Queen Bee Colors By Year
Marked Queen Bee Colors For This Year This is the color guide for marking bees. They go by the year the queen was born. For example, queens born in either 2013 or 2018 would be marked with a red dot.
This color guide helps beekeepers ensure they are dealing with the same queen over time by adhering to a standardized color scheme. Queen bee marking has come a long way since its inception, with early methods giving way to more standardized systems. Over the years, beekeepers have adopted various color codes to identify their queens, but these codes haven't always been consistent.
How to Mark a Queen Bee Safely- Carolina Honeybees
In this article, we'll take you on a journey through the evolution of queen bee marking color codes by year, highlighting key changes and. A beekeeper needs to know how queens are labeled. The marking of queen bees in color by year will help the beekeeper not to get caught by fraudsters, who often mark queen bees as they please, or sell old queen bees together with bee packages instead of the declared young queen bees.
One thing a beekeeper needs to know how to do well, is mark a Queen bee. There are many different ways a beekeeper can do this, but it all comes down to knowing the proper color for that year, having the best marking tools that are non-toxic and still highly pigmented, and then getting that colorful dot on the back of your Queen gently. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, we are here to share.
Queen Bee Colours - Quince Honey Farm
The color guide for marking bees is based on the year the queen was born, with five traditional colors used: white, yellow, red, green, and blue. This system helps beekeepers ensure they are dealing with the same queen over time by adhering to a standardized color scheme. Queens born in years ending with 1 and 6 use a white posca pen, while years ending with 2 and 7 use a yellow posca pen.
By marking new born queens with a specific color to each calendar year, beekeepers, wherever they are in the world, can identify the age of the queen bee by the color of her mark. As queen bees very rarely live more than 3-4 years, 5 colors are all that is needed. As you know, especially those of you breeding queens, we tend to mark the newly mated queens with different colours, one for each year in order to recognise their age.
Bee-Educational Materials – Windham County Beekeepers
This system has been around for decades because it's uniform, consistent, and lets a beekeeper know the age of the queen while making it easier to spot her in a crowd. Queen bee marking follows a standardized color-coding system based on the last digit of the year, designed to help beekeepers track the age of queens efficiently. The colors rotate in a five-year cycle, with each color representing two possible year endings.
This system ensures consistency across beekeeping communities and simplifies record. Details of how to mark your queens, or spot the age of a queen bee in your colony or swarm. The queen fashionably models the honey-bee queen colours.
If you mark your queens, you should follow the international queen-colour code: White in 2016 and 2021, Yellow in 2017 and 2022, etc.
