Are all scrub Queens poor?

[sugarbush]

"If you graft or use a Jenter type system you are making a mock emergency queen"

not if you raise in a Queenright colony.

I stand corrected. I know of nobody in the US raising queens on a queen right colony... I may have to give it a go.

 

[Hivemaker.]

I stand corrected. I know of nobody in the US raising queens on a queen right colony... I may have to give it a go.

Michael Palmer,vermont,for one,and there are plenty more if you would like the names...one's who raise thousands of queens.

 

[drstitson]

"I stand corrected. I know of nobody in the US raising queens on a queen right colony... I may have to give it a go."

sugarbush - simplest method would be to use that devised by Cloake in NZ where it is widely used and on large scale too.

ttp://www.daveX-cushmanX.net/bee/method2.html (remove the Xs)

basic idea is that once cells started (during the 24hrs isolation from the queen downstairs) the colony accepts the "wisdom" of those that started them and continue the process DESPITE presence of HM - i suppose lack of new footrpint pheromone deposition helps in the upper chamber - you have used the emergency response (help we're queenless, lets get something cooking quickly) for 24hrs and converted to supercedure response (laid back, lets do the best we can girls).

similar approach would be taranov AS and using snelgrove board for establishing 2 queen system set-up (2QS was another favorite of harry cloake).

 

[Crg]

Do you have any scientific evidence for that statement Keith?

The amount of sperm that can be stored is related to the size of spermatheca, and the spermatheca is in proportion to size of the queen.

Less sperm stored (either through size or mating availability) means the queen is more likely to turn into to drone layer.

walk away splits are quite common in some places.

Walk away splits don't mean you'll end up with a scrub queen.

 

[sugarbush]

Michael Palmer,vermont,for one,and there are plenty more if you would like the names...one's who raise thousands of queens.

I actually know Mike's method quite well being I am also from Vermont originally. His cell builder is queenless.

here is a quote from Micheal

I agree that Bro Adam really doesn't go into enough detail. Heck, he only touches on wintering nucleus colonies.

I leave my cell builder queenless until the cells are sealed. I've arranged them so they have the maximum amount of nerse bees to feed the cells. If I unite them back with the queenright section, wouldn't a large number of the nurse bees go back to feeding worker larvae in the queenright section?

I used support colonies too, and harvested nurse bees by placing open brood above an excluder overnight. I find that by adding sealed brood 10 days before grafting that I'm doing the same thing...maybe with better results.

 

[Crg]

How do you get the queens in apideas? If you graft or use a Jenter type system you are making a mock emergency queen.

With a jenter type system or grafting, you have larvae of a known age. Emergency queens are fine as long as the larvae is started young enough.

The only upside to the apideas queen is that you select the parent colony,

Breeding from a parent colony you've selected is a big upside.

but with the diploid nature of the honey bee, selecting stock from your best hives without AI is a crap shoot at best.

It's not the "diploid nature" of the honey bee that is the issue - it's the flying off and mating with anything, anywhere, that's the issue.

I think you gain nothing by raising a queen vs using one they created them selves.

Except you'll hopefully have selected from your best colony.

 

[Hivemaker.]

He did a recent post where he had changed that, Brother Adam method,queenright colony...which is also what i use. Have chatted with him in the past about this....even sent him some heather honey, as he said you don't have heather in the USA, well not his part at any rate.

 

[sugarbush]

He did a recent post where he had changed that, Brother Adam method,queenright colony...which is also what i use. Have chatted with him in the past about this....even sent him some heather honey, as he said you don't have heather in the USA, well not his part at any rate.

It would have to be really recent, like this year... here is his article from last year and he was doing a queenless brother adam method. This was posted as part of a larger article on 07/07/2010. I cut it down so it would not take up the full page, but will send you the link vie IM should you want the entire article.

My Cell Building Methods

See, Bro Adam believed that the best cells were raised under either swarming or supercedure. Supercedure is difficult to control and usually not many cells result. Swarming on the other hand is easy to set up. Just try adding 7 frames of brood to a strong colony. I call these boxes of brood Bee Bombs...see my article in Bee Culture.

So, you set up a colony to get to swarming strength, and take away the queen. You control when they start their cells. They have all the resources and more...exactly what is needed to create quality queen cells.

