Does Removal of Early Queen Cells Prevent Premature Queen Replacement and Lead to Economic Success When a New Bee Hive is Started with a Package?

Commodities

• Animals: bees
• Animal Products: honey

Practices

• Animal Production: other

Honey bees are critical pollinators of agricultural crops.  Starting a colony of honey bees requires a sizeable investment in equipment ($1000 per hive) and time.  The standard method of starting a colony uses a ‘package’ of bees consisting of about 10,000 worker bees plus an unrelated queen.  A well mated queen can lay 1,800 to 2,000 eggs per day and is critical for successful colony population development.  Only the queen can lay fertilized eggs that develop into workers who perform all of the resource gathering (nectar, pollen, water, etc.) and pollination work.  A large population of workers (40,000 or more) is required for effective crop pollination and for the perennial survival of the colony.  [The annual value of honey bee crop pollination in the USA in the year 2000 was estimated at $14.6 billion (Calderone, 2012)].   Prior research has demonstrated that about 25% of package bees replace the queen within the first 5 weeks of colony development from a package, the replacement resulting in loss of the colony or a colony that has too few bees to survive the coming winter, with loss of the beekeeper’s investment of time and money.  This grant proposes to test if destroying early replacement queen cells will significantly reduce queen replacement, thereby resulting in a more robust colony that will be able to survive the winter to become an efficient pollinating unit and produce a crop of honey the following spring.

Thirty two packages of honey bees consisting of about 10,000 bees and a newly mated queen will be obtained from Gardner Apiaries, Baxley Georgia, a commercial package bee supplier.  The packages will be divided into two groups of 16.  Bees in the control group will be allowed to replace the package queen.  In the experimental group, all attempts at queen replacement in the first five weeks will be thwarted (queen cells observed will be cut out, preventing the replacement of the packaged queen). 

The primary end points measured will be

1. the number of package queens still in their hives at five weeks after package installation
2. the number of hives in each group surviving at the beginning of October (data collected across time and shown in a survival curve; end point for statistical analysis will be at the beginning of October).

Secondary end points will be

3. the number of queen cells made in each colony (control and experimental) during the first 5 weeks after installation
4. the “success” of surviving colonies (as shown by area of brood, population of bees, number of frames honey comb built)