Emergency Queens

[clv101]

At last weekend's BIBBA/SICAMM conference, Wally Shaw (who wrote the WBKA 'Simple Methods if Making an Increase') told us there was nothing wrong with emergency queens at all, cited papers and 100+ successful colonies headed by such queens. However the following day, Gerry Ryan, from Ireland was specific in the opposite opinion, that such 'scrub' queens should be avoided. Is there a definitive answer to whether emergency queens are any good?

 

[Teemore]

As one of my former lecturers (non beekeeping related) loved to say, "It depends".... Various people seem to get good results from both Q- and Q+ queen rearing.

Some of the queen rearing methods involve making colonies Q- or placing them in a position where they think they are Q-. A Q- colony will try to make queen cells. Those queen cells are emergency queen cells. Their quality will be dictated by a range of factors including the genetics of the stock providing the eggs/larvae and by the strength of the queen raising colony. The more young nurse bees present to feed royal jelly to the queen larvae, the better. This past season I boosted colonies with extra frames of emerging brood in advance of starting batches of grafts so that there was an abundance of nurse bees and minimal open brood when the grafts were introduced.

A point worth noting is that a number of people I know who raise queens, only use Q- colonies as queen cell starters, moving them quickly to strong cell raiser colonies where they are finished under what they term "supercedure impulse".

 

[thebeeman]

We raise a thousand or so Queens every year.
In basic terms the larvae used to raise an emergency Queen and a larvae grafted in to a cell cup are the same. It just depends on the Queen that laid the egg If she was a poor Queen you may end up with a poor Queen If she was a good queen the odds start to favour you and then its on to the quality of the drones she mates with.
If the hive is strong and healthy with an abundance of young bees the Queen cell will get around 1600 quality feeds. There are many things that can effect the quality of a queen so in real terms you can not judge Queen quality from just one thing.

 

[oliver90owner]

It is the 'ability' of the beekeeper, once again.

Walk-away splits are inviting trouble. The competent beekeeper knows what to do ( NOT entirely walk away); the rest just ask for scrubby queens - but in a lot af cases they consider (or wouldn't know any better) it a job well done to get two colonies from one.

Wally Shaw should know better than being carte blanche about the topic, or perhaps someone was not paying full attention all the time.

Saying 'scrub queens should be avoided' is not the opposite. It is a simple fact.

Same with Teemore's post. You need to read it very carefully. Spreading the brood to induce queen cell building is not an emergency response. There is very little on emergency cells in his post as most is carefully contrived by the beekeeper under strict control. Most certainly different than an emergency, which implies a sudden loss of the queen from the colony (removed or pegged).

So my definitive answer is that emergency queen cells and scrub queens are not (necessarily) the same thing. You need to think about it harder as there is far more to it than automatically calling a scrub queen an emergency queen or vice versa.

 

[itma]

- the problem is NOT with a Q raised as an 'emergency' per se, or under the "Emergency Impulse" (Q- cell-raising)

- HOWEVER, there would be a problem (lower lay rate, etc) with any Q whose raising did not encompass the full 5 days of special 'royal jelly' feeding, ie a Q started on a worker larva that was already more than a day old before special feeding started.
Such a Q would definitely be smaller, and have less-well developed ovaries (with fewer ovarioles).
I think that only such a late-start Q deserves the title "scrub Queen", because she inevitably will underperform her sister who had the ideal full 5 days of Royal Jelly.
Naturally there would be a range - a Q started from a 4-day old worker larva would be very small. One started on a 2-day old larva would be close to full size.
Accordingly, a wide range of anecdotal experiences can be explained - once you realise what the mechanism is.

This understanding feeds back into Q Cell selection when raising Qs …

 

[thebeeman]

Queen cell and workers cells receive the same diet for the first 48 hours ( Scientific Fact)

Emergency queens earned a bad reputation as beekeepers panicked and tore down the first cells raise by the bees and the bees had to raise panic cells using larvae that was very near to being too old.

The bees are not daft they know how to raise a new queen it`s beekeepers who think they know more about bees than bees know about themselves that are daft.

 

[itma]

Queen cell and workers cells receive the same diet for the first 48 hours ( Scientific Fact)

I'd be interested to see your reference for that, as you are contradicting Winston ("The Biology of the Honey Bee" - at page 67 in my copy, citing Jung-Hoffmann's 1966 paper "Die Determination von Königin und Arbeiterin der Honigbiene")

Emergency queens earned a bad reputation as beekeepers panicked and tore down the first cells raise by the bees and the bees had to raise panic cells using larvae that was very near to being too old.

Precisely.
The older the starting larva, the less "well-developed" the resulting Q will be.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Wally Shaw should know better than being carte blanche about the topic,

He does unfortunately but you soon get the gist of the qualifiers - he is talking of getting a queen cell from splitting healthy strong colonies - plenty of young nurse bees to produce suficient royal jelly and raise the larvae - he laso tends to 'notch the bottom of the cell sp that they can draw the cell downwards rather than having to extend out and down like in the 'classic' emergency queen cell. He is a bit evangelistic about this 'emergency QC's are all good' mullarkey, same as he never reduces queen cells in any situation saying the bees will always sort them so you don't get casts oh, and his latest ' your colony will never swarm again' system using a 'dump box' was in Africa during that talk but it sounds like a sort of hybrid re-inventing the Demarree/an excuse for the beginner to fiddle with his bees every five minutes/'harmony frame (yes, we've heard that cuckoo stuff before haven't we) system. I think there comes a time when a person can read too much

 

[thebeeman]

(Jean-Prost, 1994) - University of Illinois Laboratory
has the basic text without having to trek through page after page of text

http://www.uni.illinois.edu/~stone2/bee_life_stages.html

Larva
The larval stage lasts eight to nine days. Upon hatching, the larva is almost microscopic, resembling a small, white, curved, segmented worm lacking legs and eyes. For the first two days, all larvae are fed a diet of royal jelly. Beginning the third day, worker larvae are fed honey, pollen and water, while the larvae destined to become queens continue to receive royal jelly throughout their larval lives. Regardless of whether the larva is male or female, it molts five times during its larval stage (Jean-Prost, 1994).

