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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Subject:
From:
"Van Roekel, Bill" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 21 Nov 2001 14:27:50 -0600
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I don't agree with all of your comments.

>
> 1)  A queen mates with 10 drones
> 2)  A swarm consists of roughly 1/2 the colony
>
> Reasonable starting points, so let's go:
>
> a)  Each worker gets 1/2 its genes from the queen, and 1/2
>      its genes from one of the 10 drones.

> b)  The queen cannot segregate her sperm "by drone", so we
>      can assume the "drone component" of each worker to be a
>      random selection, or something close to random.

I could go along with you up to here.  I have seen hives on a number of
occasions where a large proportion of the bees were very dark(black/gray),
with a substantial number of bees being uniformly golden/yellow.  Although I
have not seen proof, this indicates to me that the sperm is kept separate,
and worker eggs are fertilized with sperm from one father for a period of
time, and then from another, etc.  So, your next point would not be accurate
either.  There could be ten groups of workers (based on fathers), but only a
large number from perhaps three, the others dying off before the fourth
group is laid.

> c)  So, there are up to 10 groups (daughters of each drone)
> in the hive.
>      While all workers are daughters of the same queen, each has a
>      1-in-10 chance of being a full sister, and a 9-in-10
> chance of being
>      a half sister to any other worker bee.


> It is my personal pet theory (unverified by anyone as yet)
> that multiple queen hives are more common that anyone may
> suspect, which brings a whole new factor into the "swarming
> puzzle".  I wish that everyone would inspect recently-swarmed
> hive closely for eggs, and report any eggs found the day of
> (or the day after) a swarm.  Eggs directly after a swarm
> would prove that the swarming hive was a dual-queen hive
> before it swarmed.

Sorry, I don't think so.  I believe that there could easily be more than one
mated queen in the hive just prior to swarming, with all of them except the
mom being 'swarm queens'

(Now does my question about queens
> [plural] make sense?)

I looked over your post, and I can't find your question about queens.  Was
it in an earlier post?  Would you please repeat it?
Bill Van Roekel

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