Posted by Scott Elliott, ARS Office of Communications in Research and Science

After suffering severe winter losses beginning in 2007, the honey bee population is making a comeback. Still, losses are high, which means beekeepers have to spend a lot of time and money replacing their bees.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are responding, by using genetics to selectively breed honey bees to fight the primary perpetrators of the problem – what they call the “four Ps.” According to scientists with the ARS Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research (HBBGPR) lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the main issues that honey bees contend with are parasites, pathogens, poor nutrition and pesticides.

Honey bees are important to ecosystems and the agriculture system. Honey bees are America’s primary commercial pollinator and more than 100 U.S.-grown crops rely on honey bees and other pollinators. In addition to their important role in maintaining food security, bees provide income to the entire food production industry from beekeepers and farmers to local retailers and international exporters.

The 5-year project at HBBGPR addresses the four Ps through breeding programs that refine selected genetic traits already present in honey bee populations.

“We are breeding honey bees that are more efficient at processing nutrients in their food and are more resistant to pests, pathogens and pesticides,” said Lanie Bilodeau, research leader at HBBGPR. “Developing healthier and more productive honey bee colonies will help ease the effects of disease and climate change, and improve the food supply at local, national and global scales.”

The project is already reaping positive results, including a comprehensive catalog of genetic variation of commercial and research honey bee populations in the country, and nutritional supplements for colony-wide pathogen treatment.

“We think of ourselves as good stewards and shapers of our [honey bee] populations, such that when we make our selection decisions the outcomes are healthier, stronger and more resilient honey bees,” said Arian Avalos, geneticist at HBBGPR.

National Pollinator Week was June19 to June 25. This annual celebration recognizes the important role pollinators play in our food and agricultural systems. Improving the health of honey bees through genomic research and honey bee breeding is just one way USDA is helping protect our nation’s precious pollinators. For more information on USDA’s work to enhance honey bee health, please visit: www.usda.gov/pollinators.

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2023/06/20/breeding-bees-and-4-ps

Figure 1. Importance of traits to beekeepers in 2022. The scores given to each trait were summed and then divided by the total.

Australia 2022 Plan Bee Survey results: breeding objectives

2023 By Nadine Chapman And Elizabeth Frost

Plan Bee, Australia’s national honey bee genetic improvement program conducts an annual survey of beekeepers and breeders to determine attitudes and opinions surrounding honey bee genetics.

This annual survey is a crucial activity as it helps guide Plan Bee, ensuring that the needs of the industry are well understood, and that the future direction of the project is aligned to the future of the industry.

In 2022 82 beekeepers gave ‘weights’ to their breeding objectives. For example, they allocated 60% to honey production and 40% to temperament. Honey production (33%) and temperament (23%), were the most sought after traits, just as they were in 2021 (Figure 1). However, since 2021, the weighting of these two traits has increased even further. The next most desired trait was pest and disease resistance (a sum of individual traits relating to hygienic behaviour, chalkbrood, pest/disease, European foulbrood, small hive beetle, American foulbrood, Varroa, Nosema), this totalled 16% of the score. As for past surveys different sectors of the beekeeping community placed different weight on different traits (Figure 2).

To access the complete report go to;

2022 Plan Bee Survey results: breeding objectives – Professional Beekeepers | Professional Beekeepers (extensionaus.com.au)

We are here to share current happenings in the bee industry. Bee Culture gathers and shares articles published by outside sources. For more information about this specific article, please visit the original publish source: 2022 Plan Bee Survey results: breeding objectives – Professional Beekeepers | Professional Beekeepers (extensionaus.com.au)

Krispn Given, Apiculture Specialist, Purdue Univ. Department of Entomology

Maintains Purdue’s honey bee breeding program, manages the honey bee lab, conducts experiments and leads bee-related Extension activities.

Recognized for developing Indiana mite biters, a strain of honey bees bred with a particular behavioral trait that impacts overall survival.

Invited speaker to numerous scientific and beekeepers conferences each year, and has co-authored extension materials and several scientific papers in science journals.

When Krispn Given mentions he’s a honey bee researcher, the first question people ask him is whether he gets stung a lot. He doesn’t.

The bees are defensive sometimes but not aggressive, says Given, who is key to the entomology department’s beekeeping and pollinator protection programs. He is widely recognized for his innovative work in honey bee instrumental insemination and honey bee breeding.

Given grew up in the small town of Dayton, Indiana, where his father had two beehives. Young Krispn took care of the hives and earned money by selling the comb honey they produced.

Based on his love of classical piano and composing, he considered music training after high school but ended up working for 10 years as a chef and briefly in manufacturing. He then approached Greg Hunt, Purdue professor emeritus of entomology, who hired him in 2003 as a beekeeping technician to maintain the department’s colonies.

“I think he saw that I had a profound interest in nature and insects,” Given says of Hunt. “He became a mentor and good friend who gave me the opportunity to join him along this amazing scientific journey.”

Today Given is part of the lab of Brock Harpur, assistant professor of entomology. Given does molecular work in the winter but spends most of his time from early March to mid-November working with the colonies at the Entomology Field Operations Building west of campus. The apiary is located at this site, and the building provides support facilities for honey bee research.

Given was instrumental in developing a strain of bees called Indiana mite biters. Bees are dying globally because of a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor, he explains. Purdue bred bees that groom themselves free of mites and then bite them, killing the mites and reducing the deadly viruses they introduce into the colony. Purdue’s bee lab continues to improve the stock and research the genetics, ethology and evolution of this trait.

The mite-biter breeding program inspired serious beekeepers and micro-bee breeders to start a cooperative in 2015. Given is a former president of this Heartland Honey Bee Breeders Coop, and Purdue’s lab disseminates information and genetic stock to its members each year. They call it the annual “Instrumental insemination fest.”

He also teaches two courses, one course in queen rearing, the process beekeepers use to raise queen bees from young fertilized worker bee larvae. His advanced course on instrumental insemination, a method of controlled mating essential to honey bee research, attracts students from around the world. He learned how to successfully inseminate queen bees from Hunt, who learned the technique from the late Harry Laidlaw Jr., the father of honey bee genetics.

Given also was asked to write a book chapter on honey bee breeding for the book “Honeybee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner,” a request from Wiley he calls “a great honor.”

“Veterinary students have become interested in what we do because beekeepers who need antibiotics must get a prescription from their local veterinarian now,” he explains. “Bees get sick, too, and can be helped through medications, so the vets are learning about honeybee biology.”

Maintaining traits in honey bee breeding demands time and resources, says Given, who typically has an undergraduate helper in the lab. “You have to constantly select for the desired phonotypes or some beneficial traits could be lost through time,” he says.

His favorite part of the job is sharing what he’s discovered: “The biggest impact of my research and bee breeding is with entomology students — or prospective ones — but I’ve had several students through the years become interested in honey bee research or other aspects of insect research due to the success of our honey bee breeding program at Purdue.”

Behind the Research: Krispn Given – News & Stories (purdue.edu)

ARS News Service

A honey bee gathering pollen from a zinnia flower.

Breeding Honey Bees for Adaptation to Regionalized Plants and Artificial Diets

For inquiries contact: Kim Kaplan, 301-504-1637

Honey bees could be intentionally bred to thrive on plants that are already locally present or even solely on artificial diets, according to a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service (ARS) study.

ARS researchers found individual bees respond differently to the same diet and that there is a strong genetic component involved in how they respond to nutrition. This points directly to the concept that managed bees can be intentionally bred to do better on different diets, whether you are talking about an artificial diet or a diet based on specific plants already growing in an area, explained lead researcher Vincent A. Ricigliano. He is with the ARS

Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Research Laboratory in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

“Urban development, modern agricultural systems and environmental alterations due to climate change, invasive plants, and even local landscaping preferences have all had a hand in regionalizing plants that dominate available pollen. It could potentially be more beneficial to tailor honey bees to do better on what is already available instead of working hard to fit the environment to the bees,” Ricigliano said.

The overall aim would be breeding to improve nutrient use by managed honey bees, like we have done for poultry and cattle breeding programs, Ricigliano explained.

“Now that we know there is room for genetic adaptation to diet, we could also look at breeding honey bees with improved nutrient efficiency or identifying genotype biomarkers that respond to various supplements to promote honey bee health,” he added.

In most commercial apiaries, honey bees do not have the opportunity to naturally breed to adapt to local conditions because commercial beekeepers typically replace the queen in each colony every year. The queen in a colony is the only bee that lays eggs to produce the next generation.

Beekeepers usually purchase new queens already inseminated from a handful of queen breeders in the United States. As a result, honey bees across the country generally have the same range of genes for nutritional responses without any specialized adaptation.

Honey bees have already been successfully bred for a very few selected traits, among them Varroa mite resistance. Varroa mites are among the single largest problem afflicting honey bees in the United States today.

“It was a little surprising to find when we started this study that, despite a sizable body of research pertaining to honey bee nutrition, relatively little is known about the effects of genetic variation on nutritional response,” Ricigliano said.

His next step is to refine knowledge about what genes control which nutrient and metabolic pathways and where the greatest amount of genetic variation exists so that breeding plans can be specific and scientifically guided.

The Agricultural Research Service is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s chief scientific in-house research agency. Daily, ARS focuses on solutions to agricultural problems affecting America. Each dollar invested in agricultural research results in $17 of economic impact.

Breeding Honey Bees for Adaptation to Regionalized Plants and Artificial Diets (govdelivery.com)

Where Do We Go?

The CRSAD (Animal Science Research Center) is a non-profit corporation in Deschambault, Quebec that carries out and supports research and development in animal sciences according to a collective strategy, to enrich the expertise of various livestock industries. It operates on over 150 hectares of land and in a context of consultation and partnership. The CRSAD has research projects in seven agricultural sectors: apiculture, dairy and beef cattle, pigs, dairy goats, and hen and broiler chickens.

At the CRSAD, we have had a honey bee breeding program running since 2010. We had isolated mating apiaries during the first years of the program, but had low mating success with them which I suspect was due to bird predation since they were in a forested area. We relocated the breeding apiary to an area near the research center, where we have had much improved mating success (85%). We produce a few artificially inseminated queens, but most of our queens are naturally mated.

To control the origin of the drones mating with our queens, we flood the area with drones from selected breeding colonies. We select our breeders for honey production, hygienic behavior, brood production and winter food consumption; we run 100 colonies and select the 20 best ones to graft and raise drones with. With the selected colonies, we create 120 nucs for the following year’s selection.

