HLPB Queen Marking Plunger Cage / Tube - Beekeeping Brand for Beekeeper / Apiary

Great price on a quality tool that is essential to marking your Queen honeybees. Once you have a marked Queen you wont ever go back to unmarked. The marked Queen makes hive inspections safer and quicker for your honeybees. SO glad I have this tool!

It was a little smaller than i expected, but good overall. I had to reinforce the push stick as it was just wedged in. Added a little hot glue and all is ready for marking.

This was obviously designed by someone who has never marked a queen bee. It has one design flaw the would be simple to correct, but is critical to its functionality. The grids are to small. Which poses two problems. First the grids are not sized to allow you to align the queens thorax securely in one grid )her thorax is significantly larger than a single grid). Secondly, once you have her aligned as well as possible even using a small twig the diameter of a tooth pic. the grids are so close as soon as you touch the paint to her, it immediately bleeds on to the plastic griding before you can pull back the plunger. Which causes paint to bleed on to her wings. I have marked, or I should say painted three queens with this and still have found no way to use it successfully. The other I see with white griding seem to have a much larger grid pattern and would probably work well. Don't waste your money. You could do as good a job with a spray can of Krylon.

As previous reviewer stated-tube is amazing. However, the screen is way too small to allow you to accurately mark the queen. The fowel was not attached to the plunger mechanism and the plunger face is not as thick, so there's some concern in crushing the queen. Also the plunger is just wide enough to fit in the tube but not to stay in position, so you need someone to hold the tube and plunger while working the marker or paint.

You can make this yourself with a little bit of enginuity.

The blue mesh does come off easily so I used a little super glue to stay in place. Other than that worked perfectly. I recommend any buyers fix the blue mesh to the tube before potentially loosing a queen.

Works great however it could've been a little bit bigger round

basic, simple cheap-- requires 2 hands, if you are a pro - you want a one handed model.