>How many sperm can a spermatheca hold? My understanding is that the spermatheca is more like a ball than it is like a balloon. Wouldn't the capacity of >the spermatheca influence how long a colony might keep a queen?

The number of sperm in the spermatheca will depend on what method you use to determine this.  I can recall at our Second Australian and International Bee Congress held in Australia in 1988 there was presentation by a couple of lady scientists from Indonesia on the number of sperm they found in the spermatheca.  I remember Dr. Jerzy Woyke from Poland getting up and saying they were wrong as the spermatheca could not carry that many.  Their method must be wrong.

The late Dr. Cam Jay used to do testing of spermathecas for the co-op in Manitoba on queens imported from the US and Australia.  His method was adopted by us here in Australia.  The figure, using Cam's method, was around 4-5 million sperm.

From what I have read it is the pheromone put out by the queen which determines how long she is accepted in the hive.  If it was the number of sperm than why do we get drone laying queens?  If the bee could sense the number of sperm, they would have superceded her.  There is also the case of single drone insemination of queen bees for scientific research. These queens are accepted normally and are not superceded even though they will not have a full complement of semen.

>How many years is it possible for a well mated queen honeybee to last? Are there any statistics on that?

I have read cases of five years plus in, I think, Britain.  I once had a breeder queen that lasted four year but that is the exception.  In this case, it was in a nuc so the queen was not laying a lot of eggs compared to a normal hive.  In commercial situations here in mainland Australia, queens are normally replaced every years.  They work flat out for almost 12 months of the year.  In a place like Tasmania, where they have a winter more akin to Europe, the queens are commonly kept for two to three years.  They claim the queen do better in their second year.

This question reminds me of a saying by Dr. Tilly Kuhnert from Germany who said that "get four beekeepers together and you get five opinions, none of which are wrong".

Trevor Weatherhead
Australia
 

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