Identification
| Color | Year ends in |
|
|---|---|---|
| white | 1 or 6 | |
| yellow | 2 or 7 | |
| red | 3 or 8 | |
| green | 4 or 9 | |
| blue | 5 or 0 | |
The queen bee's abdomen is noticeably longer than the worker bees surrounding her. Even so, in a hive of 60,000 to 80,000 honey bees, it is often difficult for beekeepers to find the queen with any speed; for this reason, many queens in non-feral colonies are marked with a light daub of paint on their thorax. The paint used does no harm to the queen and makes her much easier to find when necessary.
Although the color is sometimes randomly chosen, professional queen breeders use a color that identifies the year a queen hatched, which helps them to decide whether their queens are too old to maintain a strong hive and need to be replaced. Sometimes tiny convex disks marked with identification numbers ("opalithplattchen") are used when a beekeeper has many queens born in the same year. The color code that beekeepers use to tell them the age of their queen is, (White)(Yellow)(Red)(Green)(Blue).
Read more about this topic: Queen Bee