One plus with Bro Adams approach...you can re-use the cell builder in a couple weeks after taking the cells. You never separated the queen's broodnest or restricted her from laying. Rather that using up the young nurse bee resource inthe CB, you are adding to it.

This is the best cell building method I have come across.

 

[drstitson]

Sugarbush - in your selected quote he is talking about his CELL BUILDER only.

look at a lower post by him:

"I re-unite after 24 h and let them finish in a queenright state" (ie the CELL FINISHER).

From: Beesource Beekeeping Forums > General Beekeeping Forums > Queen & Bee Breeding > My Cell Building Methods

 

[sugarbush]

Breeding from a parent colony you've selected is a big upside.



It's not the "diploid nature" of the honey bee that is the issue - it's the flying off and mating with anything, anywhere, that's the issue.



Except you'll hopefully have selected from your best colony.

It's a combination of the diploid nature and the flying off and mating with anything that is the problem. The daughter queen is only 50% of the chosen mother and 50% unknown... Only because of the diploid nature and the ability of the queen to mate with 20 or more drones, the 50% unknown becomes a much greater factor.

 

[sugarbush]

Sugarbush - in your selected quote he is talking about his CELL BUILDER only.

look at a lower post by him:

"I re-unite after 24 h and let them finish in a queenright state" (ie the CELL FINISHER).

From: Beesource Beekeeping Forums > General Beekeeping Forums > Queen & Bee Breeding > My Cell Building Methods

You are quoting Jen Larson here, who is quoting Brother Adam, not Mike Palmer... read post 8 and 9.....

 

[drstitson]

sorry - obviously not all americans can use quote marks in posts!!!!

 

[sugarbush]

No matter how he does it, he raises fine queens. I have tried to buy some off of him several times and his are always spoken for. I have managed to acquire some from Mike Bush, also very good queens.

 

[Crg]

It's a combination of the diploid nature and the flying off and mating with anything that is the problem. The daughter queen is only 50% of the chosen mother and 50% unknown... Only because of the diploid nature and the ability of the queen to mate with 20 or more drones, the 50% unknown becomes a much greater factor.

The drones being diploid has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

Yes she mates with multiple drones, (20 or more might be stretching it a bit), but you seem saying that's a reason for not trying to select on the 50% you do have control over.

 

[Crg]

The drones being diploid has nothing to do with what you're talking about.

I probably shouldn't type when I'm tired Drones (the ones that survive anyway) are obviously haploid.

The point was, haploid/diploid has nothing do to with what you're talking about.

 

[sugarbush]

My point is that the drone has 16 chromesome to pass on and the queen has 32, but the queen can only pass the other 16 onto the offspring.

step two: The queen can pass on any combination of traits, including those not expressed in her and have them expressed in the offspring. Providing she was open mated she can pass on traits from drones that are not expressed in the colony as a whole.

So there is a great chance you will breed a bunch of sub par queens before you get a good one. Which is why I argue that the bees can do just as good a job making a queen as an amateur beekeeper.

Brother Adam sunk about 10 years of breeding into each trait he wanted to stabilize in the buckfasts. In the grand scheme, selective breeding is pointless on an amateur level when it comes to bees. For it to really be affecting you have to have total control, in either remote and isolated breeding yard or with the use of AI.

Without those tight controls you can breed good queens, but you are wasting many other good queens that the bees are creating themselves and therefore wasting a resource that is easily available to you.

 

[sugarbush]

Trying to think of a better way to explain it.

Think about it as dice with each trait being a side to the dice. You have 1-6 on a regular dice and a mother and a father which represents one dice each.

Now put it into bee perspective, You have a set of dice for the queen, and a set for her father, and up to 20 unknown sets for the drones she mated with openly. Now the good offspring are only the snake eyes.....

Start throwing

Then the next twist is that you open mate the offspring. The queen could be top notch, but the colony could be mean as heck because of their father's contribution.

 

[Crg]

My point is that the drone has 16 chromesome to pass on and the queen has 32, but the queen can only pass the other 16 onto the offspring.

She will pass 50% of her genes onto *every* bee. Each drone will only pass on his genes to some of the workers. So she's going to have the greater influence.

