Simple stock improvement (2024)

Regular readers will be aware that I've spent most of this season doing inspections in the rain.

At least, that's what it has felt like.

Regular beekeepers may have been doing the same thing, as the weather this year has been 'challenging' {{1}} to say the least.

💡

Remember the {{squiggles}} are footnotes (in this instance a sweary one) and you need to use a web browser for the fancy-dan popups, or scroll for ages to read them at the foot of the page (where else?).

There are two obvious solutions.

The first is to only inspect colonies when the weather is benign and when there's a good nectar flow keeping the foragers busy (and elsewhere).

Good luck with that 😉.

But most seasons have at least some poor days on which the colony really should be inspected.

Yes, you might be lucky, or have sufficient flexibility in your life (or live on the Côte d'Azur), meaning poor weather is never an issue. But the reality is that most of us have to put up with the vagaries of our temperate climate ... which means periodically inspecting colonies in less-than-ideal conditions.

The second solution (and don't think of these as mutually exclusive) is to keep well-tempered bees that are not overly-defensive, even when conditions are sub-optimal.

Well-tempered bees will be a benefit during every inspection, not just those in lousy conditions.

They make routine inspections - in good weather - a pleasure, and they are forgiving during those 'oops!' moments when you drop a frame, or spend 45 minutes searching (unsuccessfully) to find the queen.

They are also much better for beginners, and a real boon if you sell bees.

It's always good to hear someone who bought a nuc from you last year say "lovely calm and well-behaved bees" ... particularly within earshot of this year's trainees 😉.

Defensive bees and postponed inspections

Imagine the scenario ... it's late spring, colonies have come through the winter well, built up strongly and are now revelling in the bounteous nectar flow from the oil seed rape. With 8-9 frames of brood you can expect swarming to start 'real soon now'.

You're prepared, you know what to do. You've got an empty nuc ready and waiting. Not only that, but you have even built enough new frames for swarm control {{2}}.

Bring it on.

However, your usual Saturday morning in the apiary is rained off, and the weather is predicted to get worse for the next 2-3 days.

And it does get worse.

Much worse.

By which time you're back in the office slaving over a spreadsheet to earn enough to keep your bees in foundation, or fondant or the latest incarnation of the Flow hive.

You skipped the inspection ... previous (painful) experience has taught you that your bees are very defensive in poor weather.

You reason that it's better to be safe than sorry.

By Thursday, the weather improves.

You're still stuck neck-deep in a spreadsheet, or in interminable meetings, or a cheap hotel in New York, or a 'sheer weight of traffic' jam on the M25. Your bees are some way down your current list of priorities.

But, those bees have been busy since Saturday. Even during the poor weather. In fact, they've been so busy that the open queen cells that were present at the weekend (that you didn't see 😢) are now sealed.

With the return of better conditions, the colony swarms.

Not so much Au revoir, as Adios!

You return to find a much-depleted worker population, no queen but lots of queen cells, and the sad knowledge that your honey production is now going to be much reduced {{3}}.

Well-tempered bees are better bees

Losing a swarm is part of the rich tapestry of beekeeping. It goes with the territory. But it's also frustrating and generally - with normal observational skills, a little knowledge of honey bee biology and regular inspections - avoidable.

But it doesn't have to be like that.

In an alternative scenario, you visit the apiary - in the rain - on the Saturday. The weather is forecast to get worse, so you start as early as practical ... at the very least it will give you more time to dry out afterwards.

You have well-tempered and tolerant bees.

New blood

I don't propose to write a treatise on the genetics of honey bees, or even discuss the genetics of defensive behaviour in bees (which is at least partially understood for Africanised bees; Harpur et al., 2020). I'm not qualified to deal with the former, and you're probably not really interested in the latter {{4}}.

You just want to know how to improve the behaviour of your bees.

The queen and the drones she mated with are responsible for the genetics of the colony. If she is from poor stock, and/or mated with a bunch of ne'er-do-wells {{5}} then the resulting workers will, at best, be dodgy and, at worst, psychotic.

But equally, it also means that the simplest way to improve the genetics of the colony is to remove the queen and replace her with one from better stock.

It's a reasonably quick fix.

It usually works, though not always as fast as you'd like it to.

It will cost you at least £35-40, which means yet more spreadsheets, New York hotels or M25 traffic jams ... though the increased productivity of the colony might mean you can offset the outlay by selling more honey.

Replacing the queen

The process is simple. You find the old queen and remove her {{6}}. Once the colony knows it is queenless (hours) you can introduce your newly purchased queen.

I've written about queen introduction in the past, so won't regurgitate anything other than the following key points:

the colony must be queenless and not have any queen cells
use an introduction cage (e.g. JzBz) plugged with queen candy and (initially) capped with a plastic cover
remove any attendants from the introduction cage (their presence has been shown to reduce acceptance rates)
leave the cage capped until the colony shows no aggression to the caged queen, then
remove the cap and leave the colony undisturbed for a week.

