Early supersedure of new queens

[Jon]

Roger Patterson of the BBKA has been reporting and lecturing on this phenomenon for several years now although his observations are by no means universally accepted.
On Sunday 4th July I checked a nuc which had a 2010 mated queen which had been laying for exactly a week and found two charged queen cells which looked like supersedure cells. This queen was mated in a four frame nuc.
Today I checked another nuc which was made from some brood and young bees from the queenless part of an artificial swarm and a queen which I introduced from an Apidea on Tuesday 29th June. The queen had started to lay in the Apidea on Saturday 26th June. There were two charged queen cells present, on a pollen frame which had no other larvae. The queen had laid plenty of eggs and there were young larvae present. Both queens, marked blue, were present and going about their business.
In both cases, I brushed the bees off each frame and I put them in the upper brood box of one of my cell raising colonies. In my experience these early supersedure queen cells hatch out into normal queens.
I also expect to find more cells in a week.
last year I had a colony which made a supersedure cell every week for a month during August and I removed the frame each time and made a nuc with it. One of these queens heads my current best colony.
I have no idea why this happens. Theories range from Nosema Ceranae to wax contamination but noone knows for sure.
It is irritating when you have gone through the entire process from selecting a donor colony, setting up a cell raiser, grafting, shaking bees into Apideas, taking Apideas for queens to be be mated, uniting Apidea to a nuc only to find the bees trying to supersede a queen who has been mated for only 1 week! If you haven't got patience, you shouldn't be in beekeeping.

[Calum]

I always thought they go for early supersedure to replace a queen they feel is dodgey in one way or another.
I'm told the supersedure queens are the best there are as they get the best treatment (they dont have to share the royal jelly with 10 others).

[Jon]

I always thought they go for early supersedure to replace a queen they feel is dodgey in one way or another.

I agree, but how would they know after a week? I think in this case it is a mistaken signal/impulse as removing the queen cells when they occur usually leads to the queen settling down and laying properly after a few weeks The mystery is the underlying cause.



I'm told the supersedure queens are the best there are as they get the best treatment (they dont have to share the royal jelly with 10 others).

Also agree. These queens are always huge. I have three or four of last year's supersedure queens and they are much bigger than any others I have.

[Calum]

Poorly inseminated? (was only partially mated and didn't get out again because of weather?)
Could have gotten a infection from mating (if I understand correctly mating is fairly rough)?
Defective ovaries?
What were the brood patterns like when she started laying? Full frames that were all females with no gaps, or patchy laying pattern with sporadic drones?
...

[Jon]

The weather was perfect.
It's a bit to early to assess the brood pattern but I should know in another week.
There was no shortage of drones.
Queens often take a while to get going properly and its common to see multiple eggs in some cells with a new laying queen.
I would expect a poorly mated queen to get ditched at some point but not after just a week.

[Calum]

Is she marked? Maybe she has been impaired by glue from marking that would make the bees feel she is not alright.

[Jon]

Is she marked? Maybe she has been impaired by glue from marking that would make the bees feel she is not alright.

I marked her with a blue dot last week with a posca marker pen and she has a nice blue spot, no ink ran down her side or anything like that.
I just checked at lunchtime and she seems to have stopped laying so there does indeed appear to be some sort of a problem.
I must have a closer look and see if she has a damaged antenna or some other part of her anatomy.

[Neils]

I did have a colony doing something similar last year. It was a cast swarm that we collected, hived in a brand new hive, new frames, new foundation, which then proceeded to supersede every queen it raised from June through to september, needless to say it didn't make it through winter. The hive immediately next to it raised a new queen during the same timescale and she's been fine all the way until I got careless and let her swarm a couple of weeks back. All the colonies on the same apiary this year have also successfully raised new queens so I'd be inclined to discount the general area as being poor for queen mating, I know of at least 8 other colonies within a couple of miles of me there too.

