Queen Bee Color Year

Marked Queen Bee Colors For This Year This is the color guide for marking bees. They go by the year the queen was born. For example, queens born in either 2013 or 2018 would be marked with a red dot.

This color guide helps beekeepers ensure they are dealing with the same queen over time by adhering to a standardized color scheme. Learn how queen bee marking color codes have evolved over the years, from early methods to standardized systems, and discover best practices for accurate marking. The color guide for marking bees is based on the year the queen was born, with five traditional colors used: white, yellow, red, green, and blue.

This system helps beekeepers ensure they are dealing with the same queen over time by adhering to a standardized color scheme. Queens born in years ending with 1 and 6 use a white posca pen, while years ending with 2 and 7 use a yellow posca pen. A beekeeper needs to know how queens are labeled.

The marking of queen bees in color by year will help the beekeeper not to get caught by fraudsters, who often mark queen bees as they please, or sell old queen bees together with bee packages instead of the declared young queen bees. Use the following chart to determine the standardized queen marking numbers color for a particular year: (match up the year ending digit to the color list below) 6 or 1 White 7 or 2 Yellow 8 or 3 Red 9 or 4 Green 0 or 5 Blue Examples: 2022 would be yellow, 2023 would be red, etc. Exact style of number card may vary from the photos.

One thing a beekeeper needs to know how to do well, is mark a Queen bee. There are many different ways a beekeeper can do this, but it all comes down to knowing the proper color for that year, having the best marking tools that are non-toxic and still highly pigmented, and then getting that colorful dot on the back of your Queen gently. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, we are here to share.

As you know, especially those of you breeding queens, we tend to mark the newly mated queens with different colours, one for each year in order to recognise their age. This system has been around for decades because it's uniform, consistent, and lets a beekeeper know the age of the queen while making it easier to spot her in a crowd. By marking new born queens with a specific color to each calendar year, beekeepers, wherever they are in the world, can identify the age of the queen bee by the color of her mark.

As queen bees very rarely live more than 3-4 years, 5 colors are all that is needed. Queen bees are marked with a different color each year to show how old they are. Queen bee marking colors are chosen alphabetically, with the most common being blue for 2025.

The color guide goes by the year the queen was born, with the most common color being red for queens born in 2013 or 2018. For example, queens born in 2013 or 2018 would be marked with a red color.