> Commercial queen breeders, who wish to produce stock mated to known drone sources, should isolate their mating apiaries from other drone colonies (by at least eight miles. In cases where such isolation cannot be obtained, all colonies within eight miles should be requeened with the same drone-producing stock used in the mating apiary.
No, that's overkill.
8 miles is not needed when water (and the breeze/wind over that water) or another physical terrain barrier is leveraged.
In 4 years of annual releases of hundreds of marked and well-fed forager bees from multiple points along the East River in Queens, and along the Hudson, in NJ, zero made it back to my hives on various rooftops along 5th Ave, on the eastern edge of Central Park. Bees are able to make if from Governors Island (in the middle of the East River) to Brooklyn (1800 feet over water) to forage and return with ease, but cannot make it from Governor's Island back to hives at the far Southern tip of Manhattan, at "The Battery" (2900 feet over water). Winds matter. No bees returned from even Randall's Island, despite a mere 500 foot distance over the water at its closest to Manhattan.
I'm not the only one to leverage isolation. Some of the Buckfast breeders do their mating at Thorah Island, just under 2 miles (as the bee flies) from Spyglass point, Northeast of the Island, and about 2.5 miles to the eastern coastline of Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto.
Danes do the same. Kirsten Traynor, former Editor of ABJ, wrote an article in the Feb 2008 ABJ about "Alrø", a small island near Horsens in Denmark, only 2500 feet from shore at the point where the bridge is connected, and perhaps 3,000 feet generally from shore.
In general, bees can be reliably isolated from other hives via barriers - islands (Neumann, 1999), mountains/valleys (Jensen et al., 2005) or areas where honey bees do not normally live
(Szabo, 1986).
NEUMANN, P; VAN PRAAGH, J P; MORITZ, R F; DUSTMANN, J H
(1999) Testing reliability of a potential island mating apiary using
DNA microsatellites. Apidologie, 30: 257-276.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/apido:19990402
JENSEN, A B; PALMER, K A; BOOMSMA, J J; PEDERSEN, B V (2005)
Varying degrees of Apis mellifera ligustica introgression in
protected populations of the black honey bee, Apis mellifera
mellifera, in northwest Europe. Molecular Ecology, 14: 93-106.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-294X.2004.02399.x
SZABO, T I (1986) Mating distance of the honey bee in north-western
Alberta, Canada. JAR, 25: 227-233
https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.1986.11100722
Sent from phone - your typos may vary
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