Apiculture Management of Honeybee Colonies

American University of Beirut

Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences
Apiculture
AGSC 219
Spring 2018-2019
Colony Management-2
Queen Rearing
Migratory Beekeeping and Apiary Sites

Queen Rearing

Beekeepers rear queens in order to:

1. Requeen existing colonies

2. Establish new colonies
3. Improve the genetic quality of their bees

Usually, the response to selection is very well at the beginning of a program, while
maintaining the selected stock becomes the challenge.

The ways beekeepers follow to maintain selected bee stocks are:

1. Open mating and saturating an area with drones and allowing queens to freely
mate
2. Isolated mating by confining both queens and drones to areas such as islands and
citrus orchards
3. Instrumentally inseminating the queen to keep mating under the control of the
beekeeper

The guiding principle, therefore, in queen rearing is to emulate as much as possible

the swarming impulse.

Queen rearing is much like wine production. Anybody can rear a queen or produce
wine; but rearing a quality queen or developing a fine wine is much more difficult.

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Selections for desirable traits are based on phenotype, genotype, and/ or a

combination of both.

In nature, honeybees produce queens under three impulses:

1. Emergency, when for some reason a queen unexpectedly dies

2. Supersedure, when the resident queen, although failing, still maintains some
degree of brood rearing and order in the colony
3. Swarming, when the colony is prepared to rear many queens and usually does
Emulation of swarming conditions usually renders best quality queens.

Within various schemes, specific types of selection are possible:

1. Selection for morphological characteristics such as color or size.

2. Selection for behavioral characteristics like temper or swarming.
3. Selection based on a selection index.

Queen rearing is based on rigid timetable dictated by a development life cycle of

fifteen and half days. The usual sequence of events is as follows:

1. Selecting the 'genetic' colony for chosen genetic characters.

2. Grafting or transferring larvae less than three days old and placing them into
prepared queen cups.
3. Newly grafted larvae are left for about twenty-four hours in a starter queenless
colony.
4. The larvae are transferred to a finisher or 'cell builder' colony, and kept there for
about three days.
5. The developing queens are left for about additional seven days in the finisher
colony, or they are transferred to an incubator.
6. The emerging queens are individually moved into mating colonies (nuclei).

Before a queen flies out and mates, the workers make her take exercise that prepares
her for sustained flight. After mating occurs (5 or 6 days after emergence), the queen
is left in the mating hive until she has started to lay eggs (2 - 5 days after mating).

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Queen storage

In normal circumstances, the colony will tolerate only one queen. However, methods
have been developed for transporting, storing, and overwintering queens in large
numbers. Examples are:

1. Queen banks, used for the transport of young mated queens

2. Reservoir colonies, for several-month storage
3. Thermally controlled buildings, for overwintering

Multiple-queen colonies

It is possible to induce worker bees to maintain a colony with more than one laying
queen, the queens occupying different parts of the same brood nest.

An important reason for a multiple-queen colony is that strong or populous colonies

of bees are more efficient in producing honey than weaker ones.
In this sense, the colony's large population enables it to store more honey than could
be done by its compartment parts separately, each with one queen.

Migratory Beekeeping and Apiary Sites

Moving Bee Colonies

Beekeepers usually seek to move their bee colonies from place to place seeking heavy
nectar flows. The steps taken to ensure the orderly safe movement of colonies include:

1. Moving bees at night or at times when all bees are back in the colony
2. Providing extra ventillation through screening hive entrances and top covers
3. Tightening or strapping hive sections together
4. Handling the heavy lifting and placement of colonies properly
5. Netting large loads so bees won't fly out
6. Making sure that the operation is done with the minimum time possible
7. Placing bees at a new site, at least two miles away from the old one for the
bees to reorient.

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Apiary Sites and Placement of Bee Hives

Whether dealing with a backyard apiary or a commercial one, several features are
taken into consideration upon apiary site selection and placement of hives. However,
large-scale operations may require additional arrangements for saving additional cost,
time and effort. A number of desirable features are:

1. Easy accessibility to all hives by the beekeeper (and her vehicle), under all
weather conditions
2. Placement of hives on a reasonably flat surface for easy and safe movement of
the beekeeper around the hives
3. Shade from the sun and shelter from excessive wind
4. Permanent water availability
5. Minimal danger from fire
6. Minimal danger from flood water that might get high and enter the hive
7. Protection from attacks or incidental damage by animals
8. Safety from vandalism and theft
9. Minimal nuisance from bees, to people and their animals

When placing the hives, measures to prevent drifting of bees are likely adopted.

Bee housing structures such as specific trailers may be used for placing the hives on,
where flight entrances points towards the periferies.

Whether caught by a bait hive or present in nature, swarms and existing colonies are
usually tranferred into frame hives. However, captured swarms are easier to transfer
than colonies residing in traditional hives or wild nests due to the unavailability of
brood and food stores in the former.

Package bees are framless colonies produced from colonies containing large numbers
of young workers. They are placed in frame hives upon arrival to selected sites, where
frames of wax foundation are provided.

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