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Chances of queen dying on mating flights

18K views 39 replies 19 participants last post by  biggraham610 
#1 ·
I have a virgin queen that may be my only chance at a queen that will lay eggs. My other hive has no queen. Unfortunately, here we cannot order queens like in the U.S., so I have to make this queen work or I'm in deep crap and will likely lose both hives.

What is the chance my queen will die on her mating flights? If she does then I'm up a creek. :digging:

Also, does she mate with drones from her hive or other hives? I ask b/c there is no one in the local area who has meliferra, so I assume she would have to mate with drones from one of my hives. And there aren't that many drones. Like only a handful.
 
#2 ·
YMMV, but we are running 50% - one post swarm queen didn't return, one "emergency" queen from a hive split did. Don't know what the national average is.
Common wisdom is that a queen will not mate with drones from her own hive - they're not like the royals of Europe!
There are hopefully bees in your area that you don't know about.

good luck
 
#3 ·
Im running 100% this year on 5 splits but we have alot of feral hives around and diversity in genetics.

Its a possibility she is caught by bird or injured etc, I would be more concerned about mating drones nearby. Unlike the kind folk down south, bees don't do incest.
 
#4 ·
I disagree with the first 2 answers. Queens cannot control which drones mate with her. It's whichever drones happen to get to her-luck of the draw. So, she can be and often is mated with her own sons. However, she mates with on average 15 different drones giving her a variety of sperm. When eggs are laid that are fertilized from sperm of her own sons, the worker bees can tell and eliminate those eggs from the cells. That is one of the reasons that a brood pattern is spotty. The workers have eliminated the inbred eggs from the broodnest. http://www.bushfarms.com/beesgeneticdiversity.htm

Hopefully, there may be feral colonies of bees in trees/buildings/etc from swarms of your hives or past hives that may have drones to mate with your queen.

Maybe you could get a frame of bees and eggs from a mellifera beekeeper in another town and let your other hive raise queens to be mated with by your drones. In your situation, it would be best if the 2 hives were of different stock-the more diverse and the more number of drones around from different genetic sources, the better.

By the way, you write with very Americanized English. I'm impressed.

Good luck. In the US, we seldom have extreme problems of lack of genetic diversity that you have. Please let us know how it works out for you.
 
#9 ·
You don't have much choice but to let her mate... and that has risks. Odds are she will fly further and higher than the drones from the same yard, but there is no telling what drones she will mate with and if some of the drones from her hive have drifted back from a DCA to some other hive and then flew out with those drones to the same DCA (Drone Congregation Area) that the queen did. In other words, there are no guarantees but the biology of the bee puts the odds in favor of out crossing and diversity rather than inbreeding.

What can you do? I find that a queen is more likely to fly and more successful if the hive is in a flow. If it's not in a flow, I would reduce the entrance (to prevent robbing) and feed them during the time when she needs to mate. This will increase the odds that she will fly and that she will succeed. Everything works better in a flow, including queen mating.

Never underestimate how many drones there are and how many feral hives there are. She will likely find some drones somewhere.
 
#11 ·
I'm sure queen success is local, like much of beekeeping. I have 80% average success from queen cell to laying queen. Some don't hatch and some don't come back. This year I was 100% successful on my first larger batch and 50% on my smaller second batch. (The second batch was to replace any failures from the first, which I didn't end up having). I rarely have a hive go queenless though, say after swarming or supercedure. I know that I see a lot of that here on Beesource, but I don't see it in either of my apiaries. In one, I have up to 100 swallows flying over my hives at any one time. It looks like a terrible place for bees, but I've never not had a queen return. Maybe they prefer drones.
 
#14 ·
This is the funniest thread! You guys are crazy. thanks for the comment about my Americanized English. That's probably b/c I am an American living over here.. LOL. :lookout:

I don't understand all this stuff about the flow b/c I have given them syrup, but they won't take it right now, so I assume the flow is on.

If I was to get a frame of new eggs, how long can those eggs last in shipment without being fed? It would likely take 2 days door to door...
 
