Winter bee watching

[The Drone Ranger]

Surely they tolerate Oxalic trickle pretty well too and there has been quite a lot of research done on this elsewhere in Europe.
As Finman likes to say in the other place, just Google Nanetti and varroa.
.

When I watched Ghosts in the hive it occurred to me that throughout Summer most varroa in well managed hive would be fairly inbred whereas in an infested hive during Winter there would be more than one female laying per cell and possibly the out crossed progeny might be more vigorous and hence more dangerous
Just a thought

[fatshark]

cabin-fever-1.jpg

[alancooper]

An IR thermometer aimed at the crown board will give you an idea of the likelihood of brood. No need to open up.

Mine are at 16C - so no brood.

I might try this - thanks But before I ask Santa - is it based just on your observations? - or is it generally accepted by other beeks?
Alan.

[gavin]

I might try this - thanks But before I ask Santa - is it based just on your observations? - or is it generally accepted by other beeks?
Alan.

Sounds like a more accurate way of doing the 'back of the hand' test. Best applied to the crownboard immediately after lifting the insulation before things cool. I would imagine this works well when there are significant areas of brood and less well for a small patch.

Watching for brown dust on the floor insert (if you cleaned it last visit) also tells you when (and where) brood is being uncapped (and sometimes when cells are being cleaned out ready for laying).

[greengumbo]

I trickled all my hives with OA yesterday and received some nice stings on the wrist through the gloves.

No hives had flying bees at 9am but when I lifted the roofs the poly-hive inhabitants were extremely active and feisty. The wooden hives were much better behaved and tightly clustered (read colder!!).

All hives flying at 1230 and visiting gorse, mahonia and Schistostylis which are in full bloom. Sweet rocket is flowering as well and some ivy still going.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi greengumbo
That made me smile
they are a bit too lively at the moment, for me anyway
On one I removed the mouse guard as gently I could and was rewarded by a sting on the wrist
(from the only bee on guard duty!)
"Ungrateful little bee " (or something very like that) I shouted
A few seconds later all her mates arrived and I pushed off to find the Anthisan

[madasafish]

Sounds like a more accurate way of doing the 'back of the hand' test. Best applied to the crownboard immediately after lifting the insulation before things cool. I would imagine this works well when there are significant areas of brood and less well for a small patch.

Watching for brown dust on the floor insert (if you cleaned it last visit) also tells you when (and where) brood is being uncapped (and sometimes when cells are being cleaned out ready for laying).

Yes: I remove insulation and immediately point IR thermometer - the one I have (£12 ex eby iirc) has a laser light to show where you focus.

All my colonies are insulated (except my one polyhive) and had the same crownboard temp 15-16C. It's 5-10C outside and gray and raining most of the time, no pollen coming in so no chance of brood.. And white cappings only on the varroa board. Some have clear crownboards and some ply. Results the same.

Roof/crownboard insulation is a minimum 100mm

[Greengage]

I read this on one of the facebook beekeeping pages, A honey bee queen mates on wing with an average of 12 males and stores their sperm to produce progeny of mixed paternity. The degree of a queen’s polyandry is positively associated with measures of her colony’s fitness, and observed distributions of mating number are evolutionary optima balancing risks of mating flights against benefits to the colony. Effective mating numbers as high as 40 have been documented, begging the question of the upper bounds of this behavior that can be expected to confer colony benefit. In this study researchers used instrumental insemination to create three classes of queens with exaggerated range of polyandry– 15, 30, or 60 drones. Colonies headed by queens inseminated with 30 or 60 drones produced more brood per bee and had a lower proportion of samples positive for Varroa destructor mites than colonies whose queens were inseminated with 15 drones, suggesting benefits of polyandry at rates higher than those normally obtaining in nature. The results are consistent with two hypotheses that posit conditions that reward such high expressions of polyandry: (1) a queen may mate with many males in order to promote beneficial non-additive genetic interactions among subfamilies, and (2) a queen may mate with many males in order to capture a large number of rare alleles that regulate resistance to pathogens and parasites in a breeding population. Their results are unique for identifying the highest levels of polyandry yet detected that confer colony-level benefit and for showing a benefit of polyandry in particular toward the parasitic mite V. destructor.

[mbc]

Interesting. I Google it and found : http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0142985

This has quite serious implications when considering the statistics of likely in race matings, optimal polyandry, avm and such.

[prakel]

This has quite serious implications when considering the statistics of likely in race matings, optimal polyandry, avm and such.

This has been one of the reasons I've found the idea of avm to be questionable. It's always struck me as being a very unnatural process, more like an opportunistic result created by beekeepers placing lots of colonies close together. I'm fairly sure, based on what we so far know of honey bee mating, that it wouldn't be the optimum method of maintaining a strong population in nature.