Marking Some Queens

On Saturday afternoon we came back to work on two other hives in an attempt to find and mark the queens. We managed to find and mark one queen, the other proved a little more elusive. While we did find her, she scurried away before we could trap and mark her, with the smoker inevitably going out and the bees starting to get grumpy over the intrusion, we closed up and left her for the time being.

Why mark the queen? Here's a frame fresh out of the hive. Somewhere amongst that lot might be the queen, marking her makes it, in theory at least, that much easier to find her. It also lets you verify that the queen that you're looking at is the same one you saw in the last inspection:


In this hive the Queen was obligingly wandering around in a clear space:


Using a Press in cage to trap the queen:


And applying the mark, there is a colour scheme normally used to mark queens:
White for years ending 1 or 6
Yellow for years 2 or 7
Red for years 3 or 8
Green for 4 and 9
and Blue for 5 and 0

We'd lost the red pen and felt that a marked queen, even not following the above scheme was better than no mark at all: