Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
- Animals: bees
Practices
- Animal Production: genetics, livestock breeding
- Education and Training: farmer to farmer, workshop
- Sustainable Communities: sustainability measures
Abstract:
This proposal addresses the limited available local, survivor honey bee queen stock for access by beekeepers in the Missouri/Illinois region. We will raise queen stock from local survivor colonies, make them available for sale in our region, and provide training on sustainable queen rearing to beekeepers through various modes of outreach. In 2018 this group was awarded SARE grant FNC18-1145 to support the newly formed SSA Queen Rearing Apiary, to facilitate the development of locally-adapted queen stock by increasing the number of resource hives, supplies, testing and labor. We will continue this work and expand upon progress made with the previous grant including adding a second (resource) apiary, innovating to improve methods of queen rearing to produce greater quantity of queens and improve methods of “banking” queens for availability to beekeepers throughout the active season, all while maintaining the integrity of the feral drones stock for mating, in the original apiary area. Being able to provide both mated queens and nucleus colonies from this survivor population, that successfully overwinters in our zone, increases the purchasing beekeepers' springtime hive strength and honey production, while decreasing cost of stock replacement.
Project objectives:
- Produce 100 locally-bred and adapted honey bee queens plus 20-30 nucleus colonies with the same queen stock, each season
- Provide access to this local queen stock by making the queens and nucs available to beekeepers in our region for purchase
- Document over-wintering success of queen honey bees produced, over two cycles during the 21-month period of the grant
- Survey purchasing beekeepers progress, get feedback and report
- Share outcomes and information with local beekeepers through beekeeping association meetings, field days, social media, to database email of the Eastern Missouri / Southern Illinois region's active beekeepers, with a final video to NCR-SARE.
Successes:
Saint Louis Beekeepers Sustainable Stock Apiary (SSA) succeeded in producing 97 queens during the 2022 queen rearing season. Most of the queens were harvested and sold to local beekeepers.
160 queen cells were developed, mostly through cell grafting. Of those, 97 successfully became laying queens. We were able to generate revenue in 2022 from the sale of 18 starter colonies, overwintered from 2021, and 62 queens from 2022 production season. We lost 8 harvested queens in transportation and retention delays, with the remaining 27 queens from the final graft established in 5-frame nucs to overwinter for sale as starter colonies in Spring, 2023.
Areas of improvement:
Our target for queen development (to successful mating and egg laying) is 75-80% success rate and we achieved 60%.
Possible paths to increase our success rate?
- Use two starter/finishers instead of one. We may be placing too many grafted cell cups in the 1 starter/finisher. We speculate this may diminish the quality of the larva in the capped queen cells, when environmental conditions are less than optimal, as excessive heat was an environmental factor in 2022.
- Refreshing our mating nucs between grafts with a new cohort of nurse bees. It was noted when harvesting queens that several mating nucs had few bees and low on resources. With the addition of the second yard, our resource apiary, we should be able schedule additional harvesting and transporting nurse bees for this purpose into our calendar.
- Increase time on calendar to include observation of the following situations for correction -
- of dead out or queenless nucs when harvesting queens. This will alert us to which nucs need help.
- Make note if unopened queen cells remaining beyond the point they should have hatched and determine viability. Are these the result of supersedure or replacement of an inferior queen or queen larva? Replace with synthetic QMP (Queen mandibular pheromone) if necessary to keep from going laying-worker while we work to rebuild these mating nucs and place the next round of grafts.