OOPS may have really messed up!

[alfred]

Yesterday I was going through my hives to see how things are doing. I have three new packages and three new swarms as well as one that made it through the winter.

I had decided to mark the queens if I found them on the old hive and the swarms.


I have done some marking before, but I had simply caught the queen and let her run in a jar and then quickly dabbed her with paint on the fly. Not a good method and I wanted to do it correctly and make sure to get a good mark on her and also so as to not injure her by getting paint where it shouldn't be. Also my previous marking attempts had been cleaned off by the girls.

Well I really messed up. The first unmarked one that I found I pulled the frame out and I grabbed her by the wings.  I tried to get ahold of her with my other hand so that I could mark her. I was so afraid of hurting her that I lost control of her and she fell/flew away to the ground and ran under the hive stand. I had a heck of a time trying to find her and when I did I scooped her up in a jar then dropped her back onto the frame that she had come from.

I stood there for awhile and got my courage back up. All the videos of this process make it look really easy. Soooo I tried again and the same thing happened! I had an even harder time finding her and then I ended up chasing her around for a bit as she scurried around under the hive stand before I got her back into the jar. I finally decided to give up... so I put her back on the frame.... and that is when they balled her! or atleast I think that is what was going on. I watched for a little while and then I decided that it would be best to simply close things up and come back another day to see what had happened. They were by this time very agitated.

Needless to say I gave up on marking the other queens. At that point I ended up just doing a cursory look at the other hives and adding boxes where needed.

This morning I found a whole bunch of them doing bearding like behavior on the front of the hive near the entrance ( I use top entrances) this was very early before the sun was really up and it was cool. I think that I may have really messed up. Not sure what the bearding behavior means?



On another note. One thing that I really noticed this time about using top entrances. Once you move down into the hive and you have moved off one of the boxes the returning girls don't know what to do and they hover around  eventually getting more confused and upset. I have not really had a problem with this before probably because I have never had a hive dismantled for so long before this. Just a side observation. I still like my top entrances.

[iddee]

Get one of these.

http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/Queen-Marking-Tube/productinfo/264/

And one of these

http://www.brushymountainbeefarm.com/Queen-Marking-Pen/productinfo/389/

[riverrat]

sounds like you had quite a time with your marking experience. The bearding could be from them being overcrowded or to warm in the hive so they are hanging out on front of the hive. Although it has happened before the good thing about bees is its real hard for human interaction to mess the hive up bad enough they cant fix it.  I have never marked a queen as the bees usually in time groom the paint marking off. I do mark the queen in my ob hive when taking it to a show so i don't spend all my time helping people find the queen.  In a hive I don't look for the queen unless there is a problem i spend the least amount of time in a hive as needed. I look for signs of a queen or a problem if i see signs of a queen and looks like things are going good i close it up and move on.

[Kathyp]

i'm not sure there is a huge advantage to marking queens.  i guess if you are going to requeen on a schedule, or you want to keep track of her for some reason....and as riverrat points out, you'll never be really sure that they didn't clean the mark off.