Queen mating problems? Really?

[Jon]

I see the usual suspect is posting drivel with no evidence at all that queen mating problems are caused by neonicotinoid pesticides used on oil seed rape!

Just to inject some reality into the situation, I have stacks of grafted queens mated and laying now and so do other members of our queen rearing group.

I made up 8 four or five frame nucs with new queens about 10 days ago and these queens are out of the cages are now laying in the nucs.

I have a similar number of mated queens still in apideas and another 25 apideas with virgins waiting to fly and mate.

Our group has about 90 apideas set out at its mating site and a lot of these should be laying soon as Wednesday and Thursday of last week were good flying days.

The last batch I grafted had 39/40 queens emerge successfully in the apideas of group members. Another 15 apideas were set up last Friday evening and these queens should be out now.

And yes, I have oil seed rape right beside my mating site most years including this year. Would be about 400 yards away.

I am actually surprised that queens have flown and mated so successfully this year as the weather has been atrocious apart from 2 weeks at the end of May and the first queens only emerged from cells on 2nd June.
They have managed to fly and mate during brief breaks in the rainy weather.

1101

How is the queen rearing going on neonicotinoid free Orkney?
I imagine there are hundreds available by now with such favourable conditions.

[drumgerry]

Maybe not representative as it's such a small sample but here in Speyside, of 10 queen cells given to Apideas and a couple of Kielers, I now have 7 mated and laying queens - 3 are now in introduction cages in other colonies and their mininucs have been given a new queen cell each.

No sign of any neonic induced malady here!

[Jon]

Hi Gerry
The guys in our group who have had poor success rate have been the people who do not look after their apideas well, letting them get to starvation point rather than topping up the feeder would be the most common problem. Bees die or drift to neighbouring apideas leaving a non viable amount of bees in the apidea.
Others put too many bees in, not enough bees, bees the wrong age etc.
These are all issues I am trying to address and it is a good teaching point to look at those who are doing well compared to others who are not, using the same grafted cells and the same mating site.
People can compare results and see who is doing things right.
With apideas you can really increase your success rate by attending to them properly.
Having said that, I have a stack set out and I am away for nearly 3 weeks so if the weather stays bad I will have to get someone to feed them.

[drumgerry]

And it's actually quite nice attending to them Jon. The bees seem pretty calm and it's a doddle to slip a chunk of fondant into the feeder by flexing the little crownboard (like you advised me to do!).

I'd do the feeding for you mate but it'd be too much of a commute!

[Jon]

Grizzly would be handier in Stranraer.

I ran out of fondant and have been using ordinary sugar sprayed a bit.
Everything got topped up to the hilt at the weekend and the apideas with laying queens have 5 frames in the bottom (feeder removed) and a super up above with a kilo of sugar in it.
I like to let the queens lay 2-3 weeks in the apidea before removing them to cages.
The nucs I made up, the queens were only laying about a week on average but I needed to free up apideas for more cells.
I enjoy looking after the apideas as well and you get a buzz a few days after a decent spell of weather when you find several laying queens.
I hope I am not counting chickens as poorly mated queens can turn drone layer relatively quickly.

I have a couple of queens mated from apideas in their third season now so the apidea is not a problem per se.

[kevboab]

I made up half a doz nucs with single cells inserted. Of the six, four have mated very well, one drone layer and a tiny runt which has since been superceded. Haven't had a problem getting queens mated and neither have beekeepers around me although they have taken slightly longer to get going as there has hardly been a full dry day here for months.

[Jon]

Most of my first batch took a full 3 weeks to mate but the seem to be ok so far, touch wood.

[Rosie]

I have had about 90% success rate with my nucs so far so I am doing reasonably well considering the awful weather although not quite as well as Jon. I don't have the benefit of neonics though so that proves that neonics must be good for bees. My conclusion is obvious and indisputable so anyone who doesn't agree with me must be a soil association shill.

Steve

[Jon]

I stopped short of attributing magical mating powers to the fields of yellow peril in our midst.

I have had a drone layer, a laying worker apidea and a couple with laying queens abscond but that is par for the course with queen rearing from apideas.

It's great to see the beginners using apideas for the first time getting a queen or two mated.

[Adam]

My mini-nucs have generally done well - 2 - 3 days after good weather and there are eggs. Nucs have been OK too. The exception is one location where the queens never come back. I won't use that spot again - I'll just park-up old queens there instead as they are sometimes useful. However queens mating from large colonies have consistently failed this year. Usually the large colonies mate OK and I see a bit of queen-hopping in smaller colonies as they return from flights and go into the wrong hive - site too congested I think. (A yellowy queen that appears in a hive that previously had a dark one is a fair give-away)!

Jon, I agree it's always nice to see fresh eggs in a hive.

[Rosie]

Usually the large colonies mate OK and I see a bit of queen-hopping in smaller colonies as they return from flights and go into the wrong hive - site too congested I think. (A yellowy queen that appears in a hive that previously had a dark one is a fair give-away)!

This year I caught a yellow cast and hived it in a nuc in my mating nuc area - about 150 yards from my drone hives. The cast was absolutely yellow but all my grafts were taken from my blackest hives. When I eventually found laying queens in them the yellow nuc had a black queen and a black nuc had a yellow queen. I'm fairly certain that they swapped homes. I don't think I will put yellow casts there again. Next year I'll find some new mistake to make!

Steve

[Jon]

Virgin queens return to the wrong colony quite frequently although a lot of the time it probably goes unnoticed.
Quite a few apidea failures are due to queens returning to the wrong one and getting balled.

If you have a queenless hive near apideas one of the apidea queens will invariably be cute enough to fly from the apidea and return to the full colony.
Two years ago I had a full colony with a queen cell in beside a 2 frame nuc with a virgin queen.
The virgin went missing from the nuc and when I looked next door she was in there and had torn down the cell.
I still have that queen.

