Timescale to mate of virgin queens.

[Jon]

I took an unmated virgin out of a nuc yesterday and united the nuc with a queenright colony beside it.
I still have two virgin queens in apideas, one 26 days after emergence and the other about 35 but given the weather forecast these have no chance of mating now.
I just left these to their own devices out of idle curiosity to see if I could get any late matings this year.
the last of my queens to mate successfully this year flew around 8th September.

[Poly Hive]

The problem with these exam questions is they are book based, and a lot of the information that went into the books was book baased, perpetuating the "given lore" as I like to think of it. So you are told eggs stick out then begin to go over and they can be timed from this information. We now know this is piffle. I have several books in my library that say you can time the egg, and hence the queens presence by the angle from the dangle of the egg. Rubbish. So due to the web we are communicating now much more effectively and what one person saw as an unusual event, and would have shrugged after consulting the books or written a letter to the SBA is now posted and discussed and it comes to light that it is in fact not that rare.

I would answer the exam question with "The texts say a classic 21 days, but the web forums are now revealing that it is not unusual to have success up to four to five weeks in inclement weather." Belt and braces anyone?

PH

[gavin]

Better to say 'respected beekeepers report' than 'I read on the internet' I suppose!

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

[mbc]

a bloke down the pub says......

[Jon]

You guys will be telling me next there are factual inexactitudes in Wikipedia!

[Neils]

Funnily enough PH we had a discussion along those lines within the study group.

What came out of that was the time to effectively mate is still regarded as being within approx 3weeks from emergence owing to the development and thickening of stuff I forget the name of in the spermatheca.

But that other factors can inhibit/encourage the queen actually starting laying past that point. That it can take upwards of 4-5 weeks I don't think is in dispute.

For what's supposed to be a one point question I think it's badly written unless you're just happy to bite your lip and put "approximately 3 weeks"

[mbc]

My theory is that the hardenning/drying of the virgin queen's vagina is retarded by endless bloody rain.

[prakel]

But that other factors can inhibit/encourage the queen actually starting laying past that point. That it can take upwards of 4-5 weeks I don't think is in dispute.

For what's supposed to be a one point question I think it's badly written unless you're just happy to bite your lip and put "approximately 3 weeks"

I think that there will always be a grey area with regards to questions like these unless of course someone can furnish absolute proof that all queen bees develop at exactly the same rate.

Being unencumbered with exam questions my personal interest is purely practical -if a queen takes five weeks to mate will she (all other things being equal) be as good as one which has mated within a more accepted time frame or am I more likely to find that she's turned drone layer by the following Spring? I don't know the answer but rightly or wrongly I would be inclined to cull her there and then, in practice this is an event which would only be likely to happen if I'd been too ill to check the mating nucs or unexpectedly working away during the weeks following emergence; at all other times she'd be culled before being given a chance to mate at five weeks -at most times it's easy enough to produce replacement queen cells so unless we're rapidly approaching the end of the season why take the chance if we don't need to?

nellie's comment about later laying not necessarily being the result of later mating is perhaps the most important point to be mentioned in this thread and may well even work to advantage with some of the later supercedure queens in strains which are early to limit brood rearing, but if we're talking of a queen which we're rearing for increase or controlled replacement why would we leave her in a nuc for that length of time on the off-chance?

I'm doubtful that many of us would rush to buy a £35 queen which was advertized (even on the internet) as 'guaranteed to not have been mated before the end of week 4'. I wonder why?

[Jon]

One problem with apideas/mini nucs is that the population dwindles from day 1.
After 5 weeks there are hardly enough bees left to incubate brood.
You sometimes find a queen in an apidea with a lack of bees which has mated yet has no brood.
You can tell by her size, gait and behaviour.
If you introduce these queens to a decent number of bees they often start laying.

[prakel]

A slight move away from the specific topic, but this is quite a nice article (available online as a pdf too but I've never worked out how to link pdfs!) with at least some relevance.


http://www.extension.org/pages/28328...en-spermatheca