Queens
Openbeehive records who the queen is, where she came from, how she is marked, and when her reign began and ended. Every queen stays in the record, so each hive builds a history of its stock over the seasons.
What a queen record holds
Set or replace the queen from the hive page. The form has:
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Year | The year the queen was bred. Drives her marking colour. |
| Number | An optional breeder or sequence number, e.g. "12". |
| Origin | Where she came from: own breeding, Buckfast, a swarm, a supersedure, and so on. |
| Marking | The dot colour on her thorax. Follows the year automatically; untick auto to pick a colour by hand. |
| Comment | Anything else: breeding line, behaviour, laying pattern, source breeder. |
:::tip Recording origin honestly "Own breeding, daughter of #214" or "Bought from the local association, Buckfast" tells you far more in two years' time than "queen" ever will. :::
Marking colour by year
Openbeehive follows the international queen colour scheme, cycling every five years by the last digit of the year:
| Year ends in | Colour |
|---|---|
| 1 or 6 | White |
| 2 or 7 | Yellow |
| 3 or 8 | Red |
| 4 or 9 | Green |
| 5 or 0 | Blue |
When you set the year, the matching colour is selected. Untick auto to record a different colour if the queen you bought carries one, so the dot in your records matches the dot on the bee. For the full scheme and the mnemonic, see Queen marking colours.
Replacing a queen
A colony has one reigning queen at a time, but over its life it will have many. When a queen is superseded, swarms away, dies, or you requeen deliberately, do not delete her record. Tap Replace queen on the hive page and enter the new one. Openbeehive:
- Closes the previous queen's reign, stamping her replaced date.
- Records the new queen with her introduced date.
- Keeps the old queen under Queen history on the hive page, with her introduced and replaced dates.
:::tip Requeening Note why you requeened in the new queen's comment: poor laying, defensive bees, age, planned line improvement. Patterns across several hives often reveal more than any single colony does. :::
Back-dated entries
Visits, harvests and treatments carry their own date and are attributed to the queen whose reign covered that date, not necessarily the queen heading the hive today. If a requeening and a back-dated visit fall close together, check the dates so each record lands under the right reign.
Queen records sync like everything else; see Offline and sync.