Quote Originally Posted by Jon View Post
Is there research to back up where queens fly to?
Those RFID markers used in some of the pesticide studies would be a good way to track virgin queens.
There must be some studies which have tracked queens to DCAs but I am not aware of any.
I remember Robert Paxton commenting that extraneous DNA turned up at one of the Baltic island mating stations so either queens were flying onshore or drones were doing the reverse. The island was 2 miles off shore
I wrote to Gudrun Koeniger on this last year and she said that queens preferentially flew (in an experiment in the Alps) downhill, to a dip in the horizon, just as drones did. That isn't from direct observation but inference from mated queens.

In their excellent book on mating biology they describe work with Cordovan bees which shows that queens were tending to fly further than drones to mate. Cordovan is a recessive trait so virgin and drone have to carry it to make Cordovan workers. They also said that the variability of flight distance was greater for queens.

I asked her the question on whether queens and drone may fly upwind in a breeze, as I believe workers tend to do when aiming for distant forage. She thought not.