Yellow is the colour to mark your new queens and is the colour of the box tree that threatens to fill your hives so quickly that you will miss a bigger harvest if you don’t take honey off quickly.
Any queens you see in the apiary are easy as pie to age. The ones with a blue (occasionally a white) dot are from the last spring-to-autumn season. Newbies are marked yellow and ring-ins will be unmarked or will have a red dot. The oldest, swarmiest, crankiest and crookest colonies are being progressively requeened.
One of the most taxing of requeening exercises is to find and remove the old queen. Sometimes that means removing more than one queen and it’s always a good idea to check all brood combs just in case. This situation arises where a queen is being naturally replaced. Often enough the old queen lays alongside a daughter queen only to ‘disappear’ weeks to few months later. We call this supersedure.
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