Universal Annual Queen Bee Colors

The health and productivity of a Honey Bee colony is dependent on the health and vitality of the queen bee. We inspect our hives regularly to check in on our queens to ensure that they are healthy and our hives are doing well.

During hive inspections we must find our queen however, it can be very difficult to find her moving around in a colony of 30,000 wiggling honey bees. Even though the queen is larger in size than the others, she is very difficult to find. 

For hundreds of years beekeepers have been using safe methods to mark queen bees so that they stand out in a crowd. As honey bee health is directly related to the age of their queen, the international queen color code was developed to add an additional feature to help beekeepers.

By marking new born queens with a specific color to each calendar year, beekeepers, wherever they are in the world, can identify the age of the queen bee by the color of her mark.

 As queen bees very rarely live more than 3-4 years, 5 colors are all that is needed.

 A useful mnemonic that beekeepers use to remember the colors system is: “Will You Raise Good Bees”

As a tribute to this color system, we offer annual t-shirts in the corresponding color of this current year’s queens.