#20 ·
If I was to get a frame of new eggs, how long can those eggs last in shipment without being fed? It would likely take 2 days door to door...
Since no one else is answering you, I'll try and then maybe someone north of the Mason-Dixon line can help also.

It takes about 3 days for eggs to hatch into larva. For bees to raise a new queen, they need to use larva that has hatched less than 3 days and preferably only one day. So, if your shipment takes a long time to arrive, they cannot use the larva to raise successful queens.

The larva need to be fed as soon as they hatch from eggs, so if eggs are shipped and at least some of them are newly laid, I guess that would work. The eggs/larva absolutely must be kept warm-I think around 85 degrees F.

It would be far better to have the frame of eggs shipped along with the adhering nurse bees to keep them warm and attend to any larva that hatch. They would need to be shipped in a ventilated container (cage made of screen wire would be perfect) and would need feed of soft candy, fondue, etc. Too much jarring in shipment would not be good.

Hope I didn't leave something out.
 
#21 ·
Large scale queen producers would, I am sure, agree that anything over a 90% success rate is pretty rarified air though at least some of the "misses" may well involve cells that never hatched. If you don't have a lot of nearby hives to distract a returning, disoriented queen, though, I would think its reasonable to expect at least 9 of 10 queens to successfully find their way back into the proper hive.
 
#23 ·
Using instrumental insemination it is possible. A virgin queen can first be gassed with carbon dioxide which will induce her to start to lay, the eggs are drones and when the drones mature the semen is used to inseminate the virgin queen. At least that is how I have read it can be done.
 
#26 ·
I thought that there was a theory that queens flew farther away from the hive to mate than drones flew to mate. If true, that would keep queens from mating w/ their brothers.

I looked in my Encyclopedia of Beekeeping but couldn't find it stated. Other interesting stuff in there though. Drones don't start searching for the queen scent 9-0-2 until they get to a certain altitude, about 30 feet up. If I recall what i read correctly. How drone congregations are established and why they are established where they are is not fully understood.
 
#27 ·
Marco, isn't Indonesia a tropical country? I come from a tropical country myself and feral bees are abundant in tropical countries, a least where I am from. They even settle in peculiar high places, trees and masonry wall. Just ask the locals about bees in the area. It must be a good flow year around.
 
#28 ·
Robert, yes indonesia is very tropical. Where are you from?

There are wild bees here, but they are mostly apis cerana, the local native bee. Apis mellifera were imported back in the day and although they do well here, they are not native, so I am not sure if they can be considered "feral". Generally, what we find in the wild here are cerana.
 
#35 ·
so lets do a decision tree... to figure this out. IF something happened to the queen on the mating flight would the bees come back to the hive who were with her when she died? And would they trigger some kind of ... pheromone reaction or whatever that would trigger the other bees to know she's gone? Would there be a difference in time too between the other bees remaining behind starting to 'cry' from her just leaving as compared to her leaving and then something happening to her?
 
#38 ·
IF something happened to the queen on the mating flight would the bees come back to the hive who were with her when she died?
I think you have assumed that when a virgin queen goes out on her mating flights that she does so accompanied. I am not certain of this, but I don't think she does go out with an entourage. I have never heard of that happening.

For certain drones from the same hive do not go with her. Queens fly farther to DCAs than the drones from her parent colony do.
 
#36 ·
There is one way to avoid the risk of a mating flight, which is to use instrumental insemination. You can find instructions and how-to videos on line. This is a pretty advanced technique, usually only used for $200 breeder queens where the breeder wants to control which drones mate with the queen.

It is grizzly business, involving killing and dismembering the drones. But things end badly for the drones in any case.
 
#37 ·
I think its kind of funny in a way...we think the bees killing their drones and dismembering them is cruel...but we have divorce lawyers do it for us and they make the agony last for years instead of a small moment. Which is really more cruel =D

I've got a lot of ideas on bees vs lawyers jokes.
 
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