: the key to prevent winter loss

(Early-morning comments from an airport lobby) 
> >I guess I wonder if it would make a difference at all... in the wild 
> >any
> given hive would presumably have a goal of swarming at least once, 
> which would mean any given nest would requeen annually.  Keeping the 
> same queen in the same nest multiple years would seem to be a sign of 
> lower reproductive fitness.


While this would certainly be true of wild hives,  in the reference of breeding long lived queens,  it’s a bit of a red herring.  We would be referring to bees that did great and either would not have a propensity for swarming, or  were kept form smarming artificially.   Any breeder queen selected from older stock would have to be of traits we wanted of large hives and good honey.  Dick has reported several times that with some selection swarming is not a problem for him.




With regard to Charlies' query, breeding from young queens does not necessarily apply negative selection against long-lived queens.

I have been pondering this all week.  Still struggling. To understand why not?  Seems to me if queens with long term issues are routinely culled or ignored that those "short term" traits may be a problem  obviously it would be sort of random as you wouldn't see the long term issues.  But what happens if we no longer select for say  (just picking one)  a trait for how much sperm is applied to each egg?  We know the average is 3  but we also know some use much more,  seems to me they would burn out faster.  Is that a genetic issue??  Just seems to me to keep picking rock stars for the short term  we may be damaging our long term. 

I do maintain about 40 hives that all have older queens I don't mess with.  This year as is typical,  they out produced all the other hives. I am for the most part completely unsure of the queens,  as they are allowed to handle it themselves. That said I know at least 3 of them (marked) are in the 3rd season (still pondering how that applies to the future for me)


Charles

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html