poor queens

[Oldtimer]

Taking bees as either a package or a swarm, from somewhere where there has been a decent flow or feeding, and installing them in a new hive where there is no flow, will stress things with the queen and sometimes lead to high % supercedure.

Each year I collect maybe 30 or 40 swarms that origionated from back yard hives in the suburbs, where there is a good nectar flow at that time. This year I put around 20 of them at a yard where there was a total dearth at the time, and the majority of them went queenless, some of them permanently & had to be requeened. Won't be using that yard for swarms again.

On a different tac, an issue for queen breeders is the effect of varroa on drones. There are often not large numbers of drones till later in the season. So the early queens can struggle with low drone numbers. This is compounded because a lot of hives will not have had their spring varroa treatments and have high varroa counts, reducing drone sperm counts. Then, when treatment is done, the chemicals themselves can also reduce drone sperm counts. So it's a double whammy that did not exist before varroa mites.

[Cedar Hill]

There may be something more insidious at work in the maintenance of the queen's pheromones. Worker bees can "reverse engineer" themselves into becoming nurse bees again. The following link may be helpful in this discussion.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Eyl...everse&f=false OMTCW

[jmgi]

Oldtimer, so maybe when us northern U.S. beeks get our packages in March or April to get an early start, we're not helping matters because these packages were shook in a southern climate with strong nectar and pollen flows going on, then dumped in northern hives where there is hardly anything coming in (depending on the year), so that may have an adverse affect on the bees acceptance of queens in some way. There is just so much at work here all at once that could be affecting poor queens, hard to put a finger on it. John

[Grant]

2. Is this really that much different than a swarm? What percentage of a swarm is made up of bees younger than 1 week? deknow

Yeah, there's a big difference between packages and swarms, and they are many, many of which remaind elusive to our knowledge.

I've been nodding my head in agreement with much of what's been said...but I'm still at a loss for the reason why commercially-raised queens have seemed to go down in quality in recent years. It may be many factors, some which remain elusive to our knowledge. Obviously, however, there are quite a few good queens still produced!

I can only change what I can change so I stopped buying packages years ago. Today, I much prefer to catch a swarm than buy a nuc, and I've invested a lot of time and energy teaching myself how to raise my own queens rather than buying commercially-raised queens.

I don't know what the "real" cause is or why mail-order queens just don't last. But I know I do not want to be dependent upon outside resources that leave me vulnerable. So I change what can be changed and accept that which cannot.

Grant
Jackson, MO

[jmgi]

The average commercial southern queen is not that great, I think we can agree on that, but that may be mainly for the earlier produced queens when the drone populations are not at peak, I don't know that for sure as I am not a package/queen producer and don't know what is or isn't a suffiicient drone population to get good mating accomplished, they know. I'm now leaning more towards the main problem with the queens being what conditions they are being introduced into up here in the north, how they are jerked out of a somewhat normal hive environment after a couple weeks of laying, then caged with an imbalanced adult bee population for a few days to a week of stress, then dumped into cold hives that in alot of cases have nothing more than frames of foundation, a feeder, and very little natural nectar and pollen sources producing, and we expect them to not miss a beat, not going to happen usually. John

[Ted Kretschmann]

Buy a nuc from a reputible breeder and leave packages alone. As a breeder that has shipped many a package in the past, (nuc producer now) and sold many a queen, I can state this: A nuc yard is basically feed lot beekeeping. Many breeders will breed off a favorite breeder queen,two or even dozens in a season. The problem arrives when the breeder grafts and ten days later harvests the graft and places the cells. All the nucs are lined up in a row. Thus the cells are place in the nuc yard by lot-date of cell placement. Well the drone stock is located nearby and is of known pedigree and probably related. When your virgins (who are sisters in a particular dated emerging lot) go and mate with the drone stock, you have a recipe for genetic disaster. The breeder then goes and catches the queens down the line of nucs. Then your order is filled. You go and requeen your yard.Since there is very little "wild" stock left; Should your bees supercede, they back cross and inbreed thus genetically weaken your bees. Thus genetically weak bees can not fight pest and disease. It is not the breeders fault.This is an industry problem that has NOBODY but ourselves to blame. We have bottlenecked down in the genetic funnel till there is NO diversity in the gene pool left. Back in the 80's, there were an estimated 850 queen lineages that breeders were using, with a very broad genetic pool. Today it has been estimated by Baton Rouge that there is maybe 37 lineages left that has survived Varroa predation. The Aussies have added maybe a few more genes also. Whether we like it or not---We will have to bring in more genetic material, superior genetics, from other parts of the world. TK

[jmgi]

Ted, the lack of genetic diversity left surely is a big part too, even though I don't claim to understand it very much, but I do know smarter folks than I understand it well enough to explain it so it makes some sense. John

[Ted Kretschmann]

Well, it boils down to the fact that all of us that breed bees in some form or fashion are as of today, using stock that is too closely related.Thus everybody in the bee industry out there, including you are also using that same stock. Everybody is back crossing each others bees and genetically weakening the species in America as a whole. While the Aussie bees I bought three years ago did have a slight problem with chalkbrood, I was glad to get the new genetics. Three years later, the bees that interbred with them seem to be a better bee. I attribute that to the new genes in the stock line. The stock line was two years out of Europe when I bought it from Australia. I plan on buying some New Zealand stock in the future. It is also two years out from Europe. That ought to make the oldtimer smile.TK

[The Honey Householder]

As a large honey producer that uses 100% packages to produce my crop, I have not had a big problem with queen in packages. Last year was a hard early queen year for the south. I did do some replacement of some of my early queens, but I knew getting package in later March I would have a problem.
I feel the queens now at days are just throw away queens. Back before mites your best queens were your second year queens, if you could keep them at home.
Is there any package producer that don't requeen in the fall. They don't trust there old queens going into winter, so why should we.