The first queen in that colony we did mark, after that we stopped just in case they were objecting to the mark and I routinely leave all my new queens until the following spring for marking now

[gavin]

So, some theories ...

1. Nosema ceranae as Jon said

2. Wax contamination (ditto)

3. Poor mating due to insufficient drones

4. Bad handling/marking

.... anything else? Should I offer:

5. Pesticides, as in neonicotinoids on OSR?

6. Varroa-affected drones

I'm seeing repeated queen problems at the site of our new association apiary. I don't think that this is 1 or 2 or 4. Could be 3, 5 or 6 though. It is surrounded by rape as well, but I seem to recall that your bees are far from rape Nellie?

[Jon]

I checked my queen today and her antennae are fine and she has started laying again -and she has probably the finest and best applied blue dot of the ten or so queens I have marked this year! A work of art if I say so myself.
I will probably find more queen cells by the weekend.

The other one I mentioned in the OP seems to have corrected itself as well.

I have one nuc which has now lost 3 virgins in a row. I put in a queen cell, it hatches, I check the wings and watch the virgin running on the comb, and then a week later it is gone.

There are other funny goings on I have noticed which have not been mentioned (yet) by Roger P.
The worst of these is a nuc swarming with the virgin and half the bees, leaving the remainder hopelessly queenless. I have seen this at least 3 times. twice I have been able to recover the swarm, if you would call it that, and reunite with the dregs of the nuc.

Gavin, re
6. Varroa-affected drones I monitor my varroa levels and uncap drone brood and I have seen very few mites this year. I think my drones are healthy and there are some monsters this year.


. Poor mating due to insufficient drones

I have been feeding shallows to my preferred colonies since mid April and I have a lot of drones about.
I am not seeing much pepperpot brood either.

I haven't a clue what causes this but I do believe it is a genuine problem.

[Jimbo]

How about
7. something affecting the queen substance (pheromones) production

Jimbo

[Neils]

I'm seeing repeated queen problems at the site of our new association apiary. I don't think that this is 1 or 2 or 4. Could be 3, 5 or 6 though. It is surrounded by rape as well, but I seem to recall that your bees are far from rape Nellie?

No rape anywhere near me, not very popular allotment crop ;)

I've had one new queen attempt to be superseded so far this year, but there's a long story around this one. She's in a Nuc and still laying up reasonably well as far as I can see but she is definitely a lot smaller than all the others so I'm not desperately surprised.

[gavin]

No rape anywhere near me ....

I dunno, beekeepers these days, they just refuse to believe that pesticides are behind all the problems!

8. (could be related to some previous ones) Insufficient pollen collected to feed the queens well, resulting in scrub queens.

[Jon]

8. Insufficient pollen collected to feed the queens well, resulting in scrub queens.

Not in my case as the queens were raised from grafted larvae and I had a frame of pollen at either side of the frame with the grafts.
No problem with size.

As you say, Imidicloprid is the root of all evil (allegedly) but unfortunately I had little or no oil seed rape near my apiary this year either. I wouldn't categorically rule it out but it's not where I would start looking either.

[Jimbo]

9. Some sort of damage to the larvae when grafting?

Pesticides might be a possibility. I must admit I have never experienced any of the problems described but then there is no farming to speak of in my area unless the MOD use them on their land!

Jimbo

[Jon]

9. Some sort of damage to the larvae when grafting?
Jimbo

Damaged larvae are usually removed within minutes of introduction.
I have grafted 20 and looked in an hour later and you can see which ones have being flooded with royal jelly and which cups are empty.

This is the first year I have grafted and I experienced the same thing last year.
It happens with queens produced any way, swarm cells, supersedure, or grafted.

[Jimbo]

Ok, Scrub theory no. 9

Jimbo

[Neils]

I dunno, beekeepers these days, they just refuse to believe that pesticides are behind all the problems!

8. (could be related to some previous ones) Insufficient pollen collected to feed the queens well, resulting in scrub queens.

