how she moves around: very purposefully. The
other bees don't walk along with such a mission in mind.
We're going to mark her...If you get impatient and you don't want to wait for her to walk
up the tube, or bring her to the edge of the frame, you can gently encourage her to get
into the tube. Sometimes that works. If you miss, be careful of getting her too scared
or excited. She may start running quickly. But we got her in on the 2nd try here, and
she is a big one!
Going to come in...test that pen again. We don't want to make a big splort of paint on
the queen. If the paint is going to act strange, you want that mistake to happen on your hive
edge or your smoker or something like that. Gently press her against the mesh. Just enough
to immobilize her. And carefully put a dot on her thorax. That's the middle part of her
body where the wings and legs attach. It’s kind of like her shoulders.
After you release her on the comb be very aware of that comb. Keep an eye on her constantly
as you're putting that frame back into the hive.
Here’s another type of queen marking device: a push-in marking ring, or disc. Be aware,
catching the queen is not a permanent capture. She can escape from it if she's left there
long enough. As you can see here, the queen has walked out; she's kind of a skinny queen.
This is a brand-new marking pen, and it takes a little while to get the paint flowing down
into that white tip. We're going to mark this queen with the push-in queen marking ring.
Just put it on the comb - not too hard, just enough to immobilize her. Those threads are
not pushing down too hard on her; she's fine. And just put a spot of paint, just like we
did before. There you go!
The mesh on this device is made out of threads so it's not only more flexible... the threads
are thinner than the mesh on the queen marking tube. Also, there's no moving parts. I like
this one better for all those reasons. Also, I attached a red wire to mine, because it's
very hard to locate it if I ever drop it.
These are 2020 queens, so we're marking them blue. The color for 2021 is white.
There's a system that runs through this mnemonic device: Wow You Raise Great Bees!
That's: White, Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. And then it repeats the next 5 years.