in hive breeding

[george s]

if i use an entrance guard to quarantine my queen will she bread in the hive?

[drobbins]

I'm guessing you mean will a virgin queen mate in a hive?
I'm pretty sure the answer is no
they mate in the air, I think she would just be unmated
why would you want to do this?

Dave

[BigDaddyDS]

Hmmm... I'm a little confused about this question also.

If she's an unmated virgin queen, then she won't mate. Not only because queens mate in flight, but because she'd (essentially) be mating with her own brothers and nature just doesn't work that way. She'll either go without mating, or they drones will. Either way, your virgin queen will probably go unmated. (But the upside, as if there was one, is that she'll be making a TON of drone bees! And, another "plus" is that you'll KNOW what caused your hive to collapse!)

Okay, if you mean, if you take your mated queen and shut her into a hive with a queen excluder, will she lay? Then the answer is, yes. The down side to that situation is that you will also be shutting in/out drones. And you still won't be preventing possible swarming. The worker bees with either "force" the queen to "diet" and "exercise" and fit through the bars, or they'll make a swarm cell and that unmated queen should be able to fit through the bars and escape.

So, that leads to the next question: Why would you want to do either of these?

DS

[sqkcrk]

if i use an entrance guard to quarantine my queen will she bread in the hive?

No, she will not.

[Michael Bush]

>if i use an entrance guard to quarantine my queen will she bread in the hive?

Never.

[riverrat]

Wont work. what would be your point for trying this. If it was to work What I see is your queen mating with her brother developing bad genetics

[jjgbee]

Dr Orley Taylor did research on queen mating. He found That a drone will only fly 1500 meters from his hive and the queen will always fly 3000 meters from home to mate. This is natures way of preventing inbreeding. Therefore if you have a mating yard with drone hives and queen nucs in the same yard, your queen is mating with the neighbors drones.

[Radar]

<Dr Orley Taylor did research on queen mating. He found That a drone will only fly 1500 meters from his hive and the queen will always fly 3000 meters from home to mate. This is natures way of preventing inbreeding. Therefore if you have a mating yard with drone hives and queen nucs in the same yard, your queen is mating with the neighbors drones.>

Perhaps this does not always work this way as I have taken A.m.m. to an isolated area with drones and virgins in the same mating yard and have morphology tested the resultant workers as pure A.m.m. Perhaps they mate as the queens are returning home.

The problem with this mating area is it is a long way to travel and now with the cost of fuel I was going to try this method:- http://www.twilightmd.com/Samples/Ho..._1991_1May.pdf

In order to keep my virgin Carnica queens pure. I intended to place drones from selected Carnica queens in a nuc along with the virgin and release them as directed in this article. Natural mating at home is not possible without contamination from other races, Buckfast, Italian and other mixes.

Has anyone tried this.

[george s]

thanks for the info. i was given a hive set up with an entrance guard and thought it should come off. i am in south texas and worried about a hive going african. the guard was to stop this. thanks again for the advice.