I have posted this message on behalf of Brian Grant, Please send any replies,etc. to me.
 
Thankyou
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Virgin queens in large colonies take a long time to mate - why?
It is widely recognised that virgin queens in small colonies, such as nuclei, mate and start laying much sooner than virgins in large colonies, but there seems to be no accepted reason for this effect. Is there even any hard data on the time taken for mating to occur in different sized colonies?
In most cases the situation of having a virgin in a large colony will only arise if the beekeeper has gone through the stock cutting out queen cells, if nature had taken her course then presumably successive virgins would have left with groups of workers until only a small colony remained. So possibly the pattern evolved to protect the first virgins to emerge since if they were mated they would be less able to defend themselves in fights with younger virgins.
This seems to imply that the virgin has some mechanism which tells her that she is part of a large colony and should delay mating, or vice-versa; but that she has no mechanism for detecting other queens in the colony unless she comes into close contact with them or hears quarking. This last suggestion is supported by the work on 2 queens survival by Butz & Dietz (J Ap Res 33(2) 87-94, 1994). How can she tell that she is part of a large colony? Could we manipulate it to get her to mate more quickly?
I can think of two possible exceptions to the general rule. In the case of supersedure do we have any information on the time needed for the virgin to mate? What is different in this case, could it  be that the time of year is relevant? Or do supersedure queens sometimes delay, become drone-layers and get thrown out?
The late C B Dennis praised the Dutch "Aalst" system of management; in one stage of this many virgins are released from the cells at the same time into the hive. He believed that in this case the virgins were harried by workers until the fittest was selected and implicitly she then mated without untoward delay.
 
 
Comments welcome, hard data even more welcome.
Brian Gant
 
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