I'm posting this in the Bee Forum, because it seems to have implications well beyond queen rearing.
For many years now, I've been regularly raising many queens each year. My mother queens are homozygous for the Cordovan color trait, though all of the daughters are not homozygous for the trait - most are. All of my home-raised queens are either the color of Italian honey bees, or, as it were, Cordovan Italian honey bees, with only a few workers in a hive or two, being darker colored.
Considering the above, when I see a swarm approaching my apiary, and it alights on the vertical shade cloth, immediately adjacent to the entrances of nucs or mating nuc colonies, and all their bees and queens are very dark bees, I take the time to observe them and, if necessary, ameliorate the effects of their presence and behavior. So far, these have all been dark bees and queens, exclusively.
But, in order to avoid digressing too far, I will now focus on what inspired me to start this thread:
Late this afternoon, I had gone into my queen rearing apiary to check on my queen cells. As I was approaching the cell builder, I observed a swarm arriving just outside the entrance to a nearby mating nuc (which was between mated queens - occupied by a recent virgin), they were alighting on the shade cloth immediately opposite the nuc entrance (only a few inches away). But, what alarms me the most about their presence; which does alarm me greatly - after I captured and caged their own dark, plump queen, was the presence of a Cordovan Italian virgin queen which the swarm was in the process of balling to death (she and all the swarm bees were still on the outside of the shade cloth). It would seem that this swarm somehow intercepted the virgin on a flight, practice or mating, and killed her, prior to attempting a take-over of her colony. No wonder so many Cordovan virgins don't make it back from their mating flights.
I guess it's good that I don't maintain any dark colored bees in my apiaries, so it's easier to discern when this happens.
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It seems like the process of usurpation is much more insidious than I ever imagined.
Hardly seems like a simple thing like an usurpation, it seems more like a coup.
