Last year I bought 15 queens from a queen breeder. When the queens came they looked fine. We got them mid May. They were introduced into 10 production hives and 5 nucs. The queens were released by the workers eating the candy plug. Two were killed upon release. Three or four were superceded within two weeks. The queens that started laying were laying brood patches that looked like winter brood patches. None of the queens were laying patches that would support the hive population. It took the ones not superceded 6 weeks to lay a respectable patch of brood. Except for 3 all had been superceded by July 1. These queens were replaced by our own queens, and they have done well, except for two that were superceded.
Lets discuss commercial queen survival. I would like to know how the rest of you have faired with your boughten queens. I have been told that what I experienced is not too far off normal, but I have also talked to beekeepers that have had nearly 100% survival.
Dave
I had 150 queens ordered for a mid March delivery from a sizeable supplier I’ve used in the past. Because of his location, he is able to have mated queens weeks before I can. In late December he told me his hives were in a major collapse and he would be unable to deliver my queens.
I have to ask myself…what would cause such an operation wide collapse in a relatively large operation run by experienced people? And as is appropriate to this thread….how do the things that result in such a collapse affect the queens produced by them?
When I was about 12 I went to the eye doctor. As he handed me my prescription…he laughed and said ‘son…your next prescription is going to be a seeing eye dog’. Fifty years later and I’m not quite ready for the dog but needless to say my eyesight hasn’t improved. I say all of this to explain why I’ve never produced my own queens. I simply don’t have the eyesight to graft. I just got a Jenter and have a Mann Lake graftless box on the way and expect to break them in this spring. It’ll mean a very different strategy for my nuc production but I’ve had enough of the headaches of buying queens from commercial suppliers.
Nothing boring about keeping bees…..
And what made that even more interesting...only a single interior surface had been treated! Can you imagine what it would have done if all of the wood surfaces inside the hive had been treated?
Ok...got to run...honey to deliver....bees to check...and this evening a pint at the pub with some other local beekeepers. There is something to be said for winter. In spring it is all I can do to eat and drop into bed at the day's end.
i'm seeing the other salient advantage of raising your own queens is that you get to evaluate each one's performance prior to putting her into production.
They had a tough time mating them last year due to weather in CA early on. So it depends on the weather out there also. If a queen has to wait to do a mating flight to long or not enough drones get out of their homes due to weather it can make for some wussy queens.
Thanks Radar. The words used were "It appeared, though, that Api-Life VAR may be toxic to sperm in the spermatheca".
Interesting but doesn't tell you much. Wonder if there's any hard numbers.
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