Breed of bees?

Never heard of a red pin queen. Two thoughts come to mind....

One....this is a queen or queens, that came about by happenchance, and some beekeeper "coined" the term to market or feel special about their bees.

Two....Someone has spent a few years developing a line of bees, and has named them "red pin queens".

My money is on #1. Probably some combination of blend, a hybrid that came about. I would wonder if this is a selected line with specific criteria, or just a result of open mating with little control in the breeding efforts.

I have some really neat looking bees from time to time. The result is usually due to a lack of control of genetics. I never thought of slapping on a fancy name and marketing them as something new. Hmmmmm......

Mutts no more! "Bjorn's Evaluated, Selected, Traits"....... better known as "BEST" bees and queens! :lol:

I'll have to give this some more thought..... :?

pcm writes:
It is a 2008 Queen, marked red, the international marking color for that year ????

tecumseh:
this possiblility seem extremely plausible to moi...

at one time (a long long time ago) while making up packages when it came to installing the queens in their little introduction cage into the package the fellow that I worked for pointed out to me that the queens we were installing (and provided by one of those known names in the bee keeping industry even then) had quite evidently caught 'last years' queens while they were shaking packages or perhaps while they were making up swarm boxes. my employer was a bit miffed that someone he knew well had tried to pass a two year old (or perhaps older) queen off on him as a 'fresh' queen. the down side being that any package failures would come back for him to replace.

the above I would read as a warning for all new bee keepers. no matter what the source of queens (or packages) that you might acquire take a good hard look at the queen in the package and see if indeed she does look 'fresh' before she is installed.