Hi Roger & All

Waldemar said...
From what I know queens take flight only to mate (or to leave with a swarm).

Queens can and do fly on a few occasions, but the occasions are rare and
difficult to study.

Why do queens fly ?

Flying practice, Orienting, Mating and Swarming are the ones mentioned in
books.

Mating flights in themselves will vary in number according to race of bees.
Many American strains that are based on Italian lines will only mate with
something in the region of 7 or 9 drones.

Each semen load is in the region of one microlitre and the queens
spermatheca is also about one microlitre in volume. The semen is delivered
by each drone into the median oviduct and after a batch of drones have mated
the queen will return to the hive. During a period of time (often overnight)
the semen in the median oviduct is homogenised and a portion of each drone's
semen will be passed into the spermatheca with the excess volume being
expelled.

There are some differences with other races that mate with larger numbers of
drones, because there are limits to the volume of the median oviduct a
mating session can only continue until this organ is full, so the
homogenising and compaction has to occur before a second flight can take
place, this may be later in the same day or the following day.

So there is a mechanism whereby a queen's tank can be 'topped up', quite
what happens in some of the African strains that can mate up to seventy
times is anybody's guess :-)

Roger said...

> We have seen queens that have  started laying after a shortage of drones
only to stop again
> after 2-3 months and then start laying well again a couple of  weeks later
and go on to head
> production colonies for two seasons.  we have often thought that they went
for a second
> mating flight but have never witnessed it actually happening.

I too have heard many reports of apparent additional matings, but accurate
observations are very thin on the ground, it would seem that it is
physically possible over a time scale of a few days, but the reports I
mention vary from months to years, between possible top up matings.

Queens do fly on occasions, and I believe that this is much more common than
it has ever been written about, but why it happens I do not know, I
conjecture that when it does happen... That a bunch of workers fly along
with the queen, but this is based mostly on guesswork, because of the way I
have had marked and numbered queens change places...
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman/flyingqueens.html

Proving the effectiveness of top up mating after a few months could be done
with a fairly simple experiment...

A queen could be instrumentally inseminated with a small amount of semen
(less than one micro litre) and monitored, such a queen would likely become
a drone layer after a few months. The queen could then have a further
insemination... If there were female offspring after this it would verify
that the mechanism works after a time lapse. By using semen of known source,
it could be verified that the new batch of female offspring was due to the
second insemination, rather than a re-activation of the semen from the first
dose.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Fall Back M/c, Build 5.02 (stable)

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