Hi All ~
A week or so ago & posted about my dilemna & whether or not to do a shake-out & re-queen as I wasn't seeing any activity. I did get a new queen & she was marked with a bright green dot. The queen I had with my package was marked red/pink which I thought was last years color.
After getting the new queen & emailed the seller & he said he just thought it was an accident. That the people marking the new queens accidently used last years color on some of them.
Does this sound OK? Does it really happen. The seller also said most people don't care the color. But, I DO because I like to document what I doing & what's happening in the hive. He replaced the old queen without question so that was nice but now after doing the shake out & starting over the hive is very active & has a nice sound...before there were no bees leaving in the hive. It's weird....or maybe only for me.
So what color dot does your queen have?? :) FG
My queens were green. Both different shades of green but came from two different sources. Either way though they were both green.
I think I got queens from last year! hmmmm. And that's why I had a problem. FG
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesqueenrearing.htm#colors
Not everyone follows that international system.
Here I was wondering why my "stupid" supplier used green to mark the queen instead of something easy to see like hot pink.
I had no idea they color code by year!
Flygirl,
The two that I ordered were green also.
Green is the color for this year. Mine were all greens.
International colour code for marking queen bees
Year ending in
Colour
1 or 6
White or grey
2 or 7
Yellow
3 or 8
Red
4 or 9
Green
5 or 0
Blue