>I do track my queens carefully and have found some do well in their second year but most cannot get a colony through a second winter >and never a third, even when the hive is populous. I have no idea why the age of the queen seems to spell doom for an otherwise >decent colony.
>In his CD series David Eyre of Orillia, Ontario films a set of hives that have in them queens that are 1, 2 and 3 years old. The size >of the colony diminished with age of the queen.
This is not new information, the productivity of new queens exceeding older queens has been around for a long time. Its real simple to understand if we ponder it for a few moments.
1. Large hives will always gather more resources, of which we are taking some of also.
2. No brood breaks, also means more mites brood virus.
3. Northern queens will have a larger rest period, if you assume a queen has a finite number of sperm stored, then its just math to understand when she will be slowing down
4, Our hives are "oversize" and in fact we keep trying to make them bigger yet, which depletes queens faster.
>I have bought queens who when shipped seemed to have endured heat stress and so are infertile when received. The longer they are off >lay, the more likely it seems they fail.
I have been on the phone with 3 different queen producers this week, who are now catching queens. They are well aware of the time they cage queens in relationship to their age, will affect how well they handle the stress of shipping and being taken off the laying routine.
Any queen who never has to go under the stress of being shipped, or suddenly stopping production, IE raised local, has a less chance of being "damaged".
That said, production queens are how this industry moves. Darn few of us are capable of making queens in March and April simply due to weather. I have a lot of queens coming in 2-3 weeks, there is zero chance to make queens here now, and I can tell you for sure that raising a volume of queens of any sort is a major undertaking. To continually produce queens of the quality we get shipped to us, given the shipping skills of UPS, and USPS, is nothing short of miraculous.
JMO.
Charles
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