Queen Marking

David here... After finding closed swarm cells in hive B on Sunday, 5/13, we decided to split the hive.  That meant I had to try to find the queen and move her to an empty hive.  In the 3 years we've been doing this, I rarely look specifically for the queen and when I do it always takes a long time to find her, sometimes we have to go over every frame twice.  Luck was with me and I found her fairly easily on Sunday, but I decided that it was time to begin marking our queens.  This basically means daubing a little drop of paint onto the back of the queen in order to 1) help locate her in the future 2) know that it's a queen you marked and not a supersedure queen and 3) know how old the queen is.  There is a rotating color list to use based on what number the year ends in.  With only three hives, I don't much care about the color and just want a color that will make it easier to find the queen in the future.  So I picked up a white queen paint marker and a marking tube from Brown's Bee Farm and plan to mark the old queen from the split the next chance I get (and before she has a chance to populate the hive much).  I also plan to try to mark the new queen in hive B and other old queen in hive A sometime this summer.