How long to keep queen in cage?

[prakel]

I've got a colony like that! Great for honey gathering but you just can't work with them. Picked 54 stings out of my suit the other week after a partial inspection, smoke does little to help, was wondering about tear gas? What's the story with nitrates?

They are one of the reasons I joined Jon's queen rearing group. I have one colony of blacks hardly bother when i go through them, so its requeening the rest for a quieter life

Hi Blackcavebees, well.... as you started this thread I'll come back to 'saltpetre' subjugation later today (it may not be a short post) once I've finished with the bees. A few people have recommended the technique on other forums but tell-tale signs sometimes lead me to question whether they've actually put their ideas into practice themselves. It's a simple enough subject but there are a lot of 'little' specifics to get right.

[Jon]

It's about playing with percentages.
If you breed from a very good queen and her daughters cross mainly with drones from the same race you may get the odd bad one but the vast majority will have the characteristics of the chosen breeder queen.

If you breed from a mongrel queen mating with a mixture of drones you will get some acceptable results but many unacceptable ones.

As I have said many times before, a big problem is hybrisation between distinct sub species each of which should be gentle in itself - producing very aggressive crosses. See Ruttner for detail.
A gene pool left to settle down without constant introduction of new material can be greatly improved by selection and culling of colonies. That is the basis of what Roger Patterson is trying to do with his group in West Sussex where the background bee population includes a mixture of everything.
If you live somewhere where local beekeepers bring in queens from different sub species every year, bee improvement is going to be an uphill battle.

[The Drone Ranger]

Q is how long can my queens stay in the cage out of the hive without detriment? One has 2 attendants, one has one attendant, both have candy and drops of water morning and evening. Currently sitting in a shady corner of the living room, no CH.

Advice appreciated.

I usually keep them in the cage in a small cardboard box (around 6") so they are in the dark
I made queen introduction push in cages that cover about a quarter of a brood frame so they have lots of room when introduced
Don't know if that's necessary but they seem to be always accepted

Brother Adam wrote a lot about reciprocal crosses and different outcomes
Anyone watching the BBC last night Bill Turnbull on bees would have seen a commercial outfit in Perthshire
They were loading 1.5K packages of imported bees into all their hundreds of hives (they looked like light Italians)
Besides having the cheek to run a" sponsor a hive program "they are putting those bees all over the place
Government pays (sorry off topic rant)

[prakel]

It's about playing with percentages......

....A gene pool left to settle down without constant introduction of new material can be greatly improved by selection and culling of colonies. That is the basis of what Roger Patterson is trying to do with his group in West Sussex where the background bee population includes a mixture of everything.
If you live somewhere where local beekeepers bring in queens from different sub species every year, bee improvement is going to be an uphill battle.

Very true words. The real results become apparent in years rather than months, years because it tends to take a couple of years for new beekeepers to; get bored and give up, loose their bought in queen and allow the bees to go down the road of rearing their own; settle on a preferred make of bee and continue buying in queens of that one variety thus adding some limited stability to the drone population or to wise up and start trying to breed their own locally (ideally within a group of likeminded people such as the group which Jon and Blackcavebees are members of.

I don't think that large scale imports to an area necessarily result in a worse case scenario IF you're working with a mongrel to start with although it's of course a different matter all together if you're trying to rear a pure race/Buckfast type bee. It's the 'collector' mentality of having one of each race that really seems to create issues, that constant swapping and changing. Personally, in my own location I'd love to see one of the big guys flood the area with several hundred carnica or buckfast colonies.... but most of us in the South of England as well as probably all urban beekeepers are going to be working with mixers (no matter how much we'd like to work with one type of bee) unless we buy into reliance on outside breeders to keep renewing our queens but that then brings us back to one aspect of 'how long to keep queens in cages'. I've read somewhere that at least one very large scale breeder believes that a large percentage of the queens he sends out are lost either on introduction or shortly afterwards simply due to people rushing the queen into action rather than making the colony wait.

edit: I wrote this post before seeing DroneRangers previous comments on releasing Italian bees into what I suppose is an amm area. I am of course referring to my own location which like Roger Patterson's has a bit of everything when I say that I'd actually welcome a mass import of well bred bees of a 'type'.

[Jon]

The biggest problem with queen introduction is beekeepers convinced a hive is queenless when there is a virgin in it.
Many people who ask for queens clearly have little understanding about queen mating times and bee life cycle.
The mantra about 'I think my hive is queenless' starts about a week after losing a swarm.
Some people even get annoyed when you wont sell tham a queen which you know is going to be cannon fodder.

With queen introduction, you have to use your judgement. If the bees are aggressive towards the cage, it should not be opened yet irrespective of the time it has spent in the hive.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi prakel
I think in this area it's mainly AMM(ish), Carniolan and crosses between the two I'll post some plots on another thread(so I mess this one up less)
Italian blood shows up through Buckfast (I think)mainly because Italian bees are not a popular choice
That's the strange thing about those package bees seen on Horizon, if they are NZ Italian they won't do well (lovely bees though they may be)
Following on Jon's point ,introduction via a big push in cage gives her a chance to move around,get some hatching bees with her and do a spot of laying

[prakel]

That's the strange thing about those package bees seen on Horizon, if they are NZ Italian they won't do well (lovely bees though they may be)

No, they didn't even do very well on Portland, mind I'm not sure that we saw the sun through the mist at all that year!

Following on Jon's point ,introduction via a big push in cage gives her a chance to move around,get some hatching bees with her and do a spot of laying

Yeah, a good type of cage. In the past I've had good results with Manley cages on the similar (but smaller) principle. As an aside, I was rereading Honey Farming the other week and for the first time ever actually noted his overview on the development of this cage, I don't know how many times I'd missed the point previously but it would appear that the version which we now know as the Manley cage was actually developed by EWD Madoc. This, along with John Atkinson's assertion in 'Bee Breeding' that Manley adopted the closed end super frames from Madoc as well...

[prakel]

Stumbled across this video which shows a 'different' approach to introducing a caged queen. Takes a couple of minutes before it reaches the 'business end' of the video.