may-jun-2019

IN YOUR ORCHARD rest of the country is in need of new colonies to replace those that they lost over the winter. Each package of bees weighs between three to five pounds, containing approximately seven to 12,000 bees and a caged-queen. These packages will be installed in hive equipment and hopefully start a new colony. In conversation with package producers, some report that each year, this bee industry produces and sells over 250,000 packages to the beekeeping community. Producing Queens The queens need to be produced during this same window of opportunity. Beekeepers use excess bees to create what they call cell builders, often queenless colonies, with a lot of young “nurse” bees and the necessary resources to produce numerous queen cells. Some queen cells are sold as is and used by many beekeepers to speed up the splitting process by introducing queen cells into their newly made units. Other queen cells will be destined to hatch, mate and be sold as fully ready to be inserted in most packages of bees or sold individually to beekeepers for replacements. BIP works closely with many California Queen breeders during this period to assess colony health and sample for pests and diseases. Additionally, BIP performs testing on breeder queen colonies to measure hygienic behavior, a genetic trait that translates into better resistance against certain honey bee diseases. This hygienic behavior is the ability of worker honey bees to “sense” diseased pupae, uncap them and remove them from the nest efficiently. The test consists in freezing a section of the brood, effectively killing the progeny, and counting the number of pupae removed in a 24-hour period. Those colonies with higher removal rates are considered more hygienic, and thus preferable to breed from, than those who score lower on removal. BIP has played an essential role in testing, reporting and advising California Queen Producers over the past decade, supporting them in selecting better breeding stock year after year. This is made evident by the statistically positive increase in hygienic behavior scores of bees from the BIP Tech Transfer Team Program participants, as seen on the next page. Figure 2 & 3: A package of bees (left) and a frame of queen cells (right). Figure 4: Freeze killed brood area to test for honey bee hygienic behavior. Figure 5: Excellent hygienic test score on the left (all pupae removed) and poor hygienic test score on the right, 24 hours after freeze killing the brood. 4 0 A L M O N D F A C T S