I introduce all my mated or virgin queens like this, and it works consistently well {{7}}.

Now and then the colony fails to chew through the queen candy/fondant plugging the neck of the cage. I've had two like that this year already {{8}}. In both instances the queen was fine; they'd been feeding her through the cage, and accepted her a week later after I released her.

How quickly will the temper of the colony change?

The expectation is that the temper of the colony should gradually improve from ~21 days after the queen was released and started laying. That's because it will be three weeks until there are any workers originating from your new queen.

You should then expect all the workers to be replaced over the following couple of weeks (based upon the known - rather short - lifespan of worker bees).

This means that the entire process will take ~5-6 weeks ... nothing like instantaneous.

However, in reality it's not unusual for the temperament of the colony to improve almost overnight.

Not sufficiently for you to omit the gloves and veil, but enough to make you wonder whether you should have spent that £40 after all ... 😉. Remember, none of the workers are from the newly introduced queen, and won't be for another three weeks.

Like most things bee-related, I usually reckon this change in temperament is due to pheromones. The new queen is presumably younger than the one being replaced, so she'll produce more mandibular and footprint pheromones, all of which may calm the colony significantly.

Hang on ... you said 'usually' works

Introducing a new queen is not guaranteed to fix things. Despite presumably being from a selected line of bees, with a history of being calm, well-tempered, productive etc., the purchased queen is likely to be 'open mated'.

Actually, for £40 I can guarantee it.

'Open mated' means she mixed with whatever drones were in the area ... and if they were vagabonds, rogues or vagrants then her progeny may not be as well-behaved as you might like.

If you're willing to pay a lot more for a queen you can get them instrumentally inseminated (II), or mated in a tightly controlled 'closed' environment (like an island, or an isolated valley) flooded with drones of proven quality stock.

Expect a hefty three figure price tag ... but don't expect me to have any experience of them.

Over the years I've purchased a few queens. Probably less than a dozen in total. None have been terrible, most have been acceptable ... but I don't think any of them have been excellent.

Several have been superseded within weeks of being introduced.

I've certainly reared better queens than I've bought ... which I'll come onto once I've briefly dealt with what sometimes happens when the purchased queen is eventually replaced through swarming or supersedure.

Second generation fighters

There are a number of subspecies of honey bee (Apis mellifera), of which ligustica, carnica and mellifera are probably the best known and most widely managed for beekeeping. There are also well-known breeds, such as Buckfast bees, which are also widespread.

Sometimes, hybrids between subspecies, or between Buckfast bees and subspecies, produce aggressive progeny, despite the parental colonies being perfectly acceptable.

Like the pure island-mated or II queens, this is something I've got no experience with.

To avoid inbreeding, queens and drones usually fly different distances to drone congregation areas for mating. It's therefore unlikely to be bees in the neighbouring field that influence the performance of your locally-mated queens.

I've seen and handled some terrible bees resulting from natural crosses between a purchased queen and 'something else' in the neighbourhood, but the true parentage (often of either the queen or the drone(s) she mates with) was unclear. The defensiveness might have had nothing to do with the particular cross, but everything to do with just lousy genetics.

I have often used larvae from pure-bred native black queens (Apis mellifera mellifera; Amm) when queen rearing, with the virgins being open-mated in an environment containing a motley collection of other bees (though probably mostly Buckies and Carnies). Most of the resulting queens were perfectly acceptable, so I am very sceptical of the stories about any crosses with Amm being awful.

Caveat emptor ... the queen you spend £40 on may be great, the colony may be calm and productive and all the other things we want in our bees, but 'all good things must come to an end' and the queen will need to be replaced in 1-3 years.

Which means either buying another ... or taking pot-luck with whatever her daughter is like and hoping she is very picky when it comes to selecting suitable drones for mating.

Alternatively ... roll your own.

Good, bad and indifferent

I've reared 99% of the queens I've ever used {{9}}, learnt a lot about bees and beekeeping along the way, and had a whole lot of fun.

But I wouldn't have persevered if the resulting queens weren't good quality. After all, perfectly acceptable (though probably not outstanding) queens are less than £50.

Improving your own stock through selection is even slower than simply buying in a queen, but it's a much better long-term solution, it's more dependable, sustainable, educational and likely to produce (some) excellent queens.

Yes, there will be some duds along the way, and no, not all your queens will be outstanding, but it's relatively easy to produce some really nice bees like this.

The principles are straightforward ...

Keep good records of the traits that are important to you (temper, productivity, stable on the comb, frugality, etc.).
Only rear queens from your best stocks.
Always requeen your poor stocks with 'better' queens.

At every inspection I score colonies on a few traits that I care about. Over weeks or months it's easy to determine that some colonies - and therefore the queens that head them - are better than others.

Conversely, some are disappointing, poor or downright awful ... defensive (or worse, suicidally aggressive), very slow to build-up, lots of chalkbrood, spotty brood pattern, uncontrollably swarmy etc.

But between these two groups - the good and the bad - are those that are OK, but that could be better.

