The qualities of the queen – her fecundity, longevity, genetics and so forth. – are an important affect on colony ‘success’.

You may measure that success by way of copy (if free-living, does the colony swarm efficiently?) or – of extra relevance to a beekeeper – by the load of the honey supers. However bees do different issues as properly, so success may very well be quantified by spring growth (for financially-rewarding almond pollination contracts at ~$200/hive), Royal jelly or propolis manufacturing, or preferential pollination of particular crops.

Beekeeping … a lot greater than honey!

However, regardless of the standards, the queen that heads the colony is vital to the success of the colony. Moreover, regardless of the fascinating qualities of the colony are, there’s compelling proof that larger queens are higher queens; they lay extra eggs, they lay for longer, they produce larger employees, who acquire extra pollen and so forth.

Background studying

I’ve mentioned larger queens making higher queens in three earlier posts. These cowl:

• a number of the background evidencing why larger queens actually are higher queens
• the demonstration of a maternal impact in honey bees, the place the queen invests extra sources (e.g. larger eggs that, in flip, produce larger queens) when laying in queen cups moderately than in employee comb … this suggests that grafted queens might not be the perfect achievable high quality
• some sensible approaches to take advantage of the maternal impact when queen rearing. These are very a lot in progress research, however I believe that the early outcomes present promise, notably for these new to queen rearing and/or averse to grafting day-old larvae

I am going to attempt to keep away from re-hashing these posts, however – in locations – they need to be thought-about required background studying for the issues I need to cowl right here.

At the moment, I’ll focus on the affect of the scale of the queen cell cup on the scale of the ensuing queen.

I’ve not seen a dialogue of this within the beekeeping literature, regardless of it being primarily based upon science going again well-over a decade.

It’s instantly related to those that rear queens by grafting and these hoping to take advantage of the maternal impact for his or her queen rearing.

It is an attention-grabbing story and one which has the potential to ship an ‘simple win’ if you find yourself queen rearing utilizing synthetic (often plastic) queen cell cups, regardless of the strategy you employ.