Queen puzzle 2

[Jon]

On Monday evening 4th July we has a meeting of our queen rearing group.
I demonstrated how to remove a queen from an apidea and put her in an introduction cage with attendants.
I marked and clipped the queen and we introduced her to a queenless colony.

The queenless apidea was returned to its stand. It is the only apidea at that site.

On Thursday Alan the owner of the apidea brought it round to get another queen cell put in. I has a virgin just hatched in a roller cage so I put that in for 24 hours and released her the next day. The apidea was closed up until this point. The bees started to ball her and I had to put her back in the cage.
I checked the apidea and there was a black unmarked queen in it which had started to lay.
It didn't come from one of my apideas it it had been closed.

Some time between Monday evening and Thursday afternoon a queen took up residence in the apidea and started to lay.

On the same Monday evening I had checked a nuc of mine 200 yards away from the apiary where we held our queen rearing meeting. This nuc had a black virgin queen which was due to start laying. The nuc was a bit tetchy and I could see no sign of the virgin queen.

Hmmm. But it gets worse.

Yesterday evening I took a mated queen from one of my apideas with a view to requeening this nuc which had lost its black queen. I cycled over to the other apiary about three miles away and got there about 7 0 clock.

Second frame in I found this.

725

Great. So my queen has started to lay. I must have missed her the week before.

A couple of frames later.

726

The curse of Roger Patterson - an early supersedure cell.

And then I found the queen, on the next frame.

727

But this is a banded queen with a white spot!

Ok. So a marked queen flew into my nuc and took it over after it lost its virgin, which seems to have moved to an apidea 200 yards away.

Good theory but this queen has its left wing clipped!

Tim has a colony about 20 feet away and he mentioned to me that his new queen had started to lay but the colony was making supersedure cells. He also mentioned that he had marked and clipped her. He is in Donegal until the weekend so can confirm or deny that that is his queen on his return. I reckon his colony swarmed leaving a supersedure cell and his queen dropped in the grass and made its way into my nuc. The grass is over a foot long so it must have been an epic journey. The bees must have been fanning to draw her in.

Musical chairs or what.
So Alan ends up with a daughter of a 100% AMM queen, I get a scabby mongrel which they want to supersede, and Tim will have to check what is under the crown board of his colony at the weekend.

The timing just about works to have sealed brood in my nuc. The marked queen must have entered on Tuesday and I saw the brood the following Wednesday evening. I doubt if I missed seeing a clearly marked queen on the Monday although I was looking for an unmarked black one and that can put you off.

[gavin]

Daft.

I've been told (John, are you reading?!) that queens usually leave on their mating flights in a roughly southerly direction. Of course that might just be due to the aspect of his apiaries (any views?), but in case not is Tim's scabby mongrel's home to the north of your Apidea?

[Adam]

My fun and games with queens is much less than yours Jon. I wonder if it is worth numbering queens rather than just painting blobs on them in order to keep track of them better?

This year I found a dark queen in a nuc where I had expected to see a yellow/orange one. The mini-nuc 6 feet away became queenless so it ties in.

Last year I am convinced that one queen jumped ship from one nuc to another and displaced the queen therein to a nuc which was south by about 5 metres. I also had a swarmed clipped queen walk - say 5 metres or so - into a nuc so there was the clipped queen and the virgin in one colony.

While I think of it, I have a scrub queen from a decent sized cast that flew into a mini-nuc during her mating flights. Small and dark she is now laying although she is no bigger than a worker. As she cannot be kept I put a 'spare' queencell in there that I had cut off a frame, thinking that either the queencell will be torn down or the small queen will leave. Neither happened. There are now 4 frames of eggs, dark laying queen plus the newly emerged virgin. I am hoping that they consider it as perfect supercedure and the small black queen goes when the brown queen starts to lay. We'll see what happens.

It good to have the luxury of being able to play like this; although I don't know if I will learn anything from it. I currently have a few more queens than I need so the mini-nuc is surplus.

[Jon]

Daft.

I've been told (John, are you reading?!) that queens usually leave on their mating flights in a roughly southerly direction. Of course that might just be due to the aspect of his apiaries (any views?), but in case not is Tim's scabby mongrel's home to the north of your Apidea?

Mine is 20 feet south of Tim's and the Apidea is a further 200 yards south of that.


It good to have the luxury of being able to play like this;

Totally agree. I think this is the way you can learn stuff that you won't find in a basic beekeeping text.

Last year I had a poorly laying new queen in a nuc and they made a supersedure cell. I removed it and put in a virgin in a roller cage and released her the next day. They coexisted for about a week and then the marked queen disappeared. I was checking every day out of curiosity. It seemed that the virgin I introduced was treated as a supersedure queen.

Regarding the supersedure, I helped move Tim's colony to this site from another one at the start of May. It was queenless but had queen cells and I assumed it had probably swarmed already. The other thing I noticed was a lot of streaking on the front of the hive and I remember commenting to him that it likely had a nosema problem at one point. Nosema and supersedure seem to crop up together quite a bit. I need to do more reading in that area as there are papers which go away back and what Roger Patterson and others report may be linked in some way to an increase in nosema levels or maybe N. Ceranae.

[Adam]

Here's a picture of the small queen. Marked or you would miss her! There is still another queen in there that emerged after putting a queencell in. The small queen is continuing to lay in one of my plywood mini-nucs.741