A poll for the people who raise their own queens

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Originally Posted by The Drone Ranger

Likewise the worker bees are not all that closely related so would they share a behaviour pattern like protecting piping cells ?

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Now there's a can-of-worms. Quite possibly it's the fact that there are subsets of supersisters that triggers the protection of certain cells. There's at least one paper on the behaviour of supersisters preferentially choosing one of their 'own' when forced into an emergency queen rearing situation. I'll come back with a link to that one later if no one else has it handy.


edit: or, maybe I won't produce the link. I was sure that there is one (amongst all of the counter claims) but simply can't find it now so perhaps I'm mistaken. This of course doesn't spoil good speculation that this sister differentiation is possible.

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Originally Posted by Rosie

I think Beowulf Cooper said it when he was assessing native bees in the 60s and 70s. I wouldn't be surprised if it had even been noticed before him. I would dispute the statement that it's not a widely held view. It's used by some as one of their selection criteria.

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Somewhere I have a booklet with some Beowulf Cooper text in there - I'll have to find it out and read it. I might have been better to write that the number of swarm cells in relation to swarming is not widely written about - not in the standard text books I have seen anyway.

I suspect that the prime selection criteria for swarminess for many beekeepers is - "Did that colony swarm or not?" - and otherwise it's the time of season, size and state of the colony when it did prepare to swarm.

My father's bees are really swarmy and I am often amazed how few cells some of them will swarm on. I have gone through a box of his after it swarmed to find only 3 or 4 queen cells.
When you dig around for any experimental evidence for stuff like this the trail is often stone cold and the only material on the table is the writings of Beo Cooper.

Jon, in my experience I would expect your dad's swarmy bees to be capable of leaving anything between 2 and 30 swarm cells behind. If you have a non swarmy strain it will be very unusual to see more than 8 swarm cells. At least that's the pattern around here.

It's easy to knock Beowulf but he was working up to 50 years ago and the bees he had were less influenced by exotic races than they are today so it's difficult to judge his conclusions. He was also working in the English Midlands where the bees and ecology may have been quite different to Irish ones.

That's the point though. What he saw may have been local to his area, his time, and his bees, or may have been misinterpreted, inaccurately recorded, subject to an agenda etc.
This illustrates the difference between science and anecdote quite clearly.
Same applies to anything written by brother Adam, Rev Langstroth etc.
Interesting observations but not science and not necessarily true.
Cooper's claim that apiary vicinity mating is a strategy used by AMM to mate in low temperatures or poor weather conditions is totally at odds with my observations.
I have seen apiary vicinity mating in 3 different apiaries in total 12+ times and one factor in common has been perfect weather with Blue skies and a temperature abound 20c.
No way would I make a claim that that is a blueprint for how bees mate as it is just happens to be a phenomena I have observed on a few occasions.
I could write it all down and package it up and sell it in a book but it would become no more or no less true.
I have in fact drafted some stuff about AVM for Roger P which he wants to quote me on for a book he is writing - but I made sure to include plenty of caveats.
It would be a nice piece of work to set up a load of apideas with virgin queens and monitor them by video, or better still use an RFID transmitter attached to each queen like they have started to do with bees in the pesticide monitoring experiments such as the recent papers by Henry et al and Schneider et al.
The point is, you have to decide if you go with science or you go with anecdote.

I think Adam is right in that the swarm cell thing is not a widely held view. It may well be a widely held view in Bibba circles.

I have observed a few AVM myself, and one thing that struck me is that it has always been from mini nucs, and another is that the excitement of a mating 'swarm' (often the reason I have noticed the AVM) can be too much and the whole lot can abscond.
FWIW I would rather have my queens mate too high, and too far away for the eye to see.

My bees will usually produce between half a dozen and a dozen and a half queen cells when they decide to swarm, but to be honest, so long as its not excessive (>18), I dont care. What is important to me is what stage the colony has reached before deciding to make swarming preparations, those who want to go before filling a box are obviously the ones to eliminate from a breeding program aiming at a productive strain.

All of my observations bar one were queens flying from apideas. I did witness it once with the virgin from a colony which was superseding. The process was exactly the same.
I have also linked this to absconding in some cases.

I rescued one clump of bees and queen from an Apidea in August this year, which had spent the night 20 feet up a tree.
I wrote about it in the blog section at the time.

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FWIW I would rather have my queens mate too high, and too far away for the eye to see.

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If you had as many dodgy colonies in the area as I have you would be glad to see more AVM.
The one I mentioned in the blog is now heading a full colony in my garden.
I wonder is AVM a heritable trait?

Hi Jon
I think it's unlikely Apiary Vicinity mating is easily passed down the generations otherwise it would be common and therefor reported much more frequently down through the years
I don't know though that's just a guess lot's of things just go unnoticed until one day somebody spots something unusual

It seems that FW Sladen's work with bumble bees forms the basis of the modern more scientific approach
He wrote his first book at 16 years old it seems
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Humble-Bee-I...5477921&sr=1-1
Here's a free online version of the same book on the bumble bees
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/i...ge/18/mode/1up

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Originally Posted by Jon

My father's bees are really swarmy .

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Jon, isn't it time you gave him some of your queens? :)

I clipped and marked them all for him last April/May and he says none swarmed last summer!
It will be interesting to see how many have grown back a wing tip next spring!!;)