For drone production, we put a drone comb frame in the middle of the brood chamber in eight to 10 of the selected colonies. This ensures the production of 20,000 to 30,000 drones every 24 days. Since we can’t be 100% sure that our queens really mate with those drones, we wanted to better understand the reproduction dynamics occurring with our mating apiary. The first step of this process was to find the drone congregation area (DCA) of our breeding apiary.

A DCA is the area where sexually mature drones congregate and wait for virgin queens. This area is located at the same place year after year and the presence of a queen is not a necessity for its formation. DCAs are formed in areas protected from winds where flight is unimpeded. There are no obstacles within the DCA, but there should be some surrounding it for wind protection and to help the bees with orientation. In optimal weather conditions, drones in a DCA patrol a zone 100 – 200m wide at an altitude of five – 40m, and this area gets smaller in less favorable weather conditions. When a queen enters a DCA, a swarm of pursuing drones rapidly forms behind the queen in a comet shaped formation. The borders of the DCA are well defined, and when a queen leaves it, the drones rapidly cease pursuit.

Most of the drones in a DCA come from nearby apiaries. More than 96% come from apiaries located at an average of 900 m from the DCA. They transit between their apiary and the DCA via migration pathways that can form in areas protected from winds by the landscape or by buildings. Only 0.5% of these drones successfully mate with a queen. From a biological point of view, the closer the DCA is from the apiary, the higher the chances are for a drone to successfully mate. Since drones wait for queens and can’t fly indefinitely, a short transit distance will increase the time they can spend in a DCA.

Drones have two types of flight: short orientation flights of one to six minutes and long mating flights of 32 ± 22 minutes. Flight duration is limited by the honey they can stock in their crop and between two mating flights, they spend an average of 17 minutes feeding inside the hive. Drones don’t necessarily come back to their native colony, and can choose to stop in a colony closer to the DCA they are visiting. Weather greatly influences the flight activity of drones. Favorable weather includes a sunny or partly clouded sky, temperature in the 19-38ºC range and wind under 22 km/h. Normally, peak mating flight activity occurs between 2pm and 5pm.

DCA localization techniques can be complicated and strenuous: listening for the buzzing of drones, queen observations, radar surveillance or landscape analysis. In 2014, Mortensen and Ellis developed a simple method that can be executed by a single person. This method consists of positioning drone traps in potential DCA areas that were identified beforehand via satellite imagery. This was the method that we adapted to locate our DCA.

Figure 7. Identification of potential DCA areas with Google Earth.

The first step was to use Google Earth software to locate potential DCA areas within a 1 km radius from our breeder’s apiary (areas in open fields with protection from wind). We identified 13 such areas that were further subdivided up to six subplots (figure 7).

Then we built drone traps (figure 1). For each trap, the following material was required:

• White nylon tulle fabric (5” x 63”)
• Steel wire (.060”), used to form three rings of respectively 8.5”, 14” and 20” of diameter
• Fishing nylon mono line
• 6 cigarette filters
• Black spray paint
• Hot glue
• 4 virgin queens
• 3 steel nuts (approximately ¾”)
• 2 balloons (35”)
• Kite line (150’)
• Helium tank
• A 3-way ball bearing swivel
• A 2-way ball bearing swivel
• Sewing thread
• Kite reel

The three steel wire rings and the nylon tulle were sewn together to form a trap with a height of 40”, in a cone shape. The 8.5” ring was at the top, the 14” in the middle and the 20” at the bottom. The top of the trap was closed with tulle, but the bottom remained open. The cigarette filters were painted in black and randomly attached inside the trap with fishing line (approximatively 6-9” of line). A drop of hot glue was used to secure the filters to the lines; these represent drone dummies. We don’t know if the dummies are necessary, but since they were used in previous research and were cheap to produce, we put some in our traps.

A fishing line was fixed across the middle ring and a second one across the bottom ring. In the middle of each line, we fixed a fishing line 8” long, ended by a small hook (figure 1). This small hook serves to easily attach and remove queens from the trap. We used three short pieces of fishing line to bind the top ring of the trap to one end of the two-way ball bearing swivel. To the other end, we fixed a 35” kite line and the end of this kite line was bound to one end of the three-way ball bearing swivel. A 15’ kite line was fixed to another end of the three-way swivel and served to tie the balloons. The remaining kite line (125’) was tied to the last end of the three-way swivel.

Figure 1. Schema of the drone trap model on the left (adapted from William, 1987) and on the right (Mortensen and Ellis, 2014).

To help us estimate the height of the trap, we put paint marks on the kite line every 15’. We also built a homemade reel with a wood plank, 12” nails and a plastic tube (google would help you with that). The steel nuts are fixed to the bottom ring to prevent the trap from being pushed horizontally by the wind; you can adjust the quantity to match your weather conditions.

We used two 36” party balloons, which are much cheaper than weather balloons, but also more fragile. The grass is as sharp as a needle for an inflated balloon! One balloon didn’t have enough lift power and three balloons offered too much wind resistance, which tends to send the trap close to the ground, unable to gain height. We found that two of the balloons worked well. To be able to reuse the balloons on multiple days, we cut a 50 mL plastic test tube and secured it to the balloon with a rubber castrating ring. This allowed us to inflate and deflate the balloons at will.

Figure 2. Virgin queen tied with sewing thread.

We tied the virgin queens with a 4” sewing thread between the abdomen and the thorax (figure 2). You need to be careful to avoid tying the queen’s legs or wings. The sewing thread with the bound virgin queen was fixed to the small hook of the free fishing line; one on the middle ring and one on the bottom ring of the trap. We replaced the queens after one hour to prevent them from dying of exhaustion. Since we needed to add weight with steel nuts to our traps, we believe that using plastic queen cages would be an interesting option instead of tying queens with thread, which is a difficult task to complete. We will try using plastic cages in future tests.

Figure 5. Drone hunting with Émile Houle (left), Pierre
Giovenazzo (middle) and Aude Sorel (right).

Next was the drone hunting part. During the afternoon on sunny days, we went onto a field identified with Google Earth as a DCA potential zone (figure 5). Since the DCA size is quite small, instead of fixing the traps on the ground, we patrolled the whole DCA potential zone. Two people patrolled the zone in an “S” pattern, maintaining the trap at an elevation close to 30’; when higher than 30’, it is difficult to see the drones in the trap. When drones were seen entering the trap the evaluator stopped and waited 20 minutes. After the time was elapsed, the trap was lowered, and the drones were counted. If the count was below 50, the evaluator moved further away in the zone. If the count was over 50, a second measurement over a 20 minute period was done to confirm the DCA (figure 3).

Figure 3. Drone trap in action.

When you count 20-30 drones over a 20 min period, this is a possible indication of a migratory pathway, and you can try following it until you reach the DCA. You can also use visual and auditory cues to locate a DCA such as the direction drones are taking when leaving their hive, the buzzing of the drones in flight when you are close to the DCA or the formation of drone comet (figure 4).

Figure 4. Comet of drones pursuing a virgin queen.

We patrolled half of the potential DCA zones before finding a DCA which was only 60 yards away from the breeding apiary (figure 6). The drones were going through a small patch of trees to access an open field highly protected from winds by the trees and by a small hill. On days with weak winds, the DCA extended over the treeline bordering it (left side in figure 6). During our hunt, we had a windy period with winds of 15-20 mph/h but still got lots of drones in our traps at the DCA, so even if the weather conditions are not optimal, you can still find a DCA.

Figure 6. The apiary in blue, the migratory pathway in white and the DCA in red.

We tested half the potential DCA areas identified by with Google Earth, and only found one DCA. By the distance from the apiary and the number of drone comets we were observing, we are confident that most of our selected drones were going there. Still, we intend to test the other half of the identified areas as well as marking selected drones, and trying to capture them back at the DCA. These are future projects. Eventually, we also would like to find a way to track queens, and observe if they are going to other DCA areas that are further away.

I would like to thank Émile Houle (CRSAD) for the design and building of the drone traps as well as the field support. I also thank Pierre Giovenazzo (Université Laval) for traineeship supervision. Pictures in this article are from Aude Sorel and Mélissa Girard.

First published in BeesCene, from the British Columbia, Canada Beekeepers Association. Heather Sosnowski, Editor.

References

Clement, H.; Bruneau, E.; Barbancon, J. M.; Bonnafe, P.; Domerego, R, Fert, G.; Le Conte, G.; Ratia G.; Reeb, C.; Vaissiere, B. (2015). Traité rustica de l’apiculture(le) n. Éd., Rustica, 528.

Galindo-Cardona, A.; Monmany, A. C.; Moreno-Jackson, R.; Rivera-Rivera, C.; Huertas-Dones, C.; Caicedo-Quiroga, L.; Giray, T. (2012). Landscape analysis of drone congregation areas of the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Journal of Insect Science, 12: 122.

Koeniger, N. ; Koeniger, G. (2004). Mating behavior in honey bees (Genus Apis). TARE, 7, 13–28.

Koeniger, N. ; Koeniger, G. (2005). The nearer the better? Drones prefer nearer drone congregation areas. Insect Soc 52, 31-35.

Koeniger, G. ; Koeniger, N.; Ellis, J. ; Connor, L. (2014). Mating biology of honey bees. Wicwas Press, 50-75.

Koeniger, N.; Koeniger, G.; Gries, M.; Tingek, S. (2005). Drone competition at drone congregation areas in four Apis species. Apidologie 36, 211–221.

Koeniger, N.; Koeniger, G.; Tingek, S. (2010). Honey Bees of Borneo. Exploring the Centre of Apis Diversity. Natural History Publications. Kota Kinabalu, Borneo, 262 P.

Loper, G. M.; Wolf, W. W.; Taylor, O. (1987). Detection and monitoring of honey bee drone congregation areas by radar. Apidologie, 18(2) :163-172.

Loper, G. M.; Wolf, W. W.; Taylor, O. R. (1992). Honey-bee drone flyways and congregation areas – radar observations. J. Kansas Entomol. Soc. 65, 223–230.

Mortensen, A. N.; Ellis, J. D. (2014). Scientific note on a single-user method for identifying drone congregation areas, Journal of Apicultural Research, 53:4, 424-425.