Not only that, but raising queens from your best colony increases the frequency of the genes from your best colony in your surrounding area.
Even if the daughter's colony doesn't turn out that great (because of what she has mated with), the drones from the daughters will have the genes you prefer.

step two: The queen can pass on any combination of traits, including those not expressed in her and have them expressed in the offspring. Providing she was open mated she can pass on traits from drones that are not expressed in the colony as a whole.

And you can weed them out by selection on her daughters.

So there is a great chance you will breed a bunch of sub par queens before you get a good one. Which is why I argue that the bees can do just as good a job making a queen as an amateur beekeeper.

I don't think you're really thinking it through fully. If you breed off your best colony you're more likely to get some better queens than if you didn't select at all.
The worst that will happen is you'll end up with some of the same quality as if you didn't select, but which produce drones carrying better genes.

Also the bees do make the queen either way.

Brother Adam sunk about 10 years of breeding into each trait he wanted to stabilize in the buckfasts. In the grand scheme, selective breeding is pointless on an amateur level when it comes to bees. For it to really be affecting you have to have total control, in either remote and isolated breeding yard or with the use of AI.

Brother Adam was aiming for total control, just because you may not be able to do that, doesn't mean you shouldn't try and have a positive influence on selection, and please can we call use the usual term II?

Without those tight controls you can breed good queens, but you are wasting many other good queens that the bees are creating themselves and therefore wasting a resource that is easily available to you.

Without those controls you can't breed great queens 100% of the time, you can still have a positive influence on the genetics around you.

It's almost like saying because I can't earn a million pounds a year I should just not try to earn anything at all.

 

[sugarbush]

She will pass 50% of her genes onto *every* bee. Each drone will only pass on his genes to some of the workers. So she's going to have the greater influence.

Which can be any combination of 50% of her genes, not just the good.

Not only that, but raising queens from your best colony increases the frequency of the genes from your best colony in your surrounding area.
Even if the daughter's colony doesn't turn out that great (because of what she has mated with), the drones from the daughters will have the genes you prefer.

And creates a limited gene pool, the USA is down to only 39 distinct gene pools now, all from queen and package producers breeding 1000s of queens a year off of the best colony. We are also nearly unable to bring any new stock in. Canada has the same stock as does NZ, the only countries we can bring queens from.

And you can weed them out by selection on her daughters.

Like breeding chickens, that requires a lot of stomping.

I don't think you're really thinking it through fully. If you breed off your best colony you're more likely to get some better queens than if you didn't select at all.
The worst that will happen is you'll end up with some of the same quality as if you didn't select, but which produce drones carrying better genes.

Also the bees do make the queen either way.



Brother Adam was aiming for total control, just because you may not be able to do that, doesn't mean you shouldn't try and have a positive influence on selection, and please can we call use the usual term II?



Without those controls you can't breed great queens 100% of the time, you can still have a positive influence on the genetics around you.

It's almost like saying because I can't earn a million pounds a year I should just not try to earn anything at all.

I am not arguing that we should not breed queens. I breed queens of my own. What I am arguing is that there is a false impression among beeks that we can do it better. They go through hives and destroy every queen cell that they themselves did not induce the bees to make. There by wasting the labors of their bees only to force them to make a new queen of what is probably only equal value.

An armature beek without the tight controls we previously discussed is not going to create the holly Grail of queens. They can produce some good productive queens, which I can assure you , you really don't have to be very selective to do. Domesticated bees have been breed for production and gentleness for 1000s of years. You are not going to breed that out of them in a life time.

My best hives have been from feral sources, colonies headed up by queens that nature selected. I have sold of splits of these colonies and frequently have people come back flabbergasted that they out build up and produce commercially breed packages. The answer I have given them is that they are doing what nature selected them to do.

 

[sugarbush]

I once had a Golden Retriever; fine dog. We wanted to breed her with another fine dog, but she got loose and bred with every mongrel in the neighborhood. Her litter ended up with two that looked like Dalmatians, two which looked like Black labs, and one Golden Retriever pup. All fine dogs, but they were not going to win any prizes for swimming and retrieving. Two things of which their mother was very good at.