Tracking queens and their lineage
Temper, laying and steadiness on the comb follow the queen, not the box. How to mark, evaluate and link your queens so that selection becomes something more than an impression.
A queen, not just a hive
We happily think in hives: number 7 is gentle, number 12 swarms. In reality most of those traits follow the queen and not the box. The day you move or replace her, the history attached to the hive becomes misleading.
Following the queen as an object in her own right — emergence, introduction, evaluations, end — lets you compare queens with each other. That is the basis of any selection.
Marking: the international colour code
Marking a queen solves two problems at once: you find her faster on the comb, and you know her year of birth without looking at your notes.
The colour code is international and follows the last digit of the year of birth, on a five-year cycle.
There is nothing to memorise on the software side: Apivox suggests the current year's colour when you create a queen.
| Last digit of the year | Colour | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · 6 | White | 2021 · 2026 |
| 2 · 7 | Yellow | 2017 · 2022 |
| 3 · 8 | Red | 2018 · 2023 |
| 4 · 9 | Green | 2019 · 2024 |
| 5 · 0 | Blue | 2020 · 2025 |
For 2026, the marking colour is: White.
What is worth evaluating in a queen
- Laying: regularity, compactness of the brood nest, how fast she picks up in spring.
- The colony's temper, judged under comparable conditions where possible — a colony disturbed three times in a row cannot be judged.
- Steadiness on the comb: do the bees stay put when you lift a frame?
- The crop, relative to what the rest of the apiary did that same year. That ratio is the only one with meaning, because the season overwhelms everything else.
Scoring on a simple scale at every inspection beats a definitive judgement at the end of the year: memories of August always tidy things up a little.
Lineage, or why record where a queen came from
A queen raised at home comes from a mother you chose. Without recording that link, selection stops at the current generation: you know hive 12 is good, not that she descends from the same stock as the three other good ones in the apiary.
The mother-daughter link, kept over a few generations, turns impressions into trends: it shows which stock holds up year after year, and which owed its quality mostly to the season.
It also helps you avoid narrowing an entire operation down to a single origin — a whole apiary out of one mother is fragile.
Replace on observation, not on age
A queen does not turn bad on a fixed date. What triggers a replacement is what you observe: laying gone irregular or patchy, a colony that no longer keeps up with the others, aggression that conditions do not explain, repeated supersedure cells.
That is exactly what a history is for: telling a bad inspection apart from a trend, and deciding before the colony drops away.
In Apivox
- One record per queen: name, date of birth, date of introduction, assigned hive, marking colour, status (active, dead, replaced, swarmed).
- The current year's marking colour suggested automatically.
- Scores from 1 to 5 — crop, temper, steadiness on the comb — and their average.
- A family tree: mother, father, descendants, across several generations.
- Filters by colour, age, status or average score, to pull out the list of queens to replace.
Frequently asked questions
- Is the marking colour compulsory?
- No, it is a convention, not a rule. It is only useful if you stick to it: a queen marked in the wrong colour is worse than an unmarked one.
- What if you do not know a queen's origin?
- Record it as unknown. An unknown lineage is honest information; a guessed one contaminates everything you later infer from it.
- And for a bought queen?
- Record the origin — breeder, stated strain — in her file. That is what will let you compare, two years from now, how your purchases actually perform against your own rearing.