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Ruttner, F. (1985). Reproductive behaviour in honeybees. Fortschr. Zool. 31, 225–236.

Scheiner, R.; Abramson, C. I.; Brodschneider, R.; Crailsheim, K.; Farina, W.; Fuchs, S.; Grünewald, B.; Hahshold, S.; Karrer, M.; Koeniger, G.; Koeniger, N.; Menzel, R.; Mujagic, S.; Radspieler, G.; Schmickll, T.; Schneider, C.; Siegel, A. J.; Szopek, M.; Thenius, R. (2013) Standard methods for behavioural studies of Apis mellifera. In V Dietemann; J D Ellis; P Neumann (Eds) The COLOSS BEEBOOK, Volume I: standard methods for Apis mellifera research. Journal of Apicultural Research, 52:4, 1-58.

Soland-Reckweg, G. (2006). Genetic differentiation and hybridization in the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) in Switzerland. PhD thesis, Universität Bern, Bern.

Williams, J. L. (1987). Wind-directed Pheromone Trap for Drone Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae), U.S Department of Agriculture.

Witherell, P.C. (1971). Duration of flight and of interflight time of drone honeybees, Apis mellifera. Ann. Entomol. Soc. Amer. 64:609-612.

A young honey bee worker emerging from the cell in which it developed. Credit: Vincent Dietemann, Agroscope

In honey bee colonies, a single queen is laying eggs from which thousands of worker bees are born. At a young age, workers care for the brood, then build and defend the nest and eventually, towards the end of their lives, leave the safety of the nest to forage for food. This major step in their lives is speeding up ageing because searching the environment for food exposes these foragers to a wide range of stressors, such as pathogens, predators and adverse weather conditions.

Despite her title, the queen is not deciding who does what in the honey bee colony. How work is distributed between nestmates in these societies is not fully understood. Previous research has shown that tasks are allocated based on communication between the queen, brood and individual workers performing these tasks. For example, the presence of foragers in hives reduces the number of younger bees leaving the hives to start foraging. It is also known that the presence of larvae reduces the life expectancy of bees due to the need for adult workers to tend to them and forage to feed them. This was shown by an increase in longevity of workers after experimental removal of larvae. Since their removal also resulted in the removal of young adults that develop from them, the observed effect could not be attributed to the young workers or to the brood until now.

‘By experimentally separating the effect of brood and of young adults on their nestmates’ destiny, we could tease apart the role of these two actors’ says senior author Vincent Dietemann from Agroscope. ‘We saw that both the presence of brood and of young workers shortened the life expectancy of their nestmates’ adds lead author Michael Eyer from both Agroscope and Institute of Bee Health. The newly discovered role of young workers in honey bee social organisation adds to our knowledge of how demography shapes colony functioning. ‘These social regulation mechanisms of food collection allow the fast adaptation of the colony to a changing environment’ says co-author Peter Neumann from the Institute of Bee Health.

Understanding insect societies, ageing and significance for beekeeping

These findings are significant for our understanding of social organization in insects, which often inspires technological innovations. They also provide information on general ageing processes beyond social insects. Indeed, honey bees are used as model system to understand ageing in other organisms, including humans. The acquired knowledge has practical implications for beekeepers because colony management can include removal of brood and thus of young workers. This for example can occur before a treatment to control the parasitic mite Varroa destructor. The extension of worker lifespan induced by the removal allows the colony to compensate this absence and continue functioning.

Honey bee duties and pollination – Background

In spring and summer, honey bee colonies are composed of so called ‘summer bees’. During the first one to three weeks, they perform tasks such as nursing and cleaning within the nest and later leave its protection to forage for nectar and pollen required for colony growth, before dying. In late summer, falling temperature reduces foraging activity and brood rearing declines. The so-called long-lived ‘winter bees’ emerge from the last brood reared. Their tasks consist in maintaining the nest at temperatures that ensure the survival of the colony over several winter months and in resuming brood rearing in the next spring, before they start foraging again in spring. Worker life expectancy is thus plastic and varies according to each phase of a colony’s life history.

In addition to producing honey, wax, propolis and royal jelly, honey bees contribute to the pollination of a large variety of commercial food crops – a service valued at over 150 billions Euros globally. Moreover, honey bees together with other insects pollinate many wild flowers and are therefore central to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, of which the economical value is order of magnitudes higher.

More information: Michael Eyer et al. Social regulation of ageing by young workers in the honey bee, Apis mellifera, Experimental Gerontology (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.exger.2016.11.006

By Taryn Phaneuf in Civil Eats

On a hot evening in June, Washington State University (WSU) entomologist Brandon Hopkins sat in front of a microscope in Orland, California, handling one honeybee after another as each committed one of life’s most important acts. Hopkins squeezed one drone at a time, contracting the male’s abdominal muscles to mimic a natural mating event. As the pressure exposed the drone’s penis and a speck of semen, Hopkins vacuumed it off carefully. “You do that hundreds and hundreds of times as quickly as possible,” he said.

The process is much more technical than the actual reproductive rituals of bees (which usually happen in mid-air), but the outcome is the same: The drone gives his life, and the species lives on. Rather than immediately contributing to the growth of the colony, however, this bee’s semen will be stored in liquid nitrogen and shipped to another state.

Hopkins is collecting the first-ever honeybee samples to deposit into the National Animal Germplasm Program, a national livestock gene bank run by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), the main research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The bank contains the genetic material of approximately 31,000 species that have been deemed agriculturally important in the United States.

Housed in Fort Collins, Colorado, the repository began in 1957 as a seed library, but in 1999, the ARS started collecting the genetic material of animals used for food or fiber as well, including various kinds of beef cattle, freshwater fish, yaks, and bison. Researchers selecting for certain traits, or breeders trying to introduce greater variability to their stock, can draw from the ever-growing gene bank. And, in the event of catastrophic disease or man-made extinction, the library’s stock could be used to rebuild a population.

For the rest of this story, head over to Civil Eats by clicking http://civileats.com/2016/11/02/a-new-sperm-bank-for-honeybees-could-save-agriculture/

Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg

In the first few days after they hatch, honey bee larvae feed on royal jelly secreted by the hypopharyngeal glands of adult honey bees. “It is a highly nutritious food comprising sugars, proteins and amino acids,” says Robin Moritz, Professor of Molecular Ecology at MLU. After a few days, most larvae start to receive honey and pollen in their food. These will develop into worker bees. Only the larvae that are destined to become queens continue to be fed exclusively on royal jelly. The queen is the only sexually reproductive female responsible for the production of all offspring in the colony.

“Scientists have spent a long time looking for a specific substance in royal jelly that makes the larvae grow into queens,” says Dr Anja Buttstedt, a research associate with Professor Moritz and lead author of the new study. As far back as the late 1970s, German biochemist Heinz Rembold already showed that no single substance was responsible for queen determination – rather, the right mix of nutrients was supposed to be essential. “The special royal diet makes the larvae eat more, stimulating their metabolism and the larval development. Other genes are expressed, and this all results in entirely different developments inside the bees’ bodies,” says Buttstedt. The royal diet is also essential for the queen to develop fully activated ovaries – in contrast to the sterile worker bees. At least, this was the scientific consensus for many decades, as Buttstedt explains.

In 2011, however, Japanese scientist Masaki Kamakura caused a stir when Nature published a study in which he presented a royal jelly protein, royalactin, that supposedly could turn larvae into queens. “The study surprised bee researchers around the world,” says Robin Moritz. Hence the two MLU biologists decided to repeat Kamakura’s experiments. They received support from two MLU pharmacists: Dr Christian Ihling and Professor Markus Pietzsch. The group exactly followed Kamakura’s approach by producing a royal jelly that contained no royalactin and feeding it to larvae in the laboratory. A control group received the same food that was artificially re-enriched with royalactin. Describing the results, Buttstedt says, “Neither the royalactin-free nor the enriched larval food produced any differences in queen caste determination.” Larvae that received no royalactin developed into perfect queens, while feeding the larvae with royalactin-enriched food did not increase the number of queens.

Unlike Kamakura’s study, the MLU experiments produced numerous so-called intercastes – bees with characteristics of both workers and queens. Buttstedt says that, while this is very rare in nature, it is most common in laboratory experiments and methodologically inevitable. The MLU results confirm the suite of older studies on caste development by many other research groups. Therefore, for now, royalactin’s role in royal jelly remains rather unspectacular: one of many protein sources in the larval food.

Publication

10. Buttstedt, C. H. Ihling, M. Pietzsch & R. F. A. Moritz. “Royalactin is not a royal making of a queen”, Nature 537 (2016) DOI: 10.1038/nature19349

When a queen has sex with many different partners, it can increase her risk of infection with venereal disease. It can also lead to the collapse of her colony. This might read like ingredients for a juicy novel, but for bees it is reality.

Scientists from Aarhus University have teamed up with American and German colleagues and found that the mating behaviour of queen bees increases the risk of the whole colony succumbing to the syndrome Colony Collapse Disorder because of a venereal disease.

In order to understand how this works you need to know a few things about the mating behaviour of bees.

When the bee colony’s queen decides to mate, she flies a certain distance away from the beehive. She is drawn towards a particular goal: a concentrated swarm of randy drones that are gathered in the air in a so-called congregation area. In this buzzing confusion of drones the queen bee mates with several different males.

The drone, on the other hand, has only one shot. This is, however, quite dramatic, in that he blasts his semen into the queen. This explosive ejaculation leads to separation of the drone’s penis from his body, his falling over backwards and dying shortly afterwards. The drone leaves part of his penis behind in the queen’s body.

Mating with built-in risk

The scientists have now shown that the drone leaves behind not only his semen and part of his penis in the queen. His calling card can also include a virus that may infect the queen with the disease deformed wing virus. Since the queen mates with multiple partners in the course of a mating event, there are multiple risks of small Trojan horses being left behind in her.

All the queens in the study came from bee colonies that were free of infection with deformed wing virus. The drones in the control group also came from colonies without deformed wing virus while several of the drones in the experimental group were infected with the disease.

The research team, which consisted of scientists from the German bee research institute LLH Bieneninstitut, University of North Carolina, and Aarhus University, caught the queen bees on the queens’ way home from mating. If the queen contained a piece of the drone penis (endophallus), this endophallus was removed and examined for deformed wing virus.

