![]() In particular, if a queen gets into her third or fourth season without showing signs of swarming, she has a distinct disinclination to swarm, which is a good thing. One reason to wait until a queen is in her third season before deciding to breed from her is that there is plenty of time to assess her attributes. If the laying rate reaches 2,000 eggs per day, that equates to about 10 frames of brood in a National hive or 7 frames in a Langstroth. ![]() However, I don’t like the sort of bees that keep laying lots of brood late into autumn they need to be able to shut down properly for winter so that they don’t run out of stores and starve. I like prolific queens that lay in a beautiful pattern. Some queens are more prolific than others. Some types of bee seem more susceptible to chalk brood than others, and I don’t want them. If a colony has chalk brood, I won’t use the queen from that colony as a breeder, and I’ll try to re-queen it as soon as possible. There are no guarantees that the trait will be passed on, but I like my breeder queens to come from colonies with a low mite count. I know that some bees seem to be able to interrupt the breeding cycle of the mites. I do an alcohol wash in June on all of my production colonies to assess the degree of infestation by varroa mites. I try to find excuses for stroppy bees, but if they keep on being defensive for no apparent reason, they get marked for re-queening. One thing to consider is whether bad behaviour is a one-off or something that happens frequently. If they are a bit tetchy, they score 3, and if they are evil, it’s a 1 or 2. If they score 5, they are lovely bees that are calm on the comb and pay little attention to us. We use a scale from 1 to 5 when scoring the temperament of the bees. If the colony needs to be fed loads of syrup later on, that’s a negative. I often remove honey in June and again in August. Chances are, if they made 100+ lbs of honey, they didn’t swarm and were untroubled by disease. ![]() For a colony to make a lot of honey, plenty of things have to go right. This is a good thing to monitor, as is the amount of syrup fed in the autumn. The traits that I look out for are these: Honey Production Later on, I write these notes up, and by the end of the season I have a pretty good idea of which colonies contain my best queens. I keep notes by recording a video on my phone of the hives, and I verbally describe what I saw and did. How to select a breeder queen? Well, if you don’t keep some kind of notes you will be relying on gut feel, in which case, it all depends on the predictive powers of your digestive tract. The other part of the equation is the skill of the beekeeper from selecting larvae of the right age, to setting up a strong cell builder colony, to correct nutrition and handling of queen cells, through to mating nucs and plenty of drone availability. However, there’s no guarantee that they will be passed on, particularly with open mating of the daughter queens. To make great queens, it certainly helps to start off with a breeder queen who has the traits you wish to pass on. However, now is the time to consider this: Breeding the Best Honey Bees: Selecting a Quality Queen Bee. The best time for good mating weather in my area tends to be from mid-June to the end of July, making the end of May the time when I will start grafting. My experience and research into weather patterns tells me to hold off until later because the weather can be quite unreliable for mating flights in May. Now that we are in that time of crazy colony growth, it won’t be long until some people start to raise their first queens of the season. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |