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Wed, 20 Apr 2022 18:09:25 -0400 |
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> Is the Brood Pattern within a Honey Bee Colony a Reliable Indicator of Queen Quality?
Kathleen V. Lee 1,*, Michael Goblirsch 1, Erin McDermott 2, David R. Tarpy 2 and Marla Spivak 1
Reading this paper, I was struck by a very significant qualification in both the described methodology and the discussion.
"It is possible that if we had left the queen in the colony and sampled after 6 weeks—when the worker bees would have been progeny of the transferred queen—that we would have been able to see if the designation of poor or good brood patterns held with the new work force. Replacing the queen could result in a better brood pattern if the colony environment remained the same and the new workers were better able to thrive in that environment."
Stating the above more plainly, the swapping of a queen did not have an IMMEDIATE effect, but they did not leave the queens in their new hives long enough to allow her progeny to mature into house bees.
Had they waited a bit, and allowed the eggs laid by the swapped queen to mature into house bees, I’d expect that they'd see the "poor brood pattern queen" once again produce a poor brood pattern, and the "excellent brood pattern queen" once again be laying an "excellent" brood pattern.
So, it seems the workers make for the poor brood pattern (Maybe they don't clean cells well enough? Maybe they "herd" the queen poorly?) but requeening was NOT shown to be "useless" at all, as they were impatient.
I am amazed that I'm apparently the first to notice this significant qualification of the findings.
Before aXriv, auto-download RSS feeds, and Kindles, I'd have a nearly floor-to-ceiling bedside stack of "journals I'm gonna read soon". Wives hate that. Now, my backlog is entirely digital.
But ya gotta read the paper - abstracts don’t make it.
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