It's me gammy leg!

[Adam]

Thanks Gavin; I wasn't aware of the glenn apiaries site - so I'll bookmark it and have a good look through. I thought I'd start easily with 'Oddball Bees' but the link didn't work

Jon, I too found an unexpected queen a week or two ago. No queencells visible for me either. She was a virgin so I caged her and put her in a queenless mini-nuc in order to get mated. The following week I found a single sealed queencell in the hive so I suspect the virgin was a supercedure queen rather than one that flew in.

[Jon]

Just had an interesting chat with my mate Tim.

Tim was with Mervyn and myself the day I shot the video of the queen with the gammy leg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxVsl...2&feature=plcp

He has been reading Manley's book 'Honey Farming' and came across a couple of paragraphs describing how a queen returning from a mating flight can get stung on the leg on entering the hive. If the sting is on one of the front 4 legs this usually makes the queen non viable, but if the sting is on a back leg the queen can lay more or less normally but is usually superseded early. The leg withers up or disappears completely. He described seeing a queen with the sting of a worker sticking out of a leg joint.

I think this is the most likely explanation for the 4 or 5 queens I saw last summer with a gammy leg as none of the workers from the parent queen had leg abnormalities and if it were a lethal genetic problem caused by two copies of a recessive gene it would tend to be eliminated in a haplodiploid species as haploid drones with this gene would not be viable.

[gavin]

I remember seeing a new queen with stings stuck in her leg. She was from one of those towers with three nucs in one box and plywood dividers, and had gone back to the wrong entrance. Maybe this is another reason for having readily distinguishable (brightly painted) boxed for queen mating. Maybe you could reduce the frequency by decorating the Apideas?

[Jon]

I don't think Manley was suggesting it was a queen returning to the wrong colony, although it could certainly be for that reason. There was other stuff about the mating sign / drone endophallus. I'll post the relevant text when I get hold of the book.
I suppose if a queen picks up an unfamiliar odour on a mating flight it could be rejected.
I have seen queens getting balled on quite a few occasions but have never seen one with a sting protruding.
I had 70 apideas on the allotment at one point over the summer and I did note queens returning to the wrong apidea on occasion.