The scientists remove the endophallus from the mated queen. Photo: Roy Mathew Francis

Virus throughout the body

The results showed that queens that had mated with drones infected with deformed wing virus also often became infected with the disease. Virus was found in both the sexual organs and other body parts of the queens.

– We found answers to three essential questions: that drones infected with deformed wing virus are capable of mating naturally with queens, that deformed wing virus can be transmitted by natural mating, and that virus particles can be found throughout the body in mated queens shortly after mating, says senior scientists Per Kryger from the Department of Agroecology and continues:

– A significant portion of failed bee colonies is due to failure of the queen. This could explain the frequent loss of queens, since deformed wing virus can shorten the bees’ life span. It is a serious problem when the queen dies and often means that the whole colony collapses.

Journal Reference:

Esmaeil Amiri, Marina D. Meixner, Per Kryger. Deformed wing virus can be transmitted during natural mating in honey bees and infect the queens. Scientific Reports, 2016; 6: 33065 DOI: 10.1038/srep33065

by-Tony Harris

Honey bees perform the waggle dance on the comb within a nest to inform other foragers of the location of a newly discovered food source but the dance is also performed by scout bees on the swarm cluster after swarming indicating potential nest sites.

There could be many individual bees directing their fellow scouts to such sites but amazingly, after a vigorous debate, the bees come to unanimous agreement before moving to their new home. This model of democracy is discussed by Tom Seeley in his excellent book, Honeybee Democracy and he goes further than that stating that there are lessons we humans can learn from the bees in our decision making groups.

If you have ever served on a committee you will know that it can be frustrating at times!  With all those human egos present many us have put our foot in it and said the wrong thing at times so any help we can get from our bees is most welcome in my mind!

So, before I sum up Seeley’s  ‘Five Habits of Highly Effective Groups’, that he has learned from honey bees perhaps we should pause and reflect on what type of team member or leader we have been in the past. As chairman of my Local Association I know I found it difficult chairing meetings so I am definitely going to try some of the following ideas.

Lesson 1 is to comprise the group of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect. This seems easy to do but the mutual respect part of it isn’t so easy as one wrong word can upset a fellow member and any ill-feeling can grow into a monster of unsurmountable proportion, and you may not even be aware of it.

The house hunting bees exemplify a group with shared interests as the genetic success of each bee depends on the fate of the entire colony and no individual bee succeeds unless the whole colony survives and reproduces. Looking at human groups Seeley uses the example of Town Meetings in America as good practice as the moderator (chair) in his example asks the meeting to pause for a moment’s silence at the start out of respect for the exercise in democracy they are taking part in and to prevent tempers flaring he asks everyone to address their comments and opinions directly to him.

Lesson 2 is to minimise the leader’s influence on the group thinking. This is a difficult one for us humans as it goes against the belief that the leader is in charge but a domineering leader is in Seeley’s opinion one of the greatest threats to good decision making in groups.

The bees choose their new home without a leader influencing or telling them what to do.

Each scout bee has her say by means of the waggle dance, and if she convinces another scout, that scout has a look at her proposed home, and if she likes it, does a waggle to influence others. This continues until all scouts agree on their new home. This has been compared to the single transferable vote system that is used in some elections, every opinion is taken into consideration.

According to Seeley a leader should be as impartial as possible as any actions or comments can lead to a premature consensus by the group as its members consciously or unconsciously seek to please their leader. He suggests that the main aim of a leader should be to tap the collective knowledge of the group.

Lesson 3 is to seek diverse solutions to the problem. The house hunting bees demonstrate the effectiveness of a large and diverse search committee with hundreds of individual scout bees exploring an area of about three miles looking for the ideal home. When a potential nest site is found the scout bee returns to the cluster and reports her discovery with the waggle dance. If we relate this to human groups it is the same as putting another option on the table for further discussion. Seeley suggests allocating explorative work to individuals to report back and to create a social environment in which group members feel comfortable contributing.

Lesson 4 is to aggregate the group’s knowledge through debate. According to Seeley, the greatest challenge faced by a group that makes decisions democratically is to know how to turn the knowledge and opinions of the many members into a single choice for the group as a whole.

How do the house hunting bees reach consensus? We have already seen that the turbulent debate amongst scout bees supporting different options (nest sites) is at the heart of it. These groups compete to gain additional members from a pool of scout bees who are not yet committed to a site. Whichever group first attracts a quorum of supporters wins the competition and when they eventually leave for their new home they are in complete agreement about the flight path.

In running his faculty meetings Seeley encourages frank debate and most importantly group members are encouraged to form their own opinions and register their views independently. They do this by secret ballots as he feels it is important to get each person’s independent opinion, free from peer pressure that could influence them.

Lesson 5 is to use quorum responses for cohesion, accuracy and speed. The house hunting bees show us a clever way to make an accurate consensus decision while also saving some time. They do this by the scout bees making sharp changes in their behaviour when a threshold number (quorum) of individuals support one of the alternatives. They return to the swarm cluster to perform piping signals and this induces the many thousands of non-scout bees to warm their flight muscles in preparation for flight to the chosen site. Seeley suggests the piping also tells the scout bees from the other non-chosen sites to stop advertising and visiting these sights and this also speeds up the consensus. He calls this behaviour ‘quorum response’ and suggests it can also help human groups. Seeley’s faculty meetings are often faced with major decisions where a unanimous decision, one way or the other is required and he introduced a system of taking straw polls, by secret ballot, periodically during the discussion to see if they are near consensus. If the poll reveals they are far from unanimity then more careful debate is needed but if it reveals they are close to an agreement, the few supporting the minority position normally realise that a collective decision has essentially been made, that prolonging the debate is pointless and that it is best to switch to the majority position so that consensus can be reached. This is exactly what the bees do and Seeley claims that this and the other procedures he has introduced, learnt from the bees, has improved the decision making in the group he leads.

Of course, we humans often use other tactics in dealing with a leader we don’t like by carrying out a coup de tat, often resulting in an imaginary knife between the shoulder blades, but that just shows how far behind the honeybees we are in our democratic process!

Tony Harris, NDB is a Scottish Expert Beemaster from Morayshire.

Researchers from New Zealand’s University of Otago have discovered the molecular mechanism by which queen honeybees carefully control worker bees’ fertility.

It has long been known that worker bees have a very limited ability to reproduce in a hive with a queen and brood present, but in their absence, a third of them will activate their ovaries and lay eggs that hatch into fertile male drones.

It is queen pheromone that represses worker bee fertility, but how it achieves this has remained unclear.

Now, Otago genetics researchers have identified that an ancient cell-signalling pathway called Notch, which plays a major role in regulating embryonic development in all animals, has been co-opted to also constrain reproduction in worker bees.

In research newly published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, Professor Peter Dearden and colleagues Drs Elizabeth Duncan and Otto Hyink demonstrated that chemically inhibiting Notch signalling can overcome the effect of queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) and promote ovary activity in adult worker bees.

Professor Dearden says they were surprised to find that Notch signalling acts on the earliest stages of egg development in the ovary, perhaps even on the stem cells that make the ovary, and that in the absence of QMP the Notch receptor in a key region of worker bee ovaries becomes degraded.

“Without active Notch signalling taking place, the worker bee eggs are now able to mature. This contrasts with its role in fruit fly reproduction in which the signalling is vital for fertility,” Professor Dearden says.

He says it is not yet clear whether QMP works directly on ovaries or is acting via signalling between the brain and antennae.

“However it is acting, the outcome is that Notch signalling’s fundamental role in the ovary has been modified and transformed in honey bees into social control of worker bees’ reproduction,” he says.

What seems to be a rather routine procedure may not be. At various times a beekeeper finds that the queen needs to be replaced. Different reasons for this replacement might be: the queen is old or failing, the attitude of the hive is not what you would like it to be, the hive is non-productive, the hive needs a break in the brood cycle to clear up disease, you may want to retard the hive from swarming, or there is no queen in the hive.

When introducing a queen to a hive, there are the different techniques or procedures that can be used: introduce a mated queen, introduce a virgin queen, introduce a queen cell, or encourage the bees to raise their own queen. The percentage of acceptance by the bees in the installation of a laying queen is rather high. The acceptance of a virgin queen by the bees in a hive is the range of 50 to 60%. While putting in queen cells or allowing the bees to raise their own queen may also have a high percentage rate of acceptance, there are further conditions that the hive must have in place. When raising a queen from a cell more time is required for the queen to develop, get mated, and start laying eggs. The amount of time could be critical if the nectar flow is missed or the drones have been eliminated from the other hives, or the weather is not conducive to bee flight.

There are many devices that beekeepers have invented for queen introduction and some of the situations within a hive make queen introduction difficult. It also seems that every beekeeper has their own way of doing things and their way seems to be the only way to do things. So when you talk to other beekeepers, the more confused you will become. When you add all of these factors, the “simple task of introducing a queen” is not so simple.

If you decide that you are going to requeen a hive by installing a laying queen, the normal procedure is to order a queen. A day before you install her, you either catch the old queen and put her somewhere other than in that apiary or kill her. You need to be assured that the hive is queenless. There is some debate on whether you leave the body of the old queen in the hive or remove it if your choice was to kill her. One thought is to have the bees carry out the body of the old queen so they are absolutely sure that they are queenless. Another thought is that even a dead queen could emit a residual amount of the queen substance pheromone indicating that they are queen right. Perhaps in your efforts to kill the queen, you only stun her or injure her and thus the situation is worse by having a wounded queen in the hive emitting pheromones when you believed that she was dead. If your choice was to remove the old queen and move her to another yard, you will have the advantage of having a queen in case something goes wrong. However she may still have the problem that caused you to want her replaced.

If you wait too long before introducing the new queen and the hive is queenless for a while, there is the possibility that a worker(s) will assume the duties of laying eggs. This is known as a laying worker(s) and all these eggs will develop into drones.

Laying workers are very difficult to find as they look like all of the other workers and the hive has accepted them as queenlike. A tell tale sign of laying workers, is that the eggs in the cells are not well centered and in many cells there are multiple eggs. Some say that solving a laying worker situation can be solved by multiple attempts in introducing queens, while others say that the hive is hopeless and the hive should be combined with a strong queen right hive. The reason that the combining method works is that the pheromone of the laying queen is stronger and usually the hive has a larger population.

A California queen cage.

A queen that is failing sometimes will lay only eggs that will develop into drones, thus she is called a drone layer. Because of her appearance, she can be identified easily and caught so the situation can be corrected by requeening.

