Keeping Cordovan Queens

[Joseph Clemens]

This is the first season I've put a lot of focus on ensuring that all of my hives and nucs at my home apiary are headed by homozygous Cordovan Italian queens.

It has come to my attention after endeavoring to requeen about 15 hives and 30 nucs from two mother Cordovan queens, that doing so is trickier than I at first thought.

I've cultivated many Cordovan queen cells and had most cells produce nice-looking Cordovan virgin queens. The majority of them open-mate and start laying lots of nice eggs -- a few weeks later, when checking on them I notice that many of them are missing, their hives now queenless or have been replaced by non-Cordovan queens, sometimes the queenless hives have started queen cells, but not always. As a rough estimate this happens with about 1/3 of the requeening attempts, so I have made a great deal of progress since beginning the process in April, but there are still a few colonies that haven't permanently adopted a nice Cordovan queen.

[jeff123fish]

What Breed of queen where you working with before?


How long do you keep them contained? I only ask because I know some bee breed take longer to adopt the new queen breed.?.

Please dont get me wrong I'm no breeder just something I have read in a few places.

-Jeff

[Joseph Clemens]

The bees I was working with before were feral bees, propagated by walk-away splits, then splitting some more. Though they were very hardy, vigorous, and productive; they were extremely "runny", among other undesirable traits mentioned by me in other posts, also many were very defensive. I'm afraid that the type of bee I was previously keeping are still very dominant in the wild surrounding my locations. I'm sure that my Cordovan Italian queens are mating predominantly with these wild drones. Usually this creates quite acceptable hybrid colonies. If I don't keep replacing queens that are not homozygous for the Cordovan trait, the colonies soon revert to normal coloration, then soon after, their behaviors quickly approach the usual for feral bees in this region.

[BULLSEYE BILL]

JC, considering your long history of no treatments and very low losses I am surprised you are moving away from your proven genetic line.

Part of my survival bee tactics came from your inspiration, I hope you don't feel as bad as I do for you. Then I guess friends don't make friends put up with mean bees.

I was just getting used to the idea that AHB is knocking on my door and will soon be here when SHB arrived. So many challenges..........

[Joseph Clemens]

Through the years I've kept colonies of many and assorted strains of honeybees from various queen and package bee producers. Some of them turned out wonderful, others were less so. The feral bees I began keeping here in Tucson were always more bothersome than I liked, but I had to consider my neighbors, so I began the process of learning to raise queens and to use the open mated Cordovan Italian queens using mother queens obtained by purchasing commercially available queens from Kohnen's, and selecting from them. I appreciated that their queens develop strong yet gentle colonies. I find that most of the open mated queens, homozygous for the Cordovan trait will still produce gentle and productive hives, even if she was obviously mated with wild-type drones instead of Cordovan drones.

[Putz]

The Cordovan genetic color is recessive. Both Queen and Drone must have this trait for it to show up in the daughter.

http://members.aol.com/queenb95/cordovan.html
The single recessive gene that determines the cordovan color, works on the same principle that blue and brown eye color operates in people. Every person has a pair of genes that determine their eye color, one from each parent. Since the brown color is dominant over the blue, if either parent contributes a brown gene, their child's eyes will be brown. Only if both parents contribute the recessive blue genes will their child's eyes be blue. It is possible for two brown eyed parents to have a blue eyed child, but only if they are both carriers of blue genes. Similarly, in bees, only if the queen and a drone she mated with both contribute cordovan genes, will the workers or queens be cordovan. Drones are hatched from unfertilized eggs so they will always be cordovan, if laid by a cordovan queen, since she is the only parent.

[Adrian Quiney WI]

Are the colonies that appear resistive to requeening resisting more than one requeening attempt? I have seen on other sites, I think MB's and one on russian bees, the use of a hardwire push-in cage to cover the newly installed queen. This cage is placed over emerging brood who are allegedly more accepting of her, and then removed after they are emerged.
Also if the theory that younger bees are more accepting holds true perhaps the requeening of your problem hives could be combined with a hive move so the old field-bees would go elsewhere and the young innocents would be glad of a new mom.
Of course you may not be looking for suggestions from me, the inadvertant breeder of one queen, after my one hive swarmed, but are really after some comparitive data from others introducing queens.
JC do you have any thoughts as to why this is happening? Adrian.