Without having done anything "scientific" I'd be inclined to discount that on my own colonies, you can clearly see several different types of pollen and in large quantities across all my hives at the moment.

9) also doesn't apply to me as I'm very much in the "leave them to get on with it" school of beekeeping at the moment when it comes to queen rearing.

I know it's trendy to jump on the pesticide/chemical bandwagon and I dare say that there are people on these allotments who do use sprays, but this is Bristol, Brown Rice capital of the UK so I'll make a dangerous assertion that there'll be much lower concentrations on the forage around here than elsewhere.

In my particular case at the moment I'm inclined to blame the bees and I'm still not 100% sure what, if anything went wrong with the one in the Nuc, the only difference between that queen and the one in the sister colony (same parent queen and attendant bees) is that the sister was drawn from the queen cell late on day 15, the one in the Nuc was left to its own devices to emerge and mate.

[gavin]

10. Mixed up genetics of the bees these days (I suspect Jon may disagree, but Jim might like it).

11. It always was like this in some years, just that we didn't notice.

Perhaps we need to revisit 1 and 2

1. Nosema ceranae as Jon said

2. Wax contamination (ditto)

G.

[Jon]

10. Mixed up genetics of the bees these days (I suspect Jon may disagree, but Jim might like it).

11. It always was like this in some years, just that we didn't notice.

Perhaps we need to revisit 1 and 2

1. Nosema ceranae as Jon said

2. Wax contamination (ditto)

G.

What do you mean 'mixed up genetics' Do you mean that paper about IAPV viral sequence in the bee genome?

This is a picture from last July. A pollen frame packed with pollen apart from two supersedure cells. This happened in a colony with a brand new queen. I let one of the cells hatch and it produced a nice queen which overwintered. Curiously, the parent colony which was a double brood colony dwindled away to nothing in the autumn with what I took to be nosema, although I didn't have a sample tested. the catalyst for this was letting the colony get to starvation point after 3 weeks of rain in August.
292

[gavin]

I also had starving colonies last August - wonder if my winter losses were associated with that?

Mixed-up genetics? The effect of crossing two strains with quite diverse (phylogenetic!) origins. In groups of organisms that have diverged, genes may have got rearranged and chromosomes twisted around a bit. Make a hybrid, and the first generation is OK 'cos they all have a full set of genes, even if they are not all in the same order on all chromosomes. But the next generations starts to lose bits and pieces here and there. Alternatively, even if the genes are all still in the same order, they have become adapted to each other. Make random mixes of such genes with different origins and they might not all work together as harmoniously as before.

Ish.

G.

[Jon]

Mixed-up genetics?
I doubt if that is a factor in early supersedure.
I may be getting some unwanted drones in the mix but I doubt if there is enough of an influence to cause the problem,

[Neils]

As interested as I am in the topic I have to admit that it's getting a little beyond my knowledge and experience to contribute in any meaningful sense.

I do wonder how much 11) might be a factor though.

10) to my non scientific mind was also something I'd thought about. I think there is an analogue, I'm just not sober enough to try and explain it without upsetting people.

I will say that I'm good at spotting patterns and, at the moment, I've not seen enough in my colonies to even figure out what the norm is let alone what's weird. My colonies right now are all from the same bloodline, but there's 3 completely new colonies in our apiary so I'm very keen to see how they get on even if I greet their arrival with some trepidation.

[Jon]

11. It always was like this in some years, just that we didn't notice.
G.

Roger P always makes the point that when he kept bees in the 1960s he never saw any of these problems.
He also makes the point that if you are a hands off beekeeper you won't notice any of it.
It's easy to attribute queen losses to the voracious appetite of the local swifts and swallows.
If you don't know a supersedure attempt is under way, the old queen may disappear and the new one gets lost on a mating flight leaving a hopelessly queenless colony.

