mother and daughter

[Rosie]

Had a bee inspector here today and we found this in one hive. It made his day and mine. These used to be a black line but some yellow has crept in but they are such nice bees that I still keep them and even raise queens from them from time to time.

mother and daughter.jpg

[Jon]

Nice one.
I see supersedure quite often but it is rarely perfect supersedure with both queens laying together for a while.
I had one hive last July which had the 3 year old marked queen and her daughter both laying but not on the same frame like that.

[Rosie]

I can only remember seeing it once before and on that occasion the two queens laid together for about a month. The younger queen here is new and I can't be sure she is laying yet although we saw large eggs and sometimes 2 to a cell which suggests a young queen to me. She is also just as big or even bigger than her mother so my guess is that she is laying although I was not confident of that enough to clip her yet.

[Jon]

In my case last summer both were laying and I removed the old queen with some frames of bees to a nuc.
They superseded her again almost immediately but I had time to take a few grafts so I have some more of her daughters heading colonies. You could see that her brood pattern was starting to fail.
The original queen was the one with the nice looking morphometry plot for you guys who like your morphometry!
The old queen had 100% dark offspring but the original superdedure daughter queen has a lot of yellow banding in her workers so she must have travelled further afield to mate.
The other 3 daughters all have dark workers.
I have all of these set up as drone producing colonies to mate with the virgins I am grafting from a Galtee queen.

bees-col-44..jpg Col44..jpg

[Adam]

I posted a picture below - of what turned out to be imperfect supercedure as the old queen (which I think was laying a little) was kicked out first to leave the drone laying daughter. A bit too much yellow for you two me thinks!

http://www.bbka.org.uk/members/forum.php?t=6794

[Rosie]

I see from the thread that the young queen survived and the old one was "disappeared". I remember attending a talk last year at the BBKA convention and it was stated that the young queen prevails every time.

It's something I have noticed too beacuse if you can get a virgin to emerge in a queenright colony she always takes over, (as far as I can tell).

[kevboab]

The runt looking mother was a late supercedure last autumn. The bees have since superceded her also, I thought she was on the road out given that her wings have been destroyed however both mother and daughter are living in harmony and have been for just over a month now. A fellow member reckons the mothers chances of a succesful summer are as good as Englands. :-)