Queen rearing apiary

[dpearce4]

I am considering setting up my own queen rearing apiary next year. I have a number of sites in mind but was wondering how far queens will fly to get mated?

There are a number of sites that might be possible for me on the land im looking at but need to work out which will be best.

thanks

 

[BeeJayBee]

Queens can mate within the apiary, it's the drones you want to watch out for. They can fly for miles.

 

[thebeeman]

A Queen can fly over 10Km to a drone congregation area and drones can also fly around the same distance. So in theory drones and queens from a 20km radius.

 

[Arfermo]

Beeman should know - he is a commercial breeder and seller with own website etc etc.

 

[DanBee]

Think not in terms of one queen rearing apiary, but a number of apiaries within a 2-5 mile radius where you can raise/mate queens and drones. Conceptually, a ring of drone raising apiaries around the queen mating apiary. Mating on the wing is a numbers game; raising chosen good quality drones in sufficient (overwhelming?) quantity in the surrounding area is oft overlooked.

 

[dpearce4]

Hence you can buy drone foundation to increase the number of drones produced in any colony.

if they are colonies that are ones I want drones from would you recommend 3 drone frames in the brood box? I am running 14x12 and commercial so im sure they could cope with that amount in the box?

 

[Teemore]

A beekeeping friend runs two full frames of drown foundation in his drone producing colonies and seems to find this satisfactory. I gave a fair number of colonies a couple of wired frames with starter strips in the Spring and they drew them down in a variety of ways: some were nearly all worker comb, some nearly all drone and everything in between. A friend put some sheets of shallow drone foundation into brood frames this year and in a couple of instances, the bees decided to draw it out as mostly worker comb.

My personal observation is that colonies do not like all their drone brood in one location and its not long before they reengineer comb elsewhere in the hive, creating clusters of drone brood. I often see these "smallish" clusters of drone comb on frames central to the brood box which seems to go against received wisdom suggesting that drone brood is only produced to the outside of the brood nest where it is cooler.... Given that varroa development appears to be temperature sensitive(Romee Van Der Zee at the NIHBS conference in Athlone, 2013), I wonder whether some colonies are deliberately raising drones in the warmer, central part of the brood nest in order to control varroa levels.

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

A beekeeping friend runs two full frames of drown foundation in his drone producing colonies and seems to find this satisfactory. I gave a fair number of colonies a couple of wired frames with starter strips in the Spring and they drew them down in a variety of ways: some were nearly all worker comb, some nearly all drone and everything in between. A friend put some sheets of shallow drone foundation into brood frames this year and in a couple of instances, the bees decided to draw it out as mostly worker comb.



My personal observation is that colonies do not like all their drone brood in one location and its not long before they reengineer comb elsewhere in the hive, creating clusters of drone brood. I often see these "smallish" clusters of drone comb on frames central to the brood box which seems to go against received wisdom suggesting that drone brood is only produced to the outside of the brood nest where it is cooler.... Given that varroa development appears to be temperature sensitive(Romee Van Der Zee at the NIHBS conference in Athlone, 2013), I wonder whether some colonies are deliberately raising drones in the warmer, central part of the brood nest in order to control varroa levels.

Aha! Of course! A lot of the evolutionary pressure from varroa centres on the drones. That's fascinating; thanks.

 

[Teemore]

I mentioned my observations to Dorian Pritchard at the conference in Athlone - no idea if it tallies with what anyone else is seeing. I haven't been keeping bees long enough to know whether colonies "always" produce drone brood and comb throughout the nest but I have read enough literature to expect that it is "normally" produced towards the periphery. Then again, as one forumer's signature line goes, "Bees do nothing invariably"!