By requeening every year you generally prevent having a failing queen for whatever reason. A new or young queen tends not to swarm as much as an older queen and usually the disposition of the hive is calmer.

Many beekeepers believe that the bees are a better judge on the condition of the queen, and if she needs to be replaced they will develop supersedure cells. You can tell the difference between supersedure cells and swarm cells usually by the position that the cell occupies on the frame. A supersedure cell can be anywhere on the frame as it was built out of necessity, but usually it is in the middle part of the frame. A swarm cell usually is on the bottom part of a frame and usually there are several cells. You should also be aware that many times bees will build queen cell cups on the frames and it is worth inspecting to see if the cup is polished and being primed with royal jelly or already have eggs present.

A general rule is that you do not destroy supersedure cells. If you start destroying swarm cells in hopes of preventing swarming, you may end up with a hive that swarms and leaves your hive queenless. If you see the swarm cells, the bees have made the decision to swarm and there is little that you can do to prevent it. You can split the hive, and use the cells to queen the split(s), while keeping, or replacing the queen in the original hive.

Swarm cell hanging from the bottom bar of a frame.

It is also handy to know how to read what is happening to the queen cells in a hive. When you see open queen cells, you should look at the bottom of the cell to see if the queen emerged from the cell or was killed. An emerging queen chews the bottom of the cell open so the bottom of the cell will swing open like a trap door. A queen that has been killed in her cell will have evidence where the cell was opened from the side of the cell.

More controversy exists as to how long a queen may live and store semen. Most of the books indicate that queens living under normal conditions will last approximately two years. As proof, the books point out that when a hive swarms, the swarm begins to make supersedure cells in the newly established hive. However if a beekeeper can keep the hive from swarming, there will be days where the queen cannot be found in the hive and there are no eggs but a few days later everything is back to normal and a queen is present. This indicates that the original queen took another mating flight or was superseded.

Supersedure cells in the middle of a frame.

You also should know the usual timing procedure of a swarm. The bees around the queen decide when the hive should swarm and build many queen cells and start reducing the diet of the queen. The queen stops laying eggs and shrinks in size so she can fly. When the swarm issues, we call it the primary swarm and because it may have the old queen and the bees usually settle at a low location. Scout bees are already looking for a new home and when decided which of possibly several locations is best they go directly there.

If the weather is good, a queen will emerge from a cell in the original hive and take her maiden flight about three days after the primary swarm issued. Sometimes the timing gets off and another swarm issues from the hive and this is called a secondary swarm. Because the old queen has gone in the previous swarm, the queen or queens in this swarm are virgin queens.

I have seen a secondary swarm with seven queens and was busy catching them and putting them in mailing cages. A secondary swarm usually settles on higher objects and once hived takes longer to start up as there is the decision which queen will be dominant and the mating flight or flights will be done after the hive is established. If too many secondary swarms issue from the same hive, there is the possibility that the hive can go queenless as there aren’t eggs or larvae that are of the right age to make a queen.

A very successful method in getting ready for the introduction of a new queen is to build a Nuc (nucleus hive) by removing the frame that the queen is on along with a frame of honey and a frame of brood with the hanging bees and take them to a new location. I mentioned three frames but you could have more, it just depends upon the size of the Nuc, most beekeepers prefer five frames. You may take frames from other hives and put into the Nuc as long as you do not include the hanging bees.

Essentially what you have done is remove the old queen from the original hive in preparation for the introduction of a new queen and provide the old queen an opportunity to build up a small hive while also giving you a backup queen in case something goes wrong with the original hive.

Sometimes this is considered a method of swarm control. In the old hive you have the essentials for queen rearing such as larva of the correct age, plenty of bees to provide the bees with heat and hive duties, and plenty of food. In case the introduction of the new queen does not work, they could raise their own queen. If in the case you didn’t purchase a queen, you could use this technique as the hive may develop supersedure cells. You must take the nuc to a new location as they will return to their original hives if left in the same yard. As the nuc grows, it may be transferred to a regular hive.

A five-frame nuc.

If you purchase a queen, normally that queen has been mated and has been laying eggs. She is sent to you in a mailing cage which over time has had many configurations. The mailing cage can be made of wood with two or three “holes”, metal, or plastic. There will be room for the queen and a few attendants, ventilation, and a compartment that holds queen candy. There usually are two outlets in the cage so that the queen may be released directly or released after the candy has been eaten.

Queen candy is usually made of a mixture of finely ground confectioner’s sugar and high fructose corn syrup. If you were making a queen candy for your use, several beekeepers have used a mixture of honey and powdered sugar. Some people have claimed that using honey in the mixture may contain pathogens. Getting the candy to the correct consistency is very important as if it is to thin, it will not stay in the correct location of the cage and if it is too hard, the bees will have trouble eating it. The hardness of the candy has led to the idea that you should poke a hole through the candy with a nail.

Some beekeepers have used marshmallows instead of the conventional candy to get away from the consistency problem. The idea of using the candy is to provide the queen with food during her transportation to her new home and to provide a slow or timed release of the queen. The timed release is very important as the bees in the hive need time to accept the queen. However, there are still a bunch of questions. Where and how do you place the cage? Do you remove and replace the workers? Do you direct release the queen? Do you treat the hive for mites and other diseases while introducing the queen? Many of the answers to these questions depend upon your own experiences, training, and schedule.

If you are putting a queen in an apiary that is miles away from your home, you may wish to remove the “cork” from the candy end because it may be some time until you return to the yard. If the hive that is receiving the new queen is in your front yard, you may wish to keep the cage corked until you choose to release the queen at a later date.

Many years ago, it took nearly a week for a package of bees to be delivered in the mail, allowing the bees’ time to become accustomed to the queen. Thus beekeepers got in the habit of releasing the queen directly into the beehive. Today, some beekeepers are receiving packages that were shaken within the last 24 hours, so there needs to be some time where the queen is kept caged.

When you place the mailing or introduction cage in the hive, care must be given to not put the cage directly underneath where a top feeder is located. This is just a precaution in case the feeder malfunctions and drowns the queen in her cage.

There is a lot of discussion about how to place the cage in between the frames. Generally the candy end of the cage is higher than where the queen is located. The reasoning for this is that if an attendant bee dies and covers the candy, she traps the bees in the cage. Thus some suggest removing the attendant bees, while others suggest that the attendant bees should be replaced by bees from the colony where the queen is being introduced. Some queens are sent in bulk packaging meaning that several queens are in their own mailing cages without attendants. The balance of the bulk package is filled with loose bees to feed the various queens in the package.

I would suggest that no chemicals be used to treat diseases and mites during the period of time that a queen is being introduced as it could interfere with the pheromones of the queen. Once the queen is released and laying eggs, the chemicals for mite control could be started.

Some beekeepers advocate that the laying queen should be confined to a certain frame or within a special area. It seems that once a queen is laying eggs in a hive, her acceptance is very close to 100%. Other reasons for confining a queen is to be able to determine the age of larva in queen grafting situations or to cause a break in the brood cycle without destroying a queen.

In making nucs and splits you may transfer frames that have queen cells on them. Other times you can cut the cells out of a frame for transfer or have the queen cells that have been developed from a specially designed queen cell base or cup. In hives where there might be many queen cells, a cell protector might be used until you put the cell where you want it to belong. Cell protectors have been made out of wire or plastic.

In difficult situations where you need more time for the bees to accept the queen or the weather has been inclement, there is an introduction frame available where you can insert a wooden mailing cage and let the queen be released into an area where she can be attended by the bees in the hive. After you feel that she will be accepted, you can open the release hole in the top of the frame. This idea is very similar to the Miller Queen Catcher and Introduction cage of the 1920s, but solves the problem of catching and handling the queen.

You can see that there are many options in introducing queens.

Many of the illustrations came from the 1920 and 1930 Root Catalogs.

Double screens for winter nuc survival. Are you sure?

Drumming Bees. Was it ever effective?

Queen excluders — always an entertaining discussion.

by James E. Tew

Apparently, as I use my computer and as both the machine and I age, we acquire orphaned (junk) files in our respective storage systems. At one time, I suppose these files were necessary for the computer to operate efficiently. Then there were required software updates. Maybe I removed some programs, but over time, increasing numbers of orphaned files were stranded on my hard drive. Useless, space-occupying dead files accumulated, taking up space and waiting for an electronic call that would never come. The results – my aging computer ran slower – and slower.

As beekeepers, are we like that aging computer? When I refer to him, I speak of my very first beekeeping professor with pure reverence. Many professors have a cadre of graduate students who are forever beholden to them. My first beekeeping professor did not mentor grad students, but he taught thousands of undergrads. Seemingly every one of them adored the man as an instructor and as a person.

In 1973, I distinctly remember him telling our bee class participants that drones are colony laggards and contribute nothing to the functionality of the colony. At every opportunity, drones were to be eliminated. In his defense, the bee world was wildly different at the time. Other than organophosphate insecticides, nothing else was yet a problem – no mites, no small hive beetles, no killer bees. Flowering weeds were common, and there were abundant honey bees – everywhere.

From the beekeeper’s perspective, at that time, drones were not profoundly critical to the specific colony in question. But if anyone had ever asked a healthy colony if it wanted drones, an entirely different answer would have been presented. This is an example of bad information being given by an excellent instructor. This is also an old obsolete memory file that I have stored away. I will never again use this advice, but the memory file just sits there – waiting for the day to come when it is once again thought to be good management to kill all drones in our colonies.

Years ago, I was at a bee meeting in the upper Mid-West. While discussing American foulbrood, the speaker confidently explained that the reason AFB had always been such a common problem for beekeepers is that wind easily spreads the disease – even miles and miles away from the diseased hive site. This was why, when the bee disease was encountered, beekeepers with American foulbrood needed to immediately implement a scorched earth policy (actually, that part is correct.). But otherwise, these comments are seriously wrong. Wind plays very little, if any, role in AFB dissemination.

This speaker is still a respected beekeeper in his bee community, as he should be. The rest of his information was rock solid. I was the traveling presenter – the outsider – far from home and departing the next day. What would you have had me do? (Later, I told one of the meeting organizers that some of the AFB spore dissemination information should be reviewed, and then I left town.) No doubt, some of the participants today are still storing those mental files that truly need to be erased.

A double screen made by Ohio beekeeper, D. Wilson.

