Adrian Quiney WI
01-07-2009, 09:24 PM
My sister in England sent me an old bee book "Beekeeping up-to-date" by Joseph Tinsley 1945. He was a lecturer in beekeeping in Scotland.
What caught my interest was the experiments conducted to see the relationship between drones and and an unmated queen. What he concluded after a few experiments and observations was that only the drones in the hive issuing the virgin queen seemed to know that the mating flight was about to take place, and that a breeder wishing to select a particular type of drone for a queen to mate with could have a good rate of success (21 out of 25) by stocking the mating nuc with the desired drone. This seems too easy.
Does anyone do this? I seem to read a lot about drone saturation, and drone congregation areas.
Has subsequent research found some means by which drones learn that a virgin queen is coming from a different colony? Adrian.
What caught my interest was the experiments conducted to see the relationship between drones and and an unmated queen. What he concluded after a few experiments and observations was that only the drones in the hive issuing the virgin queen seemed to know that the mating flight was about to take place, and that a breeder wishing to select a particular type of drone for a queen to mate with could have a good rate of success (21 out of 25) by stocking the mating nuc with the desired drone. This seems too easy.
Does anyone do this? I seem to read a lot about drone saturation, and drone congregation areas.
Has subsequent research found some means by which drones learn that a virgin queen is coming from a different colony? Adrian.