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Matchmaking – You and Your Queen
By: James E. Tew
“You” and your queens
Is the best queen for your bees always the best queen for you – the beekeeper? Sometimes yes but sometimes – no. Availability, annual season, neighbors, and money are common reasons that you might be induced to use a queen that you would not normally have chosen. The fact is: All queens in your colonies will rarely be good queens. As competent beekeepers, we usually strive to have good queens in all our hives, but we nearly always fail.
Why?
Presently, it’s early Spring for many of us. For discussion, let’s say you successfully wintered twenty colonies and people like Jim Tew tell you to requeen them every year. Having gotten a decent honey crop, you had a good year last year. The queens are established and the colonies are all in good shape. You have the extra money in your pocket. If the colonies isn’t broken, why would you try to fix them? Well, very possibly, some of you should not try to fix a colony’s queen that’s not broken, but those of you competent enough to requeen your colonies have a tough decision to make.
Previous experience will have taught you that no matter how great a queen is, she will have a remarkably short lifespan – probably about a year. Experience will have taught you that to get the queen stock you want, you will need to have ordered them early. Experience will have taught you that there is very little value (none) for aged queens, and experience will have taught you that you don’t want to be requeening colonies during the nectar flow.
On a personal level, I deal with a high blood pressure problem. It runs in my family. In consultation with my physician, he told me that high blood pressure is deadly for some people while others live long lives – never knowing they even had a blood pressure problem. He continued by saying that medical science can’t tell which people will be harmfully affected and who will be fine with high blood pressure numbers. So, everyone gets treated.
True, some one-year-old queens heading colonies will still be great queens for a second year. Replacing them would seem nonsensical. In other cases, maybe the queen was not even particularly good during her first year – easy decision – replace her. But we can’t tell which good ones will not make it through the next year. So, all queens get replaced.
Back at the hypothetical twenty colonies that we are discussing, you have ordered twenty-one queens to have one extra in case there’s a problem. They have arrived and you have been blessed with a great day for the procedure. Articles and articles have been written telling you how to hold these caged queens and how to find reigning queens in the colony, but that’s not my theme here. You remove the old queens and install the new queens. Two weeks later, you find that three of the twenty were not accepted, but you bought a single extra queen. Remember? But she’s been in storage for more than two weeks now. Is she still a “good” queen or has her imprisonment been detrimental? Either way, you are going to install her. Now two remaining colonies don’t have queens but do have queen cells underway. What to do? One scenario is to allow the natural queen replacement to proceed but realize that these two colonies will experience retarded population development. Another scenario is for you to scramble around and get two more queens from wherever you can. Even so, these two colonies will still be developmentally set back.
At the end of the day, you have seventeen colonies with queen stock you like, one colony may have queen stock you like, and two have queens over which you had little control. Could it get more confusing? Yes, because of the seventeen original queens that you installed early, not all will be great queens. You will have variation within that group, too. True, some of you would have been lucky enough to have all twenty be accepted and are off to a great season. That is the exception. For others of you, the rejection numbers could have been even greater. Bad weather, bad queens, and lack of experience on your part are all common reasons for queen replacement not to be successful. I put you through all of this hypothetical discussion to say again, as competent beekeepers, we strive to have good queens in all our hives, but we nearly always fail.
Your queens and you
Throughout all our queen selection history, passionate people have dedicated their entire lives to developing a queen stock that is truly exceptional. Today, one hundred percent of our bees reflect some of that dedicated breeding effort. Unless you go to the next level and purchase instrumentally inseminated queens, any queen you buy will have been open mated. Various isolated locations have been tried in years past to be sure that the drones with which queens mate are of strains that we want to cross. But the fact is that most of the queens we buy were naturally inseminated by free-flying drones; therefore, the pedigree of our queens will always be in some question. Though they will be similar, the twenty-one queens you bought will not be twenty-one identical queens. Try as you might, you will still experience variations in performance within the bee yard. That’s where you, the beekeeper, come in.
In the wild, the best queen for most colonies would be a queen whose prodigy stings everything in sight, swarms several times per year, successfully winters and only produces enough honey to provide for its own use. That was the strain of bee our beekeeping ancestors started from. I don’t want that kind of bee back. I want a large bee that produces far more honey than it can use, doesn’t sting me, resists diseases and pests, never swarms, and winters well – and I don’t want to pay a lot for her.
The bee strain that you like will be your decision. Some of you prefer yellow bees while others only want dark bees. Some want honey producers while others want gentle bees. Still others of us want bee strains that will tolerate riding on a semi-truck, sitting in the diesel exhaust flume for days on end, and still thrive when they finally get to the end of the long trip. I’ve come to realize that a good queen is one whose stock does what I want it to do at a price I can tolerate.