Spotting some of these embedded errors can be difficult. When repeated, most of these misinformation events easily roll from the tongue and sound factual. And then they get restated thousands of times becoming accepted facts that are not factual.

Tanging a swarm – factual misinformation
This topic will get me some email messages. The thought is that once a swarm departs the hive, clanging pieces of metal together will cause the swarm to land. At meetings, I am told by occasional beekeepers that doing that very procedure brought a swarm right to the ground. Consider this. It would be impolite – even evil – for me to take that pleasant memory from the beekeeper. There is no science to explain why this happens, and the question that is begged is how many swarms were tanged that did not come down?

Losing a swarm is disappointing. I have personal experience with that pain. I can also say that tanging is as good as anything one can do when a swarm is escaping. Playing a loud radio, spraying water with a hose, or tossing stones through the swarm will probably have the same random effect. The good news is that other than amusing the neighbors, no harm is done when swarms are tanged.

Double screens for winter nuc survival – usually factual misinformation
A common procedure is putting a smaller colony above a double screen. It is thought to make Winter life easier for the smaller colony. Indeed, in some instances, it could very well do that. But there seems to be so many variables as to make the success of the procedure random.
How large is the bottom colony? What is the cluster size of the smaller upper colony? How far is the bottom colony from the upper colony? How severe is the Winter season? Does the warmer, moisture-laden air cause a problem in the upper unit?

Bottom line – wintering small colonies, for the future, will be a challenging process. Since this top wintering procedure has been practiced for years without amazing general results, it seems that this is not the silver bullet answer for wintering small colonies. For sure, double screens have other uses such as making spring splits or producing queens, but I am not convinced that top wintering is one of its better uses.

Drumming bees – shows all the signs of factual misinformation
Though not practiced much now, drumming instructions persist in both new and old literature. When transferring bees from one box to another – for whatever reason – the drumming procedure is thought to cause the bees to abandon their stores, brood, and former nest cavity in lieu of a new or different box offered to them.

It is a simple procedure: Flip the box to be abandoned so the combs are reversed (comb bottoms are upward). Position it near the new box. Tap, drum, bump, bang or thump on the side of the inverted box with something – hands, hive tool, stone – for an undetermined length of time with an undetermined vigor. If all goes well, the bees will inexplicably begin to abandon hive and home.

Search the web. There are videos and testimonials documenting the success of this procedure, but as is often the case, if this procedure is a sound one, why is it not used for other common bee reasons? Why is it not a staple of bee management? Removing bees from supers? Driving bees up or out for package shaking or split making? Driving bees from the wall of a house?

Interestingly, the electronic bee media has hybridized the procedures of tanging and drumming. What should this blended procedure be named – “trumming?” In this variant procedure, drumming – usually on a wooden surface – will cause a swarm to land. This information is wrong in so many ways.

It is important to know that bees do not sense airborne vibrations. Now the arguments come. Maybe they feel the vibrations with their body. Then how do they exclude the noise of my neighbor’s lawn mower or the garbage truck passing, or the tractor in the soybean field behind my beeyard? All Summer long, a water tower was constructed a few miles from my home. There were frequently rhythmic metallic sounds coming from the site. I could not tell that my bees left the colony. Why would not any rhythmic sounds in the environment cause bees to leave their hive? Again, no harm seems to be done to the colony. Drum away.

Queen excluders – the eternal argument
You either hate them or you love them? Only very briefly is an undecided beekeeper in the middle. Misinformation and hyperbole flow from both camps. “I use them to keep the grass down out in front of the hive.” “I have always used them and never found them to be a problem.” “These things are nothing more than honey excluders!” “They cause swarming.” They clog with burr combs.” My favorite description is this one – “Though I don’t like them, and do not use them, here is a description of the pros and cons of excluders.” That is certainly an unbiased source for acquiring neutral information.

An older publication presented quite a few years ago indicated that without an upper entrance, queen excluders did reduce honey crops1. In fact, simply using web based searches, finding opponents with confirmed opinions to queen excluder use is common. But actual objective research findings are rare.

So, I here offer my unbiased, emotionally based opinion. I have these devices in my storage building right now. Depending on my future schedule, I might use them or I might not. They can be useful when finding a queen that has simply refused to show herself, and they have specialty uses in queen production or comb honey production. These devices clearly have novel uses and do seem to function to keep the queen from honey supers. If maximal honey production is the goal, I could see how they might hamper foragers from squeezing through them. If maximum management efficiency is the goal, I can understand why they might be used.

All the reasons to use or not to use these grids are readily available on the web. I refer you to search there. If they fit your need, use them. If they are not helpful, don’t use them; but I cannot categorically support the disdain that some have for them.

For the Beginner
Right now, lots of behaviors are ongoing in your wintering beehive; but you, the beekeeper, have nearly no involvement. There is very little you can do during hard winter to help your bees. For the previous three-fourths of the year, your colony has been preparing for this restrictive period.

If this is your first Winter with packages bees, it will be a bit more touch and go than with established hives. But, if your bees had a good season, stores were accumulated, and your queen was on the job all season, there is a good chance that all will end well.

The job description for bees is to: forage, maintain a healthy brood nest, reproduce their species (swarm), hoard food stores for Winter or other foodless periods, and, finally, defend all of this. Surviving Winter is one of the major things on the bees’ “to-do” list.

It is not uncommon for bees to perish during Winter months. This happens even in wild honey bee colonies. Indeed, even in very warm climates, all bee colonies do not survive indefinitely. If you lose the battle this Winter, I hope you realize that it is, in many ways, just the nature of bee things.

Odds and Ends

Using excluders to trap drones
Hers is a couple of untested uses for queen excluders that may or may not be useful. It is well documented that drone brood above a queen excluder can unintentionally confine mature drones. They finally die while trying to escape, and workers worry themselves trying to remove the dead drones. As was stated in the cited research paper, an upper escape entrance helps.

But what if you specifically wanted to capture drones? Maybe drones are needed for instrumental insemination work or for research studies on drone behavior. A novel use of the captured drones would be to make an educational moment for kids and adults. They could actually handle live bees, and then release them. A problem in one instance may become a solution in another.

I think this variation for a drone trap would work. After the drones are free flying – ideally from the bottom entrance – bore a hole or holes a few inches above the brood body bottom edge. Put a queen excluder between the bottom board rim and the bottom brood body with newly bored holes near the edge. The drones, trying to depart, will be trapped by the queen excluder, but will ultimately find the bored holes. Off they will go, but upon their return, they will enter the familiar lower entrance. Returning workers will have to deal with this excluding grid but most will get through it while the drones are trapped beneath the excluder and the bottom board. This contraption will only work for a few days before some drones begin to return to the colony through the bored holes.

Modified super before shavings are added.

Punched zinc excluders, shown in the photo were extensively used by past bee researchers for improvising queen and drone traps. For innumerable lab studies, these pliable malleable excluders could be cut to any size with snips allowing an unlimited number of trap or cage designs. To my knowledge, they are no longer manufactured today. If I am wrong, I would like to know.

A zinc excluder and a used, abused standard queen excluder.

An insulated hive top makeover
I improvised a variation of an insulated hive top that I saw described on the Internet. Rather than using typical screen wire, I screwed a queen excluder to the bottom of an empty super. I filled this super with wood shavings, leaving a short section of PVC pipe in the center for ventilation. A couple of bounces dislodged some of the smaller shavings that fell through the excluder. The bees may pull down even more of these wood shavings as Winter passes – I will let you know. I would hope that the shavings in the super will absorb moisture and the excluder will allow bees access to the insulated area. This is one of those ideas that looks okay on paper, but probably has problems that have not yet made themselves plain. Stand by.

We can only do our best
I am not a good one to tell anyone else how to astutely evaluate his or her beekeeping information sources. As I have become an ever increasing, cranky old man, statements like, “well, it works for me” – especially in written or video material, alerts me. In our present social media driven world, we are all self-assigned experts. (I know, I know, I too, am in that category.) Verifiable facts are valuable data points, but they rarely tell the whole story or offer a complete plan. Still, I search for them constantly.

Cedar shavings on queen excluder grid.

For instance, “Beekeepers must control Varroa!” That’s a fact, but control these mites with what scheme or chemical? That question becomes primarily an opinion that is permeated with smaller facts. Each of us must develop our opinions based on as many facts (please do not confuse facts with opinions of others) as we can reasonably amass. We will never win outright when developing plans for bees. We will always hit and miss. We can only do our best.

Photos are presented at:
https://onetewbee.smugmug.com/December-2015-Bee-Culture/n-ZTFCCt/i-dsW6qL5
Shortened URL: http://tinyurl.com/BC-December-2015

Dr. James E. Tew, State Specialist, Beekeeping, The Alabama Cooperative Extension System, Auburn University; Emeritus Faculty, The Ohio State University. Tewbee2@gmail.com; http://www.onetew.com; One Tew Bee RSS Feed (www.onetew.com/feed/); http://www.facebook.com/tewbee2; @onetewbee Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/onetewbee/videos

by Larry Connor

Before obtaining the first bee colony, the future sustainable apiculturist must master key aspects of bee biology. Here we look at the activities of queen bees.

Queen Activity, Behavior and Lifespan
When everything is working in a colony there is usually just one queen bee. This queen is a female bee that has been selected by her sister bees and is the only female bee that is fully reproductive. The queen is sexually active during the early part of her life, mating with multiple drones before spending the rest of her life laying eggs.

Worker bees feed and groom the queen, as well as take care of her waste products. She produces odors, chemical signals called pheromones and which we also call the ‘queen substance’ or ‘queen signal’. There may be a link between the number of eggs a queen lays and the amount of these chemicals she produces.

Who Decides Queen Activities?
New beekeepers often assume that the queen bee is in charge inside the hive, but she has no such power. In fact, the queen is chemically reactive to the needs of the entire colony. Queen feeding, waste removal, and her eventual supersedure replacement are all the results of the collaborative decision-making nature of worker bees. These decisions are based on chemical information (feedback) the bees receive from the body of the queen. She also produces eggs that hatch into larvae and pupae. This is the brood. Both open and sealed brood influence worker bee behavior. The queen decides very little.