 

[Bosleeu]

Queen cell and workers cells receive the same diet for the first 48 hours ( Scientific Fact)

That is how I remember it from the few books about bees and queen rearing I have read, sorry I don't have any specific references.

As I read more about bees, and learn more from the bees, it seems to me the most important factors to determine the characteristics of a colony are the queen's parents, and who she mates with.

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

Plus you can see the stuff.

 

[itma]

Queen cell and workers cells receive the same diet for the first 48 hours ( Scientific Fact)

That is how I remember it from the few books about bees and queen rearing I have read, sorry I don't have any specific references.

Its not quite the full story. It would appear to be a simplification along the lines of "there is only ever one Queen in each colony".

Dr David Woodward in his book "Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding" (2010), in Section 1.4 'Caste Determination' explains it thus:

During the first 24 to 36 hours of larval development workers and queen bees are fed similar amounts of food. During the second day the diet for larvae that will become workers or queens differs. Worker larvae recieve a light feeding of worker jelly for the first three days of development, produced from secretions of the mandibular and hypopharangeal glands of nurse bees …
By contrast, larvae developing in queen cells are fed royal jelly in copious amounts. During the first three days the royal jelly fed to these larvae is produced from nurse bee secretions of the mandibular glands only. ...

My emphasis.

Similar AMOUNTS for the first day or so (only), but of DIFFERENT stuff.
Qs get mandibular only.
Ws get mandibular AND hypopharangeal.
(For the first 3 days as a larva)

(Jean-Prost, 1994) - University of Illinois Laboratory
has the basic text without having to trek through page after page of text

http://www.uni.illinois.edu/~stone2/bee_life_stages.html

...

Actually that page was put together by a "teaching associate" at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, claiming to cite Pierre Jean-Paul.
It is a school page, not a university-level one.
I don't have J-P's book so I don't know whether the 'associate' has misunderstood or whether there is a poor translation of the french original.
Given some of the other statements on that page, I'd suspect the former.
I think we can know a little better than "Development from egg to new worker typically takes two (Tales From the Hive, 2000) to three weeks (Bishop, 2005)".
And the last paragraph contains this gem "drones can't fly well".

Not the sort of source to be treated as the best available information!

 

[Bosleeu]

Its not quite the full story. It would appear to be a simplification along the lines of "there is only ever one Queen in each colony".

Dr David Woodward in his book "Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding" (2010), in Section 1.4 'Caste Determination' explains it thus: My emphasis.

Similar AMOUNTS for the first day or so (only), but of DIFFERENT stuff.
Qs get mandibular only.
Ws get mandibular AND hypopharangeal.
(For the first 3 days as a larva)








Actually that page was put together by a "teaching associate" at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, claiming to cite Pierre Jean-Paul.
It is a school page, not a university-level one.
I don't have J-P's book so I don't know whether the 'associate' has misunderstood or whether there is a poor translation of the french original.
Given some of the other statements on that page, I'd suspect the former.
I think we can know a little better than "Development from egg to new worker typically takes two (Tales From the Hive, 2000) to three weeks (Bishop, 2005)".
And the last paragraph contains this gem "drones can't fly well".

Not the sort of source to be treated as the best available information!

Very informative!

Where do you get the time?

Edit - all the issues hotly debated should really be general facts without any debate. Just shows how little proper research has been done on bees in so many aspects that there could still be so many opinions over so many things concerning bees.

 

[thebeeman]

itma your picking and poking
The facts are all over the place Jay Smith 1949 and here there and everywhere.
even here http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/grafting.html
Its a debate that could go on forever right down to the last chemical molecule and then down to the final second second the diet is changed.

You started with
Winston ("The Biology of the Honey Bee" - at page 67 in my copy, citing Jung-Hoffmann's 1966 paper "Die Determination von Königin und Arbeiterin der Honigbiene")

Ever thought Winston was wrong? Or your wrong? Or were all wrong?

But i bet you one thing the bees are right!

 

[thebeeman]

Just to mix it up even more

Kamakura (2011)
57-kDa protein in royal jelly, previously designated as royalactin, induces the differentiation of honeybee larvae into queens

 

[masterBK]

Since fertilised eggs can develop into either workers or queens then Royalactin must work by epigenesis altering the gene expression of certain genes or by deactivating worker genes and switching on Queen genes. Presumably Royalactin is working via a series of intermediary substances yet to be worked out.

 

[REDWOOD]

I would rather split when you see a nice big fat swarm cell developing with a nice fat larvae in the bottom, but there again I don't need tens of queen

 

[mbc]

Very informative!

Where do you get the time?

Edit - all the issues hotly debated should really be general facts without any debate. Just shows how little proper research has been done on bees in so many aspects that there could still be so many opinions over so many things concerning bees.

Aye, glad someone called that shite out, it read a bit naive.

Earlier the better for caste determination seems logical to me.