[Trog]

Swallows can often be seen above my apiary when mating flights are due ... but also at other times. Great tits sometimes go around the entrances to hoover up dead bees or larvae tidied up by the bees after an inspection, as do the hedgehogs.

[Jimbo]

Back in the 60's we did not have varroa nor did they use chemicals in hives to control varroa. It could still be a gene defect that has been triggered by something. either a chemical like a pesticide or biological like Nosema Cerana.
It would be interesting to see if it was seen in the next generation next year.

Jimbo

[Jon]

Just to update this thread a little.
I am still finding the odd supersedure cell in nucs headed by newly mated queens but things are settling down a little.

One nuc has a queen which is laying 90% drone when it can be bothered to lay at all and obviously this one is determined to supersede.
I have done a little experiment out of curiosity.
The marked queen was present along with a supersedure cell.
I put in two grafted queen cells in roller cages on the point of hatching.
They had hatched by the next day and the bees in the nuc were attending them through the cages.
I removed the supersedure cell and one of the hatched queens in her cage.
I removed a frame, the one from which I had removed the supersedure cell, and released the virgin on it.
The bees accepted her immediately even though there is a drone laying queen in the colony.
I replaced the frame in the nuc.
I am curious to see at what point they ditch the marked queen or if the two queens will fight when they encounter each other.
If this works it is like a supersedure but with a queen which is not a daughter of the queen being superseded.
I will have a peek in later this afternoon if it ever stops raining.

I know it would be easier to just kill the drone layer and requeen or combine but I have a curiosity to see what happens here.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

After a good start to the season I am seeing more non mated queens or cells failing to hatch resulting in drone laying workers. I also experienced a new queen in a 5 frame nuc that was doing well only to find a week later the lot had gone. There was nothing in the nuc except a few dead bees and a few wasps robbing it out. I usually don't get that much problem with raising queens but finding this year is challenging. It will interesting to see how your little experiment goes.

Jimbo

[Adam]

Relating to Jons posts;
"One nuc has a queen which is laying 90% drone when it can be bothered to lay at all and obviously this one is determined to supersede".
I have a queen just like that. I removed her and replaced today with a queen in a butler cage. I have had 3 drone layers this year; not seen one before.

"The worst of these is a nuc swarming with the virgin and half the bees, leaving the remainder hopelessly queenless". I had that too - just once. The queen had failed to lay 5 weeks after emerging and a test frame set her off - the next day she flew. Very odd.

[Neils]

I think I'm seeing something similar to what we had last year. ONe colony raised a new queen no problems at all, the one next door, same parent queen apparently attempting repeated supersedure. It's not as obvious as last year so far but the pattern is very familiar. I've just re-united the queen I removed when it first attempted to supersede with a much larger, queenless, colony, so will see what happens, it's been fine building up in a Nuc with no apparent problems so I might just be reading too much into it, but I found a single queen cell after the new queen came into lay. I removed that and, touch wood, a week later there's no sign of new ones.

[Jon]

Hi Jon,
After a good start to the season I am seeing more non mated queens or cells failing to hatch resulting in drone laying workers.I usually don't get that much problem with raising queens but finding this year is challenging.
Jimbo

Hi Jimbo
My queen cells are hatching well, I would estimate 95% hatch and I have seen no problems with queens' wings or anything like that. I lose the queens about a week after hatching, I assume on a flight.


I also experienced a new queen in a 5 frame nuc that was doing well only to find a week later the lot had gone. There was nothing in the nuc except a few dead bees and a few wasps robbing it out.

This happened me yesterday. Fortunately the contents of the nuc were on a fence post, mated queen included, 5 feet away.
When I checked the nuc it was full of wasps and there was no food left.
The queen had been laying for 5 days and the nuc had abandoned a frame of brood.
I closed the entrance right down, put in some stores and put a piece of queen excluder over the entrance.
I think they tried to abscond due to negligible stores and persistent wasp attack.
The weather here has been rainy for two weeks but the sun is shining today.
Having commented that I don't usually feed nucs, I am eating my words and will check all of them carefully for stores later today.
Several people have commented that Poundland have a 1.5k bag of sugar for £1 so I may be stocking up.
Just started to hum Neil Young Sugar Mountain in my head there.

