Weather and mating

[nemphlar]

Do any of the experienced breeders on here have an opinion on the reliability of queens mated during poor weather in apideas, where they might be flying in marginal conditions as opposed to larger nucs where they are more likely to wait longer for better weather.
I have mixture this year from snelgrove top boxes,nucs and 6 apideas

[mbc]

Tricky question, I would say there is a slight trend to say queens mated from mini nucs are more likely to fail in their first year than those from proper nucs or full sized colonies. I don't have hard data to quantify this but it seems to be true in my own experience.

[Jon]

I don't have hard data either but I have not noticed queens mated from Apideas failing sooner than any other queens.
I know I have had Apidea queens live to the 4th year. Many people seem to think a 2 year lifespan is about normal for a queen now.

Also. I don't think queens in larger colonies wait for better weather.How would they predict the weather? I think that the small number of bees in an apidea means it is more urgent for the queen to mate and start laying in order to get colony numbers up asap.
With mating flights the queen can take a single flight or several. If she does not mate with enough drones on the first flight she will take further flights on the same day or on subsequent days.
If you get half an hour of warm sunny weather any afternoon between 1 week and 3 weeks from emergence the queen should be able to fly and mate properly.
As well as the weather, apiary vicinity mating and the number and quality of drones available are also going to be factors in successful queen mating.

There seem to be a lot of posts on Facebook and beekeeping forum about failed queens at the moment but are these drone layers due to poor mating or queens that have gone missing or colonies which never had a queen after messing up an artificial swarm? Hard to say from most of the posts you read.

Locally we only had one good mating day in May, Sat 23rd, and most of my first batch of queens started laying a couple of days later as did a couple of queens from artificial swarms at the association apiary.

[prakel]

I think that the small number of bees in an apidea means it is more urgent for the queen to mate and start laying in order to get colony numbers up asap.

This makes a lot of sense but it's a theory which would presuppose that the same urgency would occur with full size nucs which have been poorly made or are weak in bees. But I can't say that that's been my experience.

[Jon]

I would say on average I see eggs in an apidea around 11 or 12 days from queen emergence but it can be as early as 8 days or over 30 on rare occasions. Very few take longer than 2 weeks under decent weather conditions.

How long do queens take to mate from your nucs Prakel? I used some 2 frame nucs last summer and they seemed to mate quickly from those.

[fatshark]

If your idea is right Jon you might expect queens would get mated less fast in an Apidea with brood in it. What happens to your second or third round queens in the season?

[prakel]

Sounds like our mini-plus boxes are on pretty much the same time scale (perhaps a little slower on average -I reckon on 2 weeks for eggs) as your apidea except, they'd be 'lucky' to be allowed to keep an unmated queen for a month! In fact, I destroyed half a dozen this week because they were approaching that kind of timescale. Maybe the current fine weather would have seen them mated and maybe they'd have been really good queens but cells are cheap (unless you're buying them from fatshark :)) so no point risking it. Got to draw a line somewhere.

Noticed a queen (on four mp combs in an OSB3 box) which emerged on Sunday 24th May is laying -remembering that the weather at the start of this week was atrocious, while nine sisters from the same batch aren't laying although two do look like they will be soon. So many variables.

Had a high percentage vanish this last month but that's not so unusal at the site in question. I blame the swifts.

Full size frames -we're really just getting back into the swing with them after concentrating on the mp boxes so much over recent years so I'm going to hold back on making proclamations about time scales with them for the time being although the ones we have been using over the years haven't been noticeably slower than the mps. A lot depends as much on the individual week as anything, so vastly erroneous conclusions could easily be drawn by comparing different boxes being used at different points in the calendar.

My previous point was that badly made nucs and weak colonies don't seem to get queens mated sooner on an average than well made populous units so that suggests to me that there must be something else at play too with the small mating nucs.

[nemphlar]

I hadn't noticed any difference from the 3 frame nucs I had used over the years to the apideas either in longevity or reliability. but I hardly have numbers to confirm either way. The weather here has been poor so it may be academic and I'll have to keep whatever survives to lay. The earliest are out 7 days

[mbc]

One obvious reason mini nuc mated Queens might suffer more than those on full sized frames is that they will have to survive introduction whereas those on full sized frames can be built up from the mating colony.