Mating/laying Q = Mini-nuc < Nuc < Hive

[The Drone Ranger]

can see the attraction of apideas for the queen raiser
They still need bees though and those are occupied doing queen raising only
I was a bit tongue in cheek with my post
The thread says mating mini nuc>nuc>hive
I like a bit of fiddling around with punches or Chinese tools like the next chap

I have 15 hives and at the moment they don't all have boards (everything late this season)
You can raise queen cells to transfer above other boards, get wax drawn in the lower broodbox, and still get a honey crop because all the bees are still together, equipment wise you need a home made board £5-00 and a spare broodbox with wax, no other equipment or skills required
Sales pitch over

Jon and Fatshark your help with the apideas has been invaluable and I have followed your advice with the twelve I am using
I have them in the shade which at the moment could be just about anywhere (the sun has become a distant memory)

I am looking up "anthropomorphising" as we speak
I checked with the dog but he just sighed with disgust and and went into a huff . He is very pompous

[The Drone Ranger]

The queen sees the size of the cell she could reverse into (nowt wrong with a spot of anthropomorphising!).

"Does my bum look big in this" ?

[gavin]

Definitely nowt wrong with a spot of anthropomorphising!

[Jon]

I checked with the dog but he just sighed with disgust and and went into a huff . He is very pompous

Dogs can be like that. Ungrateful at times of the day well away from dog dinner time.

As an alternative to Snelgrove boards, I often make a couple of nucs splitting the top box of a queenright cell raiser after I have run a few batches of grafts through it. Each part can be left with a grafted queen cell from the last batch or you can introduce a mated queen in a cage to each part which is relatively easy as they have young bees.

Re fatshark's question, I have no idea why queens mate faster from apideas but it is certainly true. I don't recall any paper which has meaured this, but on average I would say a queen in an apidea mates about a week sooner than a queen in a full colony.

[gavin]

Is it possible that the act of setting up Apideas/Kielers somehow affects the local weather so that days of 20C+ are more frequent?

(Always alert for alternative explanations ..... )

(lots of winking smileys, in case you thought I'd gone mad!

[Jon]

Could also affect the dynamic of the mating swarms.
I have described on here watching the entire contents of the apidea plus virgin queen leaving and returning about 15 minutes later after circling over the apiary.

[gavin]

A main means of 'spreading the word' about a need for a change in the level of activity, the activity regulator if you like, is the DVAV signal. It gets workers going and it keeps queens quiescent. So is there a change in DVAV frequency in an Apidea as compared to a full hive in the same reproductive status?

(the regular up-and-down brief (1s) vibration by a worker of the thorax (usually) of another worker - or of a queen cell.)

[fatshark]

I'd argue: there *could* be a chemical reason. There doesn't have to be. Bees seem to have a sense of the quantitative and it doesn't always involve a pheromone or scent. That scout assessing a potential new home - it estimates the volume of the cavity and very likely isn't using chemicals to do so. The forager knows the distance the trip took. The queen sees the size of the cell she could reverse into (OK, there could be a signal left by the workers but no-one talks about that). It seems like a very basic appreciation of the environment that all organisms possess: how many of my colleagues are there here? The cues used could be diverse. In a social animal 'there's not very many of us!' must be a potent trigger for a change in behaviour (nowt wrong with a spot of anthropomorphising!).

All of those activities are essentially individual judgement calls ... big enough cell? big enough cavity? how far? What we're dealing with here is a population density-related process. In bacteria there would be a quorum sensing solution which would probably involve chemical communication. Interestingly, the Wikipedia page also includes the swarm decision making process described by Tom Seeley as quorum sensing. In this the "concentration" of dancing determines the outcome. Which makes me wonder if there is a behavioural difference in a mini-nuc which can be "sensed" by the occupants, rather than a chemical influence.

Ah ha ... just seen you most recent post (DVAV) ... we're thinking along the same lines.

[EmsE]

If the queens in the mini nucs begin laying sooner, could there be a risk that she's not mated as well as those that took a bit longer to fit in more mating flights?

[Jon]

It is rare for the queen to take more than one or two mating flights anyway as far as I know.