[Neils]

I'm blaming pesticides rather than my own ineptitude for my rather less than auspicious start to organised queen rearing.

The bees have occasionally triumphed despite the pesticides (my efforts) but I think I'm now onto my second batch of failures, we'll see.

[Adam]

In order to track virgins I have considered marking them with numbered discs which I purchased this year. However weather and other stuff has meant that I haven't even tried it so I'll have to leave that for next year I think.

Steve,
I'm surprised you even tolerated yellow bees. I thought you were a black only kinda guy.

[Rosie]

Hi Adam

I breed from my purest but can't keep them all black. I merely move the yellow ones to an out apiary with a view to requeening later but I never seem to have enough nucs or even queens to requeen enough as well as supplying beginners with black bees. I would rather populate other people's hives with the best stock so that I can requeen my own duds later. Fortunately my yellow ones have enough native blood in them to remain compatible with my breeders so I don't get the behavioural problems associated with hybrids. The last time I had a killer colony was the result of taking bees to distant rape fields. They had to be artificially swarmed while they were there and hybrid genetics resulted. I managed to requeen the bad ones last season so I'm back on an even keel again now. I vowed I would not move my bees again until August when it's reasonably safe.

One of my good blood lines have some yellow in them despite their wing venation and behavioural traits showing high AMM levels. I maintain that line because they are so healthy, productive and gentle. I'm not hung up on colour as I know that colour is a poor indicator of purity. Behaviour and wing venation are better measures to use. The only drawback with having some yellow in the bees is that people who want to buy native bees expect them to be black.

Steve

[Stromnessbees]

I see the usual suspect is posting drivel with no evidence at all that queen mating problems are caused by neonicotinoid pesticides used on oil seed rape!



Very nice attitude, Jon. :rolleyes:


To the genuine reader I recommend to make his/her own observations.

If you are close to neonic treated crops and you have persistent queen problems then there might well be a connection, never mind what a bunch of pesticide defenders on this and other beekeeping forums try to make you believe.

[Jon]

If you are close to neonic treated crops and you have persistent queen problems then there might well be a connection

Drivel is drivel and lack of evidence is lack of evidence.
There might well be Thetons hiding in the middle of the field as well. Hard to prove there aren't.

My queen mating site is beside oil seed rape and I don't have problems.
Just stating my own experience.

[gavin]

And we discussed this last summer or maybe the one before, with a serious consideration of whether the queen mating problems faced by some of us in the east were possibly due to exposure of oilseed rape. They weren't. Queen raisers in the west a long way from arable crops had the same problems in May/June.

This year again we had atrocious weather in the east at the main queen mating time. There was a three-day weather window in the middle of it and this time our mating success was good, despite proximity to oilseed rape. To paraphrase a well-known song, What a Difference Three Days Make (72 little hours .... ).

It is really poor science to try to describe apparent correlations of poor bee health of one kind or another with imagined exposure to pesticides without considering exposure to the other things that have historically (and not so historically) affected bees. There is some of that now surfacing and no doubt those who seek justification for their beliefs will jump on it, which is sad.

So this year - plenty of oilseed rape within a few km and many but not all colonies were working it. Terrible mating weather, queens running right up against the clock, then three half-decent days and most of them came into lay a couple of days later. 15 out of 18 virgins now laying a good pattern, one failure, two drone layers. Most of the Apideas at the association apiary are laying too but I haven't counted them up yet. I suppose that in Orkney without neonic-treated crops in a really wet couple of months you can better that then?

[madasafish]

Very nice attitude, Jon. :rolleyes:


To the genuine reader I recommend to make his/her own observations.

If you are close to neonic treated crops and you have persistent queen problems then there might well be a connection, never mind what a bunch of pesticide defenders on this and other beekeeping forums try to make you believe.

Well I am not close to any crops at all: no arable land for miles and I have queen problems.

So I am afraid your logic is - frankly - seriously flawed .

I remember the same level of debate covered testing women for witches:-

Throw them in a a pond: if they float, they are witches so drown them. If they drown, well tough...

Sorry but you really need to read a simple book on logical thinking and try to use the techniques suggested.. Otherwise you are speaking drivel. from a logical argument viewpoint.

[Jimbo]

So far this has been a poor year for me. As I was going to be away on holiday when I usually start my bee breeding I decided just to do splits this year as and when required. In our area the colonies usually start to produce queen cells in the 3rd week in May. This was true to form again this year. The splits were done and I went on holiday with the view that the new queens would hatch and possible be mated on my return. What I did not expect was the weeks of wet weather. On my return some hives were on the point of starvation even though there were in some cases 2 supers with plenty of stores on some colonies. The mating was poor of 8 splits 3 turned out to be drone layers and 1 absconded possibly due to starvation. The other 4 mated ok. 1 of the original queens also swarmed. Before anybody says it is due to pesiticides I am not near any arable land. In fact my worst mating site is on MOD land. My colonies were checked for pesticide residues by Keele University and came back as negative for any chemical substances. The reason this year for my queen problems is down to beekeeper error and extreme wet weather that has affected mating.

[EmsE]

Last year I had problems rearing mated queens which was certainly down to the bad weather as from the 20th may to the end of June the rain was almost continuous. It was actually surprising to find queens that mated successfully. This year, again drone breeders are a problem. So far 1 out of 3 colonies has a drone layer- again the bad weather began just after the splits had occurred. I've still another 2 queens to check. Last time I looked, there was eggs and larvae so just waiting for the brood to be sealed. This year I blame that wayward jet stream for my poorly mated queens. Like Jimbo, there were no pesticides found in my sample tested by Keele uni.