[Joseph Clemens]

Adrian Quiney WI,
It's more like various nucs and hives seem to be chronic queen losers. When I requeen using mature laying queens, I often use the push-in cage technique - it seems to be very reliable, but presently I have been requeening primarily by introduction of sealed/ripe queen cells. There is generally not much difficulty getting the queen cells to produce virgin queens in their adopted hives. The trouble is many of the virgin queens seem to quickly disappear, before mating, or after they are mated and laying they then disappear. Much of this I believe is directly related to my queen-rearing skills, which are still in need of much fine-tuning.

It may also be correlated with the degree of AHB genetics present in the adult populations of the hives in question. Success seems to increase as the older bees die off being replaced by brood introduced periodically from those successfully requeened colonies.

[Joseph Clemens]

Okay, I've been keeping a more watchful eye on colonies I am working to install homozygous Cordovan Italian queens in.

I have noticed that several new queens have been performing less than ideally, and the bees in those hives have been building supersedure cells. My belief is that I may be grafting larvae that are too old, thereby producing poor queens which inspire the bees to replace them, then when I check those colonies later, now headed by daughters of those queens I installed there, often they are not homozygous for the Cordovan trait, but are only half Cordovan from their mother. Half of their drones will be Cordovan, and if they have mated with only Cordovan drones, half of their female offspring will also be Cordovan, but these queens are not homozygous for the Cordovan trait, so despite that they may otherwise be very good queens, they do not exhibit the Cordovan trait, so they don't meet that particular criteria (which I have chosen) for queens in my own hives. So, I need to keep working at it, until I get it right.

I realize that most locations, especially more Northerly ones, are outside the seasonal envelope when they can easily raise good queens successfully. Yet, so far, our evening temperatures haven't even gone below 70F - most hives are still full of drones and lots of brood. I plan to continue working to improve my queen rearing skills, until it becomes obvious that seasonal conditions become a limiting factor.

[J-Bees]

The Cordovan genetic color is recessive. Both Queen and Drone must have this trait for it to show up in the daughter.

http://members.aol.com/queenb95/cordovan.html




That link will not work soon AOL is shutting it down: if it is yours and you don't want to loose it best go read about it.

http://2mdn.aolcdn.com/viewad/1092682/73770/sunset_ad2_728x90.GIF

[Joseph Clemens]

I believe that link belongs to Glenn Apiaries. I hope they aren't caught by surprise with this closure.

[magnet-man]

Joseph I was thinking of using the cordovan color trait as a marker for gentle bees that I was going to market to city beekeepers in AHB territory. You can get a very golden color of bee if you select drones with narrow color banding. It would be a very easy way to tell if your queen got replace by the appearance of non-cordovan color bees.

Researchers typically use the cordovan trait as a genetic marker. Sue Cobey developed a cordovan NWC line for a researcher in Kansas years ago. Since Sue usually selects fully banded drones the cordovan NWC line came out with a nice copper look.

With II you can quickly inject the cordovan color trait into any line of bees. I am afraid if you want to develope a gentle line where you are you are going to have to do II.

[Pooh]

Purvis's website talks about dealing with intro. leading to queen replacement by using push in cages and also checking the hive and cutting out any cells for a month or more until that queen's offspring populate the hive. They seem to feel that even an "accepted" queen may get replaced if her offspring haven't hatched out yet. Difference in pheromones?

[tecumseh]

pooh writes:
Difference in pheromones?

tecumseh:
perhaps... it is my understanding that to some degree the workers can sense relationships (full sister, half sisters).

[BEES4U]

Mesomorph.
This is a virgin queen that produced from older larvae when you do your grafting.
As far as the color Ray Marler’s posting is accurate.
I purchased a new Russian breeder queen from Glenn Apiaries last spring. When I opened the UPS overnight package I noticed that the new Charlie Harper line was yellow!
I called Suki and talked to her about the color as I was surprised that a Russian queen could be that yellow. She gave the same explanation as posted above which I understood because of my strong interest in genetics.
I used Cordovan queen cells last spring to help a friend to eliminate mean bees that were bought in prior years and we were happy to see the nice new stock show up in the hives.
Regards,
Ernie