Developmental Time and What it Means
Queens are one of two female castes of bees found inside the hive, the other caste being the worker bees. Queens and worker bees develop from apparently identical eggs that are deposited into cells by their mother queen following successful mating with multiple drones. These eggs have two sets of chromosomes, making them diploid individuals. Worker bees are unable to mate and, in queenless and broodless situations, produce eggs with a single set of chromosomes. These become drones. Both queens and worker bees produce haploid bees.

Queen bees have the shortest developmental time, running 15.5 to 16 days from the time the egg is placed into the cell to the new queen’s emergence from her queen cell. Some strains have shorter developmental times; African queens are known to develop in just 14 days.

Once a queen emerges from the cell, she will feed herself and is fed by nurse bees inside the hive. After a week or so, the queen will make orientation flights, then mating flights, coupling with 12 to 20 different drones. After several days of grooming and feeding by nurse bees inside the hive, the queen will start to lay eggs into worker cells which have been emptied and polished by the bees in the brood nest. Once she begins laying eggs, the queen does not mate again. Any shortage of sperm will not be corrected, and the fate of the queen, and her hive, is set.

In Nature, old and inferior queens are replaced through a process called supersedure. This happens when the queen’s pheromone and brood production drops to about half of its normal level. Then several larvae are selected, their cells are enlarged, and peanut shaped queen cells are built on the surface of the comb. There are three to nine supersedure cells produced in the average colony, and these cells may be located anywhere on the surface of the brood frame. The production of queen cells requires the contributions of many worker bees. Nurse bees are required for the production of royal jelly, the substance key to the development of new queens. Other bees are concerned with temperature stability to ensure proper queen development, wax secretion and cell building.

Mating, Egg-laying and Sperm Storage
Queens and drones fly on warm and calm afternoons to Drone Congregation Areas (DCAs) where the queen is receptive to the many drones that follow the queen’s pheromone plume and dark form against the sky. DCAs may be located anywhere around an apiary, and can be found by careful tracking with helium balloons or kites or radar and lures containing queen pheromone. Mating occurs 50 to 150 feet off the ground, and are thus rarely seen by humans. These are often associated with geographical ‘edges.’ Tree lines near a field, bottoms of hills, openings in heavily wooded areas and the like.

Once laying, queen bees in the wild produce about 150,000 eggs per year and depend upon two large ovaries that nearly fill her abdomen. The ovaries are made up of about 370 thin tubes called ovarioles that produce eggs on a continuous basis. In the peak of the season, a queen will produce about 1,500 or more eggs per day. Favorable weather, food supply and genetic programming stimulate her productivity. Reports of queens with egg-laying rates of 3,000 eggs per day may be a reflection of a second queen in the colony (a mother queen and her supersedure daughter, an event that occurs in over ten percent of vigorous spring colonies.)

Sperm are stored at the end of the queen’s abdomen in a clear, fluid-filled sac or sphere located called the spermatheca. This structure is covered with a fine network of breathing tubes, called trachea, that bring oxygen to the sperm stored there. The spermatheca floats in the blood (called hemolymph) of the queen and receives constant nutrition. The spermatheca holds five to eight million sperm, but a failing queen may only have a few thousand sperm and are identified by drone cells within the worker brood pattern in the hive.

Research has shown that when the queen finishes her reproductive flights, her median and two lateral oviducts are filled with sperm. The nurse bees massage her body and remove the surplus sexual fluids, while about 10 percent of the sperm successfully migrate through a spermathecal duct into the spermatheca. In one to four, days the queen will begin to deposit eggs into worker-prepared cells.

Longevity of Queens
Some queens only live a few weeks before the worker bees decide – for reasons we do not completely understand – to replace her with another. Sometimes queens stop laying eggs after several days, and no queen cells are produced from the eggs and larvae in the hive. Other queens produce a good brood pattern for several weeks before the colony replaces her with a daughter.

Once a queen is well-established in a hive, we expect her to remain there for a year or more. Reports of older queens are common, some as old as five years. Commercial beekeepers usually replace queens once a year or once every two years in non-migratory, northern operations. Small-scale beekeepers often keep queens in a hive for a longer time period if the queen continues to perform well for the colony. Bee breeders attempt to select queens that maintain egg laying for as long as possible in an attempt to select for genetic longevity within the bloodline. With selection, breeders keep productive queens for five years.

Behavior of Queens and Workers
As queen cells develop, the fully formed adult queen confined inside the queen cell produces some of the chemicals that make up part of her queen substance (pheromones). Worker bees surrounding the queen cell to keep it warm and remove the wax tip of the queen cell to expose the silk cocoon tip. It is widely thought that the workers will keep these cells under close surveillance, monitoring the development of the queen inside the cells. When the queen is ready to emerge, she will use her sharp mandibles to cut her way out of the cells. Almost immediately, she will move to other queen cells, her sisters, and chew a hole into the side with her mandibles and sting the queen inside the cell. Worker bees do not interfere with this behavior, but will remove the dead queen and her cell.

Sometimes supernumerary queens are produced in a colony and held hostage inside their cells until the bees determine the proper time for their emergence. The worker bees add beeswax to the incision the queen makes to cut herself free from the cell. While preventing her emergence, the workers carefully feed such queens to keep her healthy.

Newly Emerged Queens
After a newly emerged queen has finished killing her sisters, she moves rapidly over the combs. She does not produce as much pheromone as she will when she is a laying queen and, for the first twelve hours or so after emergence, her odor level is quite reduced. After 12 hours her queen substance production is enough for the workers to respect her as an unmated queen and to attract drones to her in the DCA for multiple mating.

Some beekeepers try smoke, strong odors and other techniques to introduce virgin queens. These may work under certain conditions but, as a general rule, virgin queens should be introduced in a queen cage with a candy release plug. This candy can be a mixture of honey and powdered sugar or common baking fondant. Virgin queens are able to fly and may escape while being handled, unlikely to return to the hive. Though a virgin queen is unmated she is a queen and is producing the pheromones and she should be treated as a queen by the hive. I place the virgin queen in a cage for three to five days before I allow the bees to remove the candy for liberation!

Virgin Queens at the Time of Mating
Worker bees may fly with the queen when she leaves for the mating flight. I have not learned of a reason for this mating swarm, but it is common in other social insects – perhaps it is a method of increasing security against predators. Back at the colony, there is a change in the behavior of the house bees while mating is underway: where bees had been storing pollen and nectar, they remove these products and polish them as a place for the queen to lay. Even the sharpest-eyed beekeeper may not be able to find the virgin queen before her abdomen starts to swell with egg laying (This is a hormonal response to the mating process.) Once mated, there should be a large area of polished brood cells for the queen to use. From the time of the last mating flight to the first eggs, queens may require one to three days for the hormonal changes and heavy feeding by workers to stimulate egg production.

Newly Mated Queens
From the time she emerges from her queen cell, it takes at least four weeks for a queen to fully mature, mate and start to lay. During this month-long period, it is possible to disrupt the delicate balance between the queen and her colony (remember, these bees are not her daughters but usually sisters). If the queen was introduced to the colony from another hive, she may not be genetically related to the queen and the balance is even more fragile. There are reports of poor introduction and early rejection of queens introduced into unrelated stocks, like putting a Russian queen into a yellow Italian hive. There are undoubtedly genetically determined variations in pheromone production, as well as key queen behaviors that worker bees monitor which we know very little about.

Laying Queens
Once established, a queen only needs to be checked every three or four weeks to make sure she is doing her job. I like to have a queen that is clipped and/or marked so I am able to confirm her bloodline. If you find eggs and young larvae and a nice brood pattern, you have seen evidence that the queen is doing her job. This means you do not need to see the queen on every inspection! For many small-scale beekeepers some colonies may only require a queen check once or twice a year; commercial beekeepers rarely check their queens.

Grand Old Ladies!
Many beekeepers develop favorite queens and want to keep them forever. Other beekeepers want to have a set schedule of queen replacement. I view older queens, those two years or older, as Grand Old Ladies. In breeding programs older queens get special respect when they continue to produce a quality brood pattern and a gentle, productive, winter-hearty hive in their third and fourth season. She can be converted over to drone production if she is not used for grafting to introduce longevity traits in your apiary – stock development is a never-ending challenge in beekeeping.

Sometimes beekeepers move older queens into smaller hives and keep an eye on them and use them for grafting. A two-deep five-frame nucleus is great for this. The older queen can be used to establish a five-frame nuc and then a super added as the colony expands. If the colony gets too strong, remove a frame of graftable larvae and give it to someone who is producing queen bees. This reduces the population of bees, spreads good genes to other colonies and keeps the older queen in balance with her reduced egg laying. Pull out frames with supersedure cells and make increase hives with them to keep her genetics in your apiary. This is part of the Sustainable Art of Beekeeping that provides me with so much satisfaction. Letting these Grand Old Ladies die a natural death seems like a fair trade for a number of highly productive seasons. It has nothing to do with being a business person, but says a great deal about your appreciation of genetic diversity, longevity and productivity.

Consult www.wicwas.com for the latest quality books on beekeeping.

by Larry Connor

Before obtaining the first bee colony, the future sustainable apiculturist must master key aspects of bee biology. Beekeepers must know the basic biological developmental rates of the three kinds of bees. It is not something that should be dismissed or ignored. Using the animal husbandry example, a beekeeper should know the developmental time of bees just like a cattle or dog breeder must know the developmental time and growth milestones of a calf or pup. Here are some common examples that I have seen happen with many new and less-experienced beekeepers:

There is no open brood. I think I lost my queen!

Events within the beehive take a set period of time, yet many beekeepers are in a big hurry for these things to happen and, as a result, ignore biology. If a European colony replaces a queen, it takes time for the new queen to develop, reach mating age, mate and then start laying eggs. Here’s a breakdown:

Queen development from egg to emerging……..16 days
Days to reach mating age…………………..7 days (or longer)
Days to mate……………………………..2 days (or longer)
Days to develop eggs after mating…………..3 days
TOTAL…………………………………..28 days

That is four weeks from future queen egg to her first worker egg! Some untrained beekeepers often expect to see new brood in two or three weeks as if Mother Nature will speed development just for them. Convinced the queen is gone, these beekeepers often buy another queen and really confuse both themselves and the bees by trying to introduce a queen to a colony that already has a queen in development! That is both wasteful and expensive, and it is poor animal husbandry.

My queen must be dead because I cannot see any eggs!

