Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
to suggest that marked queens have shorter lives, are superseded more quickly by
workers or produce fewer eggs than unmarked queens, unless they are damaged in the
marking process.
Advantages : A marked queen is more easily identified: if you mark a queen but later
find an unmarked queen, you will know that either swarming or supersedure has taken
place, or that your marked queen has died. If you employ the International Marking
Code (see Table 7), you will be able to tell a queen's age. Marking queens with coloured
discs or numbers can be of value in research and is helpful for identifying specific
strains, lineages or other qualities.
Disadvantages : You could damage a queen while marking her, which could lead to her
being rejected by the colony. Damage could also lead to a reduced egg-laying rate or
even to a drone-laying queen. You may also become accustomed to looking for dots and
not queens, and so you could miss a queen without a mark. You might then assume you
have a queenless colony and so make the wrong decisions.
Year
Colour
0 or 5
Blue
1 or 6
White
2 or 7
Yellow
3 or 8
Red
4 or 9
Green
Table 7. The International Marking Code
A queen for 2012, for example, would thus be colour-marked Yellow.
Methods
There are three basic ways to mark queens:
The queen can be picked up manually by placing your fingers on the sides of the
thorax or by holding one of her hind legs. Once picked up, mark her thorax, allow
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