Well MBC I'm not being tight, I have a queen, she just ain't laying an I need to make sure she does soon or I will end up uniting with another colony rather than have a colony which size won't see it through winter, which is a missed opportunity!
Well MBC I'm not being tight, I have a queen, she just ain't laying an I need to make sure she does soon or I will end up uniting with another colony rather than have a colony which size won't see it through winter, which is a missed opportunity!
I was under the impression that you could improve the standard of an emergency queen by knocking down sealed cells on day 4 (as long as you still have open emergency cells that is). This removes larva at 2 days and older that have been developed into emergency queens leaving queens raise from the eggs or 1 day larva, thus ensuring they had a "queen right" diet throughout development. Am I mistaken?
Just my thoughts here. It's not just the age of the larvae that they start with although that's obviously important, it's also the condition of the nurse bees and the over-all state of the colony. There's no denying that quite good queens can come from emergency cells which are built by stable, healthy colonies but you also get some right dross. It makes no sense to me to use anything less than the best available queen.
To add some flesh to my thoughts on emergency queens, I've done a lot of walk away splits over the years when I needed to spend a lot of time away and couldn't be tied to a queen rearing timetable. The method works really well as a way of increasing colony numbers but is totally inefficient as a method of queen rearing not only because we're tying up huge resources for small returns but because in my experience (and yes, it took me a fair while to put all the bits together) the amazing queen which heads the colony in the following season is quite often actually an early supercedure daughter of the initial emergency queen which has acted as a stop-gap to keep the split going. I reckon this is more usual than generally acknowledged by the walk-away gurus; a phenomena which is probably masked to a great extent by the kind of blind management which can often go hand-in-hand with the method.
Thanks prakel for pointing out the realistic field conditions. I imagine these elements are often overlooked when thinking of supercedure and emergency queens.
When raising queens in your own time the focus is on raising the best that you can by creating the ideal condition in terms of colony, eggs and resources. Things are (generally) under your control with minimal risk. With supercedure and emergency queens I guess the risk of loosing the colony shifts the focus slightly and the priority changes to having a functioning queen rather than the best that you can, even if this leads to supercedure later on.
This continues to be my recurring observation, not claiming it's a 100% rule because it's not but I reckon that it's not at all unusual. I've definitely seen some amazing queens reared off eggs laid by emergency queens comparatively soon after they themselves have started to lay -but interestingly it's something which I've only noticed since I've been in the position to make regular checks on the splits, back in the days when they were left to sort themselves out and build up for winter while I was a long way away it never happened! Back then, the emergency queens always seemed to do well...Originally Posted by Julian
Last edited by prakel; 26-07-2014 at 09:48 AM.
I suspect you are right prakel. You need the time to observe bees properly and work out what is going on. The same happens re. mating swarms. People say they don't occur but I see them on a regular basis because I spend a lot of time with my bees and I work with a lot of apideas so queens are flying and mating at my apiaries almost every day.
If you don't mark or clip queens you have no way of knowing for sure if the queen you see in the spring is the same one you last saw in September.
To get back to the original post, I would definitely be worried about how long the queen is taking to mate.
My apidea queens are mating in 10-12 days from emergence and very few are taking more than 2 weeks to start laying.
A colony where I saw a virgin emerge has eggs 13 days later.
3 nucs I made up with grafted queen cells all had a laying queen within 2 weeks of queen emergence.
This is the best year I remember for queen mating but maybe conditions are not so good further north in Aberdeen.
I'm giving her a week, then I will try eggs to kick start. After that it's either see if you have any queens left or unite with parent colony.
I recently observed 5 weeks from virgin emergence to first laying, but that was following a test-frame introduction into a long-term dysfunctional colony (1), which I suspect may have had some bearing on the queen's behaviour.
LJ
(1) In future such colonies will not be tolerated.
I wasnt implying you were being tight HJBee, rather pointing out that, at least in my area, there are knowledge gaps and misconceptions regarding the use of test frames. To my mind, a colony queenless long enough to cause concern should not be allowed to raise its own queen due to the timing of when new bees could potentially emerge (given that everything works out and a new queen gets mated) being so far ahead that the balance of the colony will be severely challenged to the extent that winter survival chances are damaged.
I recently read of worker bees being a fungible commodity and the thought made me shudder eg. a batch of new bees from a well balanced colony with good nutrition will be much more robust than new bees emerging from a recovering colony raised by older bees with hypopharyngeal glands kickstarted after atrophy. I believe it takes at least two generations to get back to robust bees of suitable quality to carry a colony through the winter months and have enough left in the tank to raise a successfull generation of brood the following spring.
It would be a pity if anyone starting to produce the odd queen were put off emergency queens, Julian is right a perfectly acceptable queen can be had by checking removing the 4 day sealed cells in reasonably sized colony. I've occasionally used these successfully and no they weren't superseded. To be honest I can only remember a true supersedure towards the end of the season, a large colony would almost invariably swarm in the middle of the year from the bees point of view that's success.
This is the first year for a long time I've been forced to let VQ mate from large colonies and they almost always mess about for weeks 4 or5 An apidea or nuc is the way to go normally job done in a fortnight
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