Having dozens of mini nucs with virgin queens on the same site must greatly increase your chance of seeing the event and may not necessarily be related to the size or lack of it of the mini nucs.Originally Posted by prakel
If you leave this alone it will usually return to its mini-nuc within a couple of hours.both times the 'swarm' has initially settled close by (and been caught).
And I have found that on many occasions this does not happen?
surley if someone had 50 hives instead of 50 nucs in a concentrated area and this was a trait of these bees then the same thing would have been observed much more often, it only seems to be associated with small queen rearing nucs of the apidea size - I've never seen this or heard it happening when using for example a 5 frame nuc for queen rearing ???
Last edited by busybeephilip; 08-09-2016 at 12:09 PM.
How many people set up 50 five frame nucs with virgin queens on a single site?
Asi mentioned above, I also saw this happen with the supersedure virgin queen from a full colony once. The other times it has been with queens flying from Apideas.
It's one of those occasions where figuring cause and effect by observation.just doesn't work. You've picked the cause you wanted to be the cause when it really could have been any factor. As Jon said you've never seen an apiary with 50 virgins in 5 frame nucs or 50 hives yet you are sure it wouldn't happen in them.
A really ridiculous( but funny) comparison is a post I just read on a Facebook beekeeping page. Some guy noticed about a month ago that his dog was eating bees, as many as 30 a week. Since then he has noticed that honey production has slowed down significantly. His conclusion ? Rehome the dog.!
Got any Apidea's that need rehoming ?
Last edited by SDM; 09-09-2016 at 07:21 AM.
The fact is that this cause does not happen so often with a larger type of colony, certainly has not been reported on this forum apart from Jons one off experience from a full colony mentioned above. The size of the mating box may be relevant as a trigger for AVM and there is little evidence to say it is not a cause. As SDM says no one knows why this happens, certainly not a mating event as listed in any refereed journal.
Beowulf Cooper mentions in his book "The Honey bees of the British Isles" I quote an interesting sentence page 66 " Apiary Vacinity Mating. It is more than a coincidence that most of the superseding characters which we know are, as the geneticist says, recessive. It is only under conditions of a moderate degree of inbreeding that the character shows up " this is followed by numerous witness descriptions of odd mating behaviours then, I quote "The effect of this type of mating behaviour is that a queen is likely to mate with one or more drones from her own hive....... thus here we have a powerful mechanism for securing some degree of inbreeding with its advantages and disadvantages"
So what does this mean - AVM behaviour is seen in supersedure type queens and is a sure sign of inbreeding. Good or Bad ?
Lot of unknowns but what is clear is that very few serious commercial queen breeders ever comment on this phenomenum maybe because inbreeding is avoided using bee lines of well characterized parentage.
Last edited by busybeephilip; 10-09-2016 at 08:28 PM.
Beowulf cooper writings are just a stream of consciousness, imho, with no science or experimental work to back them up. I don't rate his stuff at all.
Likewise, I've never seen it happen with mating nucs on half length frames totalling a comb area of just over two bs deep frames.
Fascinating stuff for sure although I don't think I'd be wanting to keep bees which had been bred for a propensity to mate in the apiary; far prefer to think of them making their way to a DCA.
Not in the summer season we don't and no doubt they have a more predictable season too.
You could be right not sure what you are meaning, however, his book is endorsed by several respectable persons such as Prof Kenneth Mellanby (re President BIBBA at time of publication), Albert Knight (sec BIBBA), Rev Eriv Milner and Adrian Waring - all respectable black native bee persons
Even so - inbreeding is the last thing I want in my bees if AVM is a true trait
Last edited by busybeephilip; 11-09-2016 at 02:57 PM.
Not rating his stuff is a bit harsh, I don't think he was a natural author but that he felt he had to get something out there to refute the anti native bee propoganda rife at the time. I agree he presents some of his largely unsubstantiated observations as fact, but if viewed as a failure in style rather than deliberate miss representation I find his work valuable.
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