Queens
The queen is the heart of a colony. Openbeehive lets you record who she is, where she came from, how she is marked, and when her reign began and ended. Because every queen is kept in the record, you build a living history of your stock over the seasons.
What a queen record holds
Each queen belongs to a hive and captures the details that matter for breeding and bookkeeping:
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| Year | The year the queen was bred or began heading the colony. This drives her marking colour. |
| Number | An optional breeder or sequence number, useful if you raise several queens a year. |
| Origin | Where she came from: your own breeding, a purchased queen, a swarm, supersedure, and so on. |
| Race / line | The strain, such as Buckfast, Carnica, Ligustica, Mellifera, or a local line. |
| Marking colour | The dot colour on her thorax (see below). |
| Clipped | Whether a wing has been clipped. |
| Notes | Anything else: temperament, laying pattern, source breeder. |
:::tip Recording origin honestly A clear origin makes your records far more useful later. "Own breeding, daughter of #214" or "Bought from the local association, Buckfast" tells you much more in two years' time than "queen" ever will. :::
Marking colour by year
Openbeehive follows the international queen colour scheme, so the colour you record matches the dot a breeder would use. The colour cycles every five years according to 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 a queen's year, Openbeehive suggests the matching colour automatically. You can override it if your queen happens to be marked differently, but sticking to the scheme keeps your apiary consistent with the wider beekeeping world.
For the full scheme, the mnemonic and printable references, see Queen marking colours.
The colour records how the queen is marked, which is normally her birth year. If you mark a queen late, or buy an already-marked queen, record the colour she actually carries so the dot in your records matches the dot on the bee.
Replacing a queen
A colony only ever 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 When a queen is superseded, swarms away, dies, or you requeen deliberately, you do not delete her record. Instead you start a new reign.
When you add a new queen to a hive, Openbeehive:
- Closes the previous queen's reign, recording her end date.
- Opens the new queen's reign from her start date.
- Keeps the old queen in the hive's history, so nothing is lost.
This gives every hive a complete, ordered queen history. You can look back and see exactly who was laying during a given season, how long each queen lasted, and which lines have performed well for you.
:::tip Requeening When you requeen, note why in the new queen's record or in an inspection: poor laying, defensive bees, age, or planned line improvement. Patterns across several hives often reveal more than any single colony does. :::
Back-dated entries and the reigning queen
Beekeeping rarely happens in tidy order. You might log an inspection days after the visit, or only get round to recording a requeening once the new queen is laying well.
Openbeehive handles this gracefully. Every queen reign has a time span, and inspections, events and other records carry their own date. When you back-date an entry, the app resolves it against the queen who was actually reigning on that date, not simply the queen heading the hive today.
So if you record an inspection from three weeks ago, it is associated with whichever queen was in charge then, even if she has since been replaced. Your history stays accurate no matter when you do the typing.
:::caution Check your dates Because back-dated records snap to the queen who was reigning at the time, the date you enter matters. If a requeening and an inspection fall close together, double-check the dates so each record lands under the right reign. :::
How it syncs
Queen records sync like everything else in Openbeehive: changes are saved locally and instantly, then merged in the background. Reigns are append-only history, so they never conflict between devices. If two people edit the same queen's notes, the most recent change to each field wins, and list-type fields merge rather than overwrite.
You can work the apiary with no signal and trust that your queen history will reconcile cleanly once you are back online. For more on this, see Offline and sync.
Related pages
- Hives — where queens live.
- Inspections — recording visits and what you found.
- Queen rearing — raising your own queens.
- Queen marking colours — the full international scheme.