>
> >I cannot disagree with anything that you have written, but you have
> ignored one factor - the genetic inclination to swarm rather than to
> supersede.


Thanks, Peter, clearly an oversight on my part!  The genetic (or perhaps
epigenetic) propensity to swarm is interesting, and many breeders (notably
Brother Adam) have made a big deal of this.  However, it is clearly working
against Nature, as without copious swarming, Apis mellifera would soon go
extinct.

I tend to agree with Charlie Mraz that the most productive colonies are
likely to swarm--that is simply the nature of the game.

>I was sad to see that my best breeder queen was no longer with us after
four years of producing excellent crops

It is hard for me to imagine that any queen could store enough sperm to
build up a huge honey-producing colony for four years in a row.  The
Australian researcher Graham Kleinschmidt found that in general, a queen was
only good for two major buildups in her lifetime.

An average queen stores about 5 million sperms in her spermatheca.  Several
are released to fertilize each worker egg.  If a queen were to lay an
average of 2000 eggs a day for 6 months, that would require something in the
range of 1.5 million sperms per season.  However, the viability of sperm
decreases over the years, so for a queen to be fecund enough to produce
populations that produce excellent honey yields for more than two seasons is
hard to work out mathematically.

I'm curious as to what beekeepers in your area would consider to be an
"excellent" crop (in pounds of harvested honey from that hive).  In other
words, I'm curious as to whether we are talking about the same sort of
colony size that we speak of here in the States.

Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
ScientificBeekeeping.com

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