queen learning curve...

[honeyshack]

...good thing it's not to steep.
So I started marking today for the first time.
I have the red pen for this years queens but they came marked...yeah!
but i have older queens. They are hard to find sometimes and I also do not know how old they all are. Either a year or two.
So because i did not know the year I had to pic a color that was out of sorts. The off ice sstores in Winnipeg seemed to have none. so i improvised...out came the testors paint...bright orange...lovely color.
Here is where the curve came in. A dull pencil colored the queen quite well...quite well. So well that i had to dispose of the queen. They tend not to like it in their eyes. So i changed to a piece of stiff broome hay. Much better. And i got better at it.
I was not able to mark all the queens because it got to late to get it all done. Hopefully Monday is another good day. I have to check on the new quuens that day anyhow, make sure they got released.
I have two new queens left over. I learned tonight from a mentor to fill the battery box with bees to nurse the queen, and give a bit of honey in a corner of the box so they can be fed. Good tip to know.

lastly i was getting myself confused out in the yard...If you knew me you would figure it was easy to do. I had some queens marked, some new queens, queend i could not find, and queens that did not get marked because it was to late. I would never remember by monday which were which so...
...the new queens got the telecopic lid turned 90*
...the orange marked queens got a line of orange paint with the hay on the front of the hive...not big but enough to see the mark
...the no show queens got a large stone on the top
...the unmarked hives got a nothing
hopefull i will remember my codes:confused:

I should mention that i used the queen catcher...good tool to have
and the making tube...some what difficult, the plunger kept falling out

[Ian]

Having market queens can be useful, that is if your involving your operation in a one or two year replacement schedule.

Good luck with your codes, it sounds like my operations sometimes!

[Zane]

Whats the best stuff to mark a queen with? is the "testers" model paint ok?

[BerkeyDavid]

Zane it is what I am using. Yellow for last year red for this year.

GOt this from somebody, not sure who: Shake bottle, take off cap, set cap nearby with a dandelion stem, weed stem, timothy stem, or something like that. Catch queen with one hand by wings, transfer to other hand head first. Then pick up stem, dip in paint on inside of cap, dab on thorax.

What Not to do! Open up queen cage outside, in bee yard, watch queen fly out, see queen fly by your nose, grab queen out of the air, open your hand to see if she is really in there, yes it is really the queen and you caught her! Watch queen fly away again, resign your self to wait, queen lands on your leg a few minutes later, try to grab queen, watch queen fly away again! Resign yourself to never see queen again, contemplate life in general and the life of a hiveless lonely queen searching in the universe for meaning, watch queen land on hive frame. In excitement to cage queen, knock over bottle of paint. Let paint run into earth as you grab queen cage. Put push in queen cage over queen and put frame in hive with unmarked queen.