Bee eggs are small, and many beekeepers will carefully inspect a frame of brood on a dark day or without a bright light (the sun over the shoulder is best) and declare that the frame does not have any eggs or young larvae. When I take the frame and look, the frame is often filled with eggs and newly hatched larvae. Yes, the young larvae will appear nearly transparent, especially on light colored beeswax or plastic foundation. I often suggest these untrained folks get a flashlight and a hand lens to make these important inspections. While this is not really biology of the bee, it is about the biology of the beekeeper who cannot see. Schedule an eye exam!

I’ve had a queen in the hive for five weeks now, there is open and sealed brood in the frames, but the colony is losing bees. What is happening?

Many things can cause a colony to go into population decline, but five weeks is a critical time for bee populations if you let bees raise their own queen. If you add the 21 days it takes for new worker bees to grow from egg to emergence, you still have to add the time it took the queen to start laying, or 28 days.
Adding 21 and 28 days gives you seven weeks. It takes a long time for a colony to raise a new queen from the accidental death of the queen or when a beekeeper makes a walk-away split. Seven weeks is a very long time for a colony to be without emerging bees in the hive, especially if it did not have much sealed brood when it was originally set up or made queenless. Within three to five weeks you will notice that the population of adult bees is declining unless you intentionally selected or added frames of sealed and emerging brood specifically to boost the bee population.

Why beekeepers do not see eggs and larvae. This is a black plastic frame of worker comb. Much of the new wax has been pulled off to reveal the eggs and larvae. The larvae floating on a bed of royal jelly are the ‘easiest’ to see. This is why beekeepers need to carry a flashlight and a hand lens in the apiary.

I keep bees in South Florida and I have trouble keeping the colonies from mating with Africanized bees. What can I do?

Researchers have shown that African queens develop about two days faster than European bees, while the hybrid Africanized bees develop one day faster than European queens. What does that mean to the beekeeper?
Because African queens emerge faster than European queens, your first concerns for producing queens in area with African genes is when you emerge queen cells in an incubator or cell finisher. Just one African queen cell will produce a virgin emerging a day or two early and the complete destruction of all the remaining cells. if you put queen cells you found on frames of brood into a new nucleus increase hive, you will find that the African queens will be preferentially favored.

Second, if you mate your queens in an area where both African and European drones are present, several studies have shown that the European queen is more likely to mate with European drones – they fly longer hours and are produced in larger numbers.

The beekeeper trying to mate queens in an area with African colonies need to develop a European-drone saturation program or develop an off-season mating program. Otherwise, they need to find an area that is free of the African bee and mate their queens to European drones at that location.
Here is a summary of the developmental time of the workers, drones and queens:

Workers

Most of the bees in a colony are workers. All worker bees are female but in a different caste than the queen. They do all the work in the hive and gather all the food (pollen and nectar) and water that the bees need to survive. Workers also collect resin from trees to coat the inside of the hive – we call this propolis. They are unable to mate with drones, the male bees and they do not attempt to make mating flights. They have very small reproductive structures and are only able to produce eggs in the absence of a queen bee’s pheromone. These eggs are unfertilized and will only become male bees.

Worker honey bees control the queen’s behavior and replacement as well as the number and age distribution of the drones in a hive. Unfertilized eggs are haploid, having just one set of chromosomes. In Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, ants), these develop into males. Worker-produced drones may or may not be significant in terms of passing on genetic information, depending on which scientist you ask. Is there a genetic benefit of the haploid-diploid sex determination system if a worker bee produces sons that contribute to the genetic composition of future colonies?

Worker Development

In whole days, the intervals of metamorphic honey bee worker development follow a mathematical progression: three days as an egg, six days as a larva and 12 days in the sealed cell. Remember this simple relationship: 3+6+12 equals 21 days. Like many things in the hive, these are averages, and the timing is not in exact 24-hour measurements. Temperature and nutrition apparently impact development rates.

Queen cells in an incubator. Genetic differences in queen development time can produce an early emerging queen capable of destroying all these cells in a matter of hours.

The Egg

After first inserting her head into a cell to determine its size, the queen deposits one worker egg. As she positions her body into the cell, she releases some of the sperm stored in her spermatheca to accomplish fertilization. Queens may deposit both fertilized and unfertilized eggs, both workers and drones in worker cells, depending on the size of the cells. All worker eggs are fertilized, and a good queen will produce a pattern of 95% or more worker cells and a few missed cells where diploid drone eggs are deposited (they are removed soon after hatching). This is the time period for the union of the sperm and egg with the resulting embryo feeding on the yolk in the egg. There is rapid growth of the embryonic bee during this short three-day period. Eggs are held vertically, head down, by a small amount of cement at the bottom of the egg. At the end of three days, the outer egg shell, called the chorion, softens as it is reabsorbed into the body. The egg flattens onto the bottom of the cell and becomes the larva.

The Larva

Once the larva hatches, it immediately enters a period of continuous feeding and extremely rapid growth. In six days the bee grows from a tiny egg to a large larva. Nurse bees feed the larva many times per hour and provide a surplus of royal jelly at the bottom of the cell for the first 48-50 hours. This is the same food as fed to a queen bee larva throughout her larval period. After this initial feeding, the diet of the larva changes to a more complex diet that inhibits the formation of queen characteristics and promotes the formation of worker features. The special diet, called worker jelly, contains additional carbohydrates and lipid molecules that turn characteristics of worker development on and turn characteristics of the queen caste off. The worker larva floats on a bed of royal jelly.
When raising queen bees, this is the start of the perfect time to remove larvae and put her into a queen cup. The larva floats on the bed of royal jelly and molts at least four times before the final molt to become the pupa. The molting skin is extremely thin and hard to detect. During the sixth day, the bees place a beeswax ‘cap’ on the cell, even though the larva inside has not completed the larval developmental phase. At this time, the larval body changes into an intermediate prepupal form, which is intermediate between the larva and the pupal stage.

Bees pass through a four stage metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupae and adult. These two are the larva and pupae (with eyes darkening, the purple eye stage).

The Pupa

The larva spins a thin brown silk cocoon with special glands located in the head. Then, she molts the final time to become the pupa, with characteristics in the form of the bee but without wing development and integument pigmentation. The first parts of the bee’s external body to change color are the two compound eyes, first to pink and then to purple. Internally, the body is becoming more differentiated, with the formation of adult bee organs, like the honey stomach, developing out of the simpler larval digestive tract. Just how many changes take place during the ‘quiet’ or ‘resting’ phase of development is not known, but it is both large and essential to the adult bee’s many roles in the hive.

The Emerging Individual

Twenty-one days after the queen has deposited a tiny egg in the cell, the worker bee emerges, soft of body, unable to sting and covered with body hairs that have not yet dried in the atmosphere of the hive. Some refer to emergence as ‘hatching’, but we restrict the term hatching to refer to the egg-to-larval transformation, and the term ‘emergence’ for the worker bees cutting the the protective silk capping off her cell and walking, ready to begin her initial adult bee duties. These callow bees are responsive to the queen bee and quickly learn her odors which helps them in various parts of their adult life.

Differences in Developmental Rates

European races of honey bees follow a similar developmental pattern. When compared to African honey bees, the European queen and worker bee require additional time for development than the same castes in the African bees.

European vs. African Honey Bee Developmental Time from Egg to Adult

From Ellis, J., University of Florida and A. Ellis, Florida Dept. of Agriculture and Commercial Services. FDACS.DPI|EDIS. Accessed online 9 Aug. 2015.

European
Queen…16 days
Worker…21 days
Drone…24 days

African
Queen…14 days
Worker…19-20 days
Drone…24 days

Division of Labor

The Nurse Bee (In the Brood Nest)
These young bees quickly assume duties. No other bee provides instruction or hints at the job ahead. There is no mentoring or internship.

Cell cleaning – Newly emerged bees clean the cells of newly emerged cells; they remove remaining royal jelly, larval fecal materials and trim the capping of the cell. They also remove any lingering varroa mites still in development and destroy them. Once the cell is clean, I suspect they either remove any objectionable odor that might repel the queen, or they coat the empty cell with a special odor or pheromone that stimulates the queen bee to deposit a new egg into the cell, thus starting the brood production cycle all over again.

The developing brood is being fed by a nurse bee, a member of house bees that has not yet started to fly.
R. Williamson photo.

Feeding brood – Newly emerged bees quickly feed themselves pollen and nectar and are fed by other worker bees as part of the ‘community stomach’ of the hive, which includes food and chemical components collected from the queen. The feeding process stimulates the digestive tract of the bee to process the food and convert the proteins and carbohydrates into royal jelly. When beekeepers feed colonies of bees, only a small percentage of the bees collect food from the feeder device, but all the bees in the colony benefit from the feeding due to food-sharing behavior.
Royal jelly production – Each worker bee undergoes a period of abundant royal jelly production when the season and food supply allows. Most of the year this feeding is almost immediately after food intake, but in the Fall and early Winter, the royal jelly production is delayed as the colony takes a break in brood rearing. The appearance of the first larvae in January (in the northern hemisphere) stimulates royal jelly secretion by select nurse bees.

Brood regulators – It appears that these young bees determine the amount of royal jelly to produce, and, thus, the amount of brood to rear, based on stimulation by the increasing day length as well as the food budget of the hive. Here the ‘community stomach’ controls population growth. Bees with proper nutrients in their body cells and their digestive tract produce more royal jelly only when there is an abundance of food stored in both the combs and coming into the hive from foragers that find early season food. Quality food reserves in the body cells of over-wintering nurse bees are essential for the care and feeding of a healthy brood cycle early in the season. If in the prior season the colony had poor food reserves, it was exposed to parasitic mites and diseases, or the colony was undergoing any other stress, then the nurse bees are less fit for brood rearing. It is not the temperature outside the hive that determines the amount of brood that a colony produces, but the bee population and nutritional status of the nurse bees. This relationship makes these young bees critical to starting the new season properly.

Queen attendants – Nurse bees also feed and care for the queen. They regulate the amount of food she receives and they themselves are subject to complex factors that include the food reserves, the nutritional composition of the ‘community stomach’ and the population of young bees inside the hive. Part of this network is the feedback the nurse bees provide to the queen by returning modified queen substance to the queen – she then responds to her own chemical signals (pheromones and hormones). The queen retinue of attendants constantly changes. Look for queens with large retinues, at least ten and perhaps over a dozen worker bees, while resting. Queens with small retinues often do poorly in the hive.

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