Queen puzzle

[gavin]

OK, here are the facts. On 3 July I moved a queen out of a double brood colony into a nuc where she is still to be found. I moved in some grafts on that day (into the middle of the top box) and will distribute the resulting queen cells to Apideas tomorrow, the day before they are due to hatch. On 10 July we grafted again into the four spaces in the bar, alongside 5 good mature Q cells.

Today, no Q cells being drawn from the four grafted 3 days ago (the cups are empty), no unsealed brood in the colony apart from a couple of drone cells and two of these:

http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/bottombar2.jpg

One was on the frame adjacent to the grafts, one on the next frame along. On the bottom bars of the top box in this double brood colony.

What on earth?! Most likely explanation seems workers moving the grafted young larvae into queen cups elsewhere in the box. I'm almost tempted to graft from an Italian-looking stock to see if they do it again with a stock of different colour. Other explanations could be drone eggs laid by workers (they don't look like them but I'll grow them on to check), or thelytoky (Google it if you need). I can't imagine that a queen would visit just to lay a couple of eggs.

[Jon]

Hi Gav. If the larva in the picture was introduced 3 days ago and moved it would be a lot bigger than this so the egg must have come from elsewhere imho.

[gavin]

Yeah, you are right it is a young larva. I'd have to invoke suspended animation for the larva-moving theory to be valid. Worker-laid egg then? Still worth growing on to see if it is drone or not. Do you see such queen cells sometimes?

This colony has a circle of pollen all round its brood nest - I'll put up a picture later.

[Jon]

Roger Patterson has this theory that workers can 'hold back' larvae and develop them into queens later.
He has found queen cells started several days after when it should not have been possible, ie about 8-9 days after the removal of a queen.
I don't think that is logical as a starved larva in not going to turn into a good queen.
I think it more likely that an egg can remain dormant before developing normally, especially if the egg is at a frame edge where it is likely to be chilled.
I think I posted before that I once removed a piece of brace comb which had a few eggs in it. It lay on a shelf in my shed for 2 or 3 days and I then used it as a starter strip in an apidea frame. They managed to start off a few larvae from it.

[Rosie]

I would not be surprised to find that eggs can remain viable if left cold like a hens egg. A bit of brooding either from a hen or a colony will get them warm and start them developing. On the other hand, some people believe that this sort of phenomenon is explained by bees steeling eggs from neighbouring colonies.

I just hope you get a queen out of it and not a chicken!

Rosie

[gavin]

:)

I should have roller caged those queen cells with the ornate head/foot gear yesterday when I had the chance. Two of them were torn down when I visited an hour ago so two Apideas freshly charged with bees from my own apiary will have to wait for a surrogate mum.

I'm thinking that I missed an emergency Q cell in the host colony and that a virgin emerged ahead of the grafts earlier today. Maybe tomorrow I'll rearrange the colony with a queen excluder and carry on using it as a queen-right cell raiser?

For the time being I have at least one extra queen cell on that frame.

[Jon]

A scrub virgin loose above the queen excluder in a cell raiser is the ultimate nightmare. You lose your cells and you also have to find her before doing any rearranging as it could kill your laying queen. get ready to sieve bees through an excluder if you think this is the case. I had a virgin escape into a colony at the start of June but fortunately it was a queenless cell raiser so I just left it to fly and mate which it did and now has the box full of brood again. In my case they destroyed about a dozen cells which had been started a couple of days before and were not even sealed yet. When I lifted out the cell frame I saw the evil culprit sitting on the top bar of the frame below but she dived down into the colony before I could do anything about it.

[Rosie]

That's a coincidence. I had the same thing happen only yesterday for the first time. I had taken most of my cells out of the finisher colony and had put them into 5-frame nucs, leaving 4 left for mini-nucs. I was probably a couple of hours preparing the mini-nucs and filling them with bees and fondant before returning for the last 4 cells. Two had emerged but the other two were still unscathed. I hoped that the 2 virgins would be too big to pass through the excluder and kill my queen so I split the colony at the excluder and made 2 with it - one half with the virgins and the other with the original queen. Unfortunately I couldn't find the old queen so I fear she might have been lost. I will probably know by the behaviour of the 2 halves in a few days.

Rosie

[gavin]

Jon, this was also a queenless cell raiser. I'm thinking that I can shake the bees off into a lower box, add an excluder, put the young stuff above the excluder, and carry on. The colony has grafts added yesterday and is drawing a proportion of them, despite the presumed virgin on the loose. Does the virgin influence the workers to stop raising queens or does she damage the grubs directly? So many questions ...

[Jon]

I would have done exactly the same thing in that situation.

This year has been odd. The virgin which got loose in my colony hatched 2 days early and I have also has cells hatching 2 days late.
I found a queen dead in an introduction cage today, attendants all fine, and another I requeened has lost its queen but I also found 6 more laying in apideas earlier this evening so options are still open.

[Rosie]

Mine was queenright from the start. I have never had much luck with queenright queenrearing before but this year I have managed to get 2 different queenright systems working quite well.

[Jon]

Does the virgin influence the workers to stop raising queens or does she damage the grubs directly? So many questions ...

Both. If you have a virgin loose, the colony will probably not start any more cells so your idea of shaking bees off frames and sieving is probably the way to go if you want to continue using this one as a cell raiser.

[Jon]

Mine was queenright from the start. I have never had much luck with queenright queenrearing before but this year I have managed to get 2 different queenright systems working quite well.

Hi Steve. Everything has to be right for queenright queenraising to work. Ie, good weather, good nutrition, pollen frames available, good grafting with suitable larvae.
In my relatively limited experience, the weather is critical and the colony has to be really strong. My colonies are not minded to start queen cells after 3 weeks of rain no matter what way you rearrange the brood above the excluder. You might get 2 or 3 out of 20 started under these conditions.

[gavin]

I'm thinking that I missed an emergency Q cell in the host colony and that a virgin emerged ahead of the grafts earlier today. Maybe tomorrow I'll rearrange the colony with a queen excluder and carry on using it as a queen-right cell raiser?


In fact the old queen had flown back home, leaving bees in the nuc a few feet away, and taken up residence again in her old double-storey Smith hive. The very one I've just seen - along with my gloved hand - on STV News to illustrate another piece on AFB! The film they took a couple of weeks ago must be in their library now.

She wasn't clipped of course :p. So I rearranged the colony in the Ben Harden/Wilkinson and Brown manner. The grafts - and that odd queen cell which may have come from a larva a worker moved into a cup - look good so I'm expecting them to be fine now.

The Mark Winston book on the Biology of the Honeybee quotes three papers (Butler and two of his own) that mention workers moving eggs.

[Jon]

More musical chairs.
I wonder is it the queen who decides to move back? My guess would be that the workers pushed her out of the nuc and went back to the old colony with her.
How far away was the nuc from the smith hive and what was left in it after the queen returned. Did the queen mate from the smith hive in its current position meaning she had a memory of its location?

[gavin]

The queen came from near Airlie a good 25 km away as the bee flies, and a significantly longer drive, in the double brood Smith in which she was living until I asked her nicely to step aside for the good of the whole apiary. Maybe three frames of bees into the nuc most of which stayed for the first few days at least and about one and a half there now. As far as I can tell she is last year's or before. I marked her a couple of weeks ago. The nuc was just a few feet away, so yes, maybe the workers pushed her out and guided her back. I wouldn't put it past them.