[Jon]

I have done a little experiment out of curiosity.

Back to the supersedure.
I checked earlier and there are two queens present in the nuc, the marked one and the virgin I released on Tuesday.
They were not on the same frame.
The marked queen has even laid a bit more although I assume it will be mostly drone brood.
Either that or she senses that the end is nigh and has got motivated.
The funny thing is that they are sisters rather than mother and daughter, both grafted from larvae from the same queen. The older one was grafted about 6 weeks before the younger one.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

After checking all my colonies, 5 fram nuc's, apideas etc I have come to the conclussion that we started well in May and June as the weather was good and the colonies were building up well. The last few weeks have been wet and the nuc's have suffered as there seems to be insufficent stores built up which has put a check on the colonies and in my case I have lost 2 nuc's possible due to starvation. The full colonies are unaffected as they had supers on and had access to food. There is not much honey coming in though. The mininucs were unaffected as they were checked for stores. So far I have 2 from 7 mated queens in mininucs with evidence that 3 others will start laying soon.

Jimbo

[Jon]

I checked the supersedure nuc today and the old drone laying queen is gone and the virgin is on the frame she used to occupy.
Someone bumped her off.
I thought they might wait until the virgin had started to lay but the old marked queen was laying 95% drone so they must have reckoned there was little to lose.
Both of them were present on Saturday so I had two queens in the nuc for 5 or 6 days.

Jimbo.
I have 20+ queens mated so far, 9 from an apiary with Galtee drones and I am looking forward to assessing those. I have 7 of them introduced and laying in nucs and 2 still in the Apideas

[Jon]

Just reviving this supersedure thread where we were speculating about possible causes of early supersedure of queens.

Some of the info. in this short paper would point very strongly at DWV.

Localization of deformed wing virus infection in queen and drone Apis mellifera L
Fievet et al (http://www.virologyj.com/content/pdf/1743-422X-3-16.pdf)


Queen fecundity is a central element in colony perform-
ance for honey production that could be impaired by viral
infections [6,15]. For instance, the undesired queen
supersedure observed regularly by beekeepers may be
related to viral infections.


DWV was detected by triplicate quantitative RT-PCR
assays [14] in 67% of asymptomatic egg laying queens (n
= 83), in 78% of drones collected at emergence (n = 14)
and in 100% of drones collected at hive entrance (n = 12)


In the drone reproductive tract, DWV was detected in most of the tissues,
especially in the seminal vesicles where the whole internal
epithelium was clearly stained with both the DWV-VP1
antibody and the antisense probe (Figure 1J and 1L; sense
negative control in K). These cells play an important role
in spermatozoa maturation. Intensive replication of DWV
in this tissue could therefore have a negative effect on
drone fertility. The mucus glands and testis epithelia were
also shown to be infected. The presence of DWV in these
tissues explains the detection of DWV RNA in the sperm,
through which drones could contaminate queens and the
next generation's worker brood following fertilization.

[Adam]

Here's another snippet from the 'paper

"The concentration of DWV in the reproductive tissues of
both queens and drones suggests that DWV infection
could have deleterious effect on their reproductive fitness,
which would seriously affect colony performance and
productivity, swarming and queen supercedure. The DWV
presence in sperm implies a possible sexual transmission
route for this virus, which could have major implications
for virus transmission between colonies [33] and queen
rearing operations".


A couple of "could haves" ... But if correct, even if your own colonies have a low prevalence of DWV, your queens could get it from others which are not so well looked-after. So maybe one explanation for the 'queen problems' that have been reported. The lesson is - keep varroa levels down.