This is my second year keeping bees and I have 5 hives....so I don't have much experience.
I have started marking my Queens this year whenever I find one when I am looking through my hives.
Of the 4 hives I have only one left without a marked Queen....and I finally found her. So, I took her into the house and marked her with #54 and then promptly returned her to her hive which took me all of about 10-15 minutes.
As soon as I put her back on one of the frames the workers started balling her. My husband was standing by watching (he is NOT a beekeeper). I proceeded to tell him that I have heard of worker bees riping off these numbers because they detect them as a fault or defect.
Well, the ball of bees did NOT subside, in fact it got bigger. After about 10 minutes I checked and I ended up having to pry off the bees from their Queen. When I finally got to her she was missing her number and seemed to be in shock. I put her in a Queen cage with some bee candy but plugged so that she cannot eat her way out nor can the workers eat their way in.
I returned her to her own hive in the evening and will check in a couple of days to see if the workers are still so fierce towards her.
Can anyone tell me WHY the hive would act so aggressively towards their very own Queen?
The only thing that I can come up with is that there might have been some foreign Queen pheromone in my marking cylinder where I had her. Otherwise their behavior was to me VERY strange.
What was the total time the girl was out of the hive?
"So, I took her into the house and marked her with #54 and then promptly returned her to her hive which took me all of about 10-15 minutes."
She wasn't out any longer than 15 minutes.
I have had aggression shown to queens placed in a wire cage to hold them while the marking paint dried. After 3 or 4 times using the same cage the colony would begin to attack the cage. When a new cage was used for each queen there was no aggression.
I have never used numbers, could there have been an odor from the glue used to attach the number?
if they don't feed her, she'll die. keep an eye on that. you might want to consider not marking them. why do you?
@Kathy: I mark my queens so that I know how old they are and also to tell if one has superseded.
It is also helpful to have them marked so if another beekeeper in my area catches a swarm and they see a number on the queen, they notify our local bee association (in Switzerland). If I report that my #64 white queen swarmed and someone catches the swarm....they will give the swarm back.
I ended up taking my Queen out of the hive and putting her with some other bees in a nuc.
There were lots of swarm cells in the hive when I looked through it afterwards. Could be that they were going to swarm and I had somehow missed the cells...I think that the cells may have not been built up when I found her and marked her the other day.
At any rate, I didn't leave her in the colony.