queen puzzle 3

[Jon]

I had a bee related text from one of the queen rearing group this morning.

She has a colony of yellow bees and 3 apideas with my queens on the same site, one mated and two virgins at the last count.

She lost a swarm from her yellow bee colony about a week ago and I said I would show her how to requeen it with a queen from an apidea. She removed all the queen cells.

I had a text from her this morning to say that she had found eggs in the yellow colony. I bet a virgin has flown from an apidea and taken over the bigger colony.

The two virgin queens were from a batch of 15 and I had 10 of them start to lay this week in apideas at my allotment so I am sure hers were flying as well.

There seems to be a lot of this going on this year. I'll report back when I have an update but I am betting that she will find a black queen in there.

One of mine swapped a 2 frame mating nuc for an 11 frame colony with queen cells last year.

[gavin]

They're not daft these young queens. Who wouldn't jump ship for a bigger, better home and an army of servants to look after your babies?

[Rosie]

During the first season after moving to my current house I had mating nucs within my apiary of established colonies. Once the virgins started flying I had all sorts of problems with hives swarming and leaving no queen cells and mating nucs going queenless. I was convinced that the virgins were flying into the large hives so since then I have always put my mating nucs about 150 yards away from other colonies. I haven't had problems since.

Rosie

[Jon]

Hi Steve. That is similar to the set up we have at the national trust site. We are going to keep 10 or 12 drone colonies there, and the mating site for the apideas is about 200 yards away along a north facing hedge on private property.

[Adam]

I wonder if we (that's Jon, myself and others) are trying too hard to produce queens and there is a law of diminishing returns; the more congested the queen-rearing site, the more problems we have. Mini-nucs are, in my (limited) experience more prone to having queens dissappear that nucs or full sized colonies. A mini-nuc has very few bees to fan the queen back - espcially if a load of them fly with the queen anyway - so the chances of loss are greater - especially if there are bigger colonies with nasnov glands in the air fanning to get THEIR queen back at the same time. I suspect that a colony, if queenless, will accept any queen back, desperate as they are to have their colony viable again.

Having said that - my out apiary had had mini-nucs in it all summer and the sucess has not been too good; although it's an exposed site and too near the coast so the temperature rarely gets to 20C.

[Jon]

If a virgin flies into a queenless cell raiser colony you can lose all your queen cells as they will be torn down. It probably makes sense to have a queen excluder below the cells to avoid this. I mostly use a queenright system so not such a big issue for me.
marking the virgins with numbered disks would probably throw up a lot of interesting results.