What is a bad queen?
A frequent comment I hear is, “He makes good money.” I’ve never known how much money “good money” is – but it must be a lot. I frequently hear the comment that beekeepers should only use good queens. Are there some of you out there who are actually shopping for bad queens? Do you need someone like me to tell you that you should be looking for good queens?
May I assume that a good queen is one whose stock is successful (based on human standards) while a bad queen is one whose stock is not as successful or even fails outright? Just as there are degrees of goodness, so are there are degrees of badness. In your colonies, a bad queen is one that you feel is bad while good queens are ones that you like. Your reasons are your reasons. Many years ago, my university apiculture professor would get culled queens (bad queens) from a commercial producer and then use them in the university bee colonies. These bad queens made the transition from bad queens to good queens because they didn’t cost anything. In some instances, one beekeeper’s bad queen is another’s good queen.
To be sure that you and I are communicating, I should say that generally, bad (or poor) queens don’t produce enough offspring or the offspring they do produce is not successful. Such colonies don’t survive the winter. They don’t show pest resistance. They sting too much or they don’t produce enough honey. These marginal colonies that don’t die outright are the ones that force us to review the degree of badness – to requeen or not to requeen.
Matchmaking – you and your queens
I have put you through this tiresome discussion to this point to hammer the concept that the quality of a queen’s performance and the urgency of replacement is a relative phenomenon; yet recommendations must be made. You will have to personally decide what kind of queen stock you would like as though you and your bees lived in a perfect world. You will surely know that the world is imperfect so while you have goals for your colonies, many times they simply will not make those goals. Your best colony this year will possibly be one of your marginal producers next year. If you have kept bees for a while, you already know there will always be some variation among the colonies within your yard.
Queen management is important to the overall success of the colony, but it is not the only criterion. Weather conditions are important but outside your control. Pest population sizes are important but there is only so much you and your bees can do. Are you splitting/dividing these colonies? Are you able to inhibit swarming? Do you move your colonies frequently? Queens and their efforts are only part of a successful management program. The queen stock you choose must be an integral part of a comprehensive management program.
What to do?
With all the complexities and variations, I have just discussed, what should you and I do to manage our queens wisely? For maximum honey production and overall productivity, I would try to requeen in the Spring with queens I purchased from an experienced producer. I selected this producer based on queen availability, price, service, and queen performance; and though I want all these queens to be great, I suspect that there will be a range of performance.
But in my imperfect world, what if I don’t get the colonies requeened in the Spring? My bee world will not collapse due to this shortage, but I will have more production variation within my colonies and my overall bee population will decline to an extent. I will anticipate more swarms. I will have to perform triage to identify the truly “bad” queens and give high priority to replacing them. The colonies that I classify as average and the occasional “good” colony, I will probably leave to themselves. I will harbor the hope that the average colonies will grow to become good colonies and I will hope that the good colonies stay that way.
Queen replacement is a serious undertaking. Too often beekeepers take an average colony and unintentionally convert it to a bad colony. It happens. Learn from it. When is it better to leave an average colony alone and when is it better to fix it? If the colony is clearly not thriving (The degree of thriving is usually based on what the other colonies in the yard are doing), requeen it. Of course, there will be no honey production from that unit and due to reduced population, pollination activity will be lowered.
Making management decisions in the Spring and Summer is somewhat easier than Autumn decisions. Late season requeening for weak colony survival may not be worth the effort. The new queen will not have time to produce new bees so in essence the colony will have a new queen surrounded by old bees – but should the colony survive the Winter, it will have a young queen next Spring. What to do?
What I really wanted to say
All I really wanted to say in this piece is don’t be intolerant of “average” colonies. Trying to have all your colonies categorized as good colonies is a proper but elusive goal. Think about it. The common range designations are poor, average, and good. Where should you realistically expect most of your colony rankings to fall? Yet we are all consistently taught to keep “good” queens in “good” colonies in order to get “good” crops. That makes you a “good” beekeeper.
There is nothing uncommon about most of our colonies being average. Do something about the bad ones. I anticipate most of my colonies’ queens will be categorized as average ones but I will always try to acquire more good ones.
In summary, in a perfect world, I will try to make bad colonies average, then try to make some average colonies good. Other selected average colonies, I will leave as is. That’s a reasonable – but elusive – goal.
Dr. James E. Tew
Emeritus Faculty, Entomology
The Ohio State University
tewbee2@gmail.com
Host, Honey Bee
Obscura Podcast
www.honeybeeobscura.com