[Ted Kretschmann]

You want me to be honest with you..... We do not requeen 2000 colonies of bees every year. When we produced packages we did not and that was not but four years ago that we quit. I do not know of any breeders that do in my circle of aquantainces. If they tell you this, it may be a tale. Yes, the best queen are the second season ones then and now. There is more genetics at play in all the lousy queen problems. TK

[Michael Palmer]

I feel the queens now at days are just throw away queens

So is that part of the problem. Queen producers using throw away breeder queens to produce throw away production queens?

I can't imaging requeening every colony every year. Why? Because the resulting colonies are less likely to swarm? OK, fine. I agree. But, wouldn't it be a better plan to select breeder queens from stocks that are less prone to swarming and maintain productive colonies for two or more seasons.

And why not take it one step further. If a colony can remain productive for many years, successfully superceding and still maintaining their productivity, shouldn't we take a serious look at that stock? Those colonies that have the ability to continue on through the years in a productive and healthy condition won't be there if you requeen every colony every year, every other year, or at any time just because the calendar says to.

Requeen by performance, not by the calendar.

[Barry]

Requeen by performance, not by the calendar.

Wow, two in one day! I'm going to have to start a collection of Palmerisms!

[jmgi]

Barry, I think you should do it, words to beekeep by. Surely you could go back over all of M.P.'s posts and find a treasure trove. John

[sqkcrk]

Bee careful, they are all Copy Righted.

Copy Writed? Copy Written? I'm getting dizzy.

[Eek-a-beek]

@Ted

"Everybody is back crossing each others bees and genetically weakening the species in America as a whole."

Inbreeding is a mixed story of benefits and drawbacks. It has good effects and bad. Among humans we do not like to do it because it leads to birth defects and genetic diseases in the children. This is not a constraint for livestock and agriculture.

A good effect of inbreeding is the elimination of genetic defects and diseases. This happens because rare defective genes become common, often causing death before adulthood but otherwise yielding obviously deformed individuals that are discarded by the breeder. At the same time bad genes are being rejected, the best dominant and recessive traits can be selected until they breed true. This is a real benefit of inbreeding.

A potentially bad effect is losing diversity at loci where heterosis yields the best qualities. Starting with two select "super star" queens, if there is only one heterotic gene then open breeding will result in half the daughter bees being super stars, two genes and it becomes a quarter. But the problem is that if you are not lucky while using open inbreeding methods then random drift can reduce the frequency of one of the alleles and super stars become rare. In this case one can not talk about genetically weakening the species though because there is nothing wrong with the allele that exists, it just does not work well on its own. Avoiding inbreeding is not the best solution here; in the case of heterotic advantage one really needs to breed two separate lines each homozygous in a different allele. Then these parent stocks are bred to yield a generation of super stars. With queen raising this really means sending your queens out for their mating flights to a fellow queen raiser with an inbred line who lives far away. I do not know if breeders have queen exchange arrangements for mating flights but they should, this would help.

Sexual reproduction exists to fight diseases such as viruses. Pathogens reproduce explosively and hence adapt rapidly. The immune system of an individual becomes the environment that it is adapting to. Because of the shuffle of genes during sexual reproduction, immune system markers get all mixed up. This means that when a virus becomes adapted to one individual it remains poorly suited to attack others of the same species. This protects the population taken as a group.

The real problem with inbreeding is not weak genes, it is that genetic uniformity leaves the population vulnerable to being swept by a pathogen which is adapted to attack all of them. This means that in an inbred population of bees one observes that the bees are getting sickly. It is easy to conclude that the gene line has become weak but that is not really what is wrong. Some virus or other pathogen has their number because they lack variety in their immune systems.

[Eek-a-beek]

@sqkcrk

Copy Righted. Copy Writed? Copy Written?

I use to think it was copywright protection, i.e. protection against those people who copy things, the copywrights.

[sqkcrk]

But the werd "wright" means to build. So that don't make no saence to me. So maybe it's "copywrit". Naw. That cain't be write, right, wright, rite,... darn it... correct.

[Ted Kretschmann]

Michael Palmer is correct in his last post. I can not look at a queen and tell how many years she will lay. I can look at her pattern that she lays and that is the only indicator of her performance that I have. Thus we never did requeen everything every year. Now we bring in fresh bloodlines periodically and distribute those genetics throughout the operation. Eek, you are correct that inbred lines of bees are susceptable to disease. Thus the whole honeybee population in the USA has a problem with the lack of diversity. You should contact the scientist at Baton Rouge and let them tell you how shallow the honeybee genetic pool is in the USA. It is a rather scary situation. TK

[jmgi]

Would it be the Italian line of bees that has the least genetic diversity in the U.S. today because they have been with us the longest? John

[sqkcrk]

Not necassarily, I would suspect.