Think of these three groups as the good, the bad and the indifferent.

Improvement requires selection

Any bad colonies/queens are replaced - by requeening with good queens (see below) - at the earliest opportunity. Importantly, these colonies are not allowed to rear their own replacement queens. It also makes sense to fork out any drone brood they produce to prevent the poor genetics from being spread in the environment.

The indifferent colonies are allowed to rear replacement queens if there are no better queens available. However, preferably, these are requeened with good queens reared from my best colonies.

Finally, the only stock used for queen rearing are those that have consistently performed and behaved well over previous months; in good weather and bad, during strong nectar flows and dearth, overwinter etc.

Selection means being able to make a choice

You need a reasonable number of colonies to be able to see the range of good, indifferent and bad colonies. With just one colony you have no choice, and with a small number the choice is restricted ... perhaps all three of your colonies are really rather mediocre?

Collaborate with one or two other local beekeepers. Devise a simple, reproducible scoring system and do a few joint inspections to ensure you broadly agree on the scores allocated for particular colonies.

Simplicity here is the key.

A 48 point scoring system of 120 different traits is completely unworkable {{10}}. A three point scheme and a handful of characteristics (temper, stability, brood pattern, productivity ... whatever is important to you) is much more likely to be useful.

And so much more likely to be used.

You can always make it more ~~incomprehensible and unusable~~ comprehensive in the future.

Remember, more colonies gives you more choice, but only if you can meaningfully discriminate between them. I'd be happy to start with a choice from 9 or 10. Any fewer than that and things get more complicated as you may not be seeing the full range of the traits being scored.

'Queen rearing' ... surely that's complicated?

I've deliberately omitted any discussion on how you rear new queens from your best stocks to replace those in your worst.

That's because, for the purposes of stock improvement {{11}}, it does not matter.

At least when you're beginning, keeping things simple means you are much more likely to make progress.

So, no grafting, no bloated queenless cell raisers, no mini-nucs (definitely no mini-nucs!), no Nicot or JzBz or Jenter systems, no queen cell incubators, no Cloake or Morris boards ... no expense, no complications and no new techniques to master.

😄.

Instead ...

You want to improve your stock, have collaborated with a couple of friends and have comparable records of a dozen colonies from August last year (explaining the timing of this post).

You agree that three colonies are markedly better than the rest, and four are unpleasant (or worse).

It's mid-May and a 'bad' colony starts to make queen cells ...

Day 0: remove the queen and destroy any queen cells that have been produced in the poor quality colony. While you're at it, fork out any drone brood that's present.
Day 3: add a frame of drawn comb to the centre of one of the good colonies. I sometimes use a super frame for this if I've got no good drawn brood comb. It helps if the comb is relatively new, not old and dark.
Day 7: carefully go through the de-queened 'bad' colony and remove all the additional queen cells that have been produced. This colony is now terminally queenless. There are no eggs or larvae left young enough to rear as a queen.
Day 7: recover the frame added to the 'good' colony, check that the queen has laid in the frame which will now contain eggs and very young larvae, gently brush off the adhering bees, and place the frame in the centre of the de-queened 'bad' colony.
Day 14: check the frame of eggs/larvae for queen cells and destroy all but one of them (but also see the note below).
Day 28-35: check the colony for a new mated, laying queen ... and look forward to the behaviour of the colony improving as the worker population are replaced over the next few weeks.

💡

Remember that you've got three other 'bad' colonies and several others scored as 'indifferent'. If there are spare queen cells produced on your introduced frame, you can cut these out and use them, having first de-queened the recipient colony.

There are a myriad of alternative ways of achieving a similar outcome. This is just one, selected to show how uncomplicated it can be.

Conclusion

In adverse conditions, poorly tempered colonies can be unpleasant to handle and may be unmanageable. Understandably - and I've done this myself - the beekeeper postpones an inspection rather than facing the wrath of the disturbed colony.

This might be inconsequential, but it might lead to the loss of a swarm. No big deal ... unless it subsequently moves into the nursery school loft space and terrorises the staff and children.

Conversely, well-tempered bees are manageable in adverse weather, are a delight to work with in good conditions and are unlikely to be aggressive to passers-by.

It therefore makes sense to cull the queens heading poor colonies and replace them with a queen selected for docility and performance, as well as any other characteristics important for your beekeeping.

You can do this by routinely purchasing new queens from a reputable supplier {{12}}. This works, but be aware that they may not have queens when you need them, that - at the prices most beekeepers can afford - the queens are open mated {{13}} and so their quality cannot be guaranteed, and that subsequent crosses from these queens may be aggressive.

Alternatively, you can rear your own queens using any of the thousands of different methods that ingenious beekeepers have invented. These strategies range from the surprisingly simple, to the cursedly complicated, but the method used is largely irrelevant as far as stock improvement goes.

What matters are keeping informative records, only rearing from your best bees and rigorously replacing the worst.

Over time - and a surprisingly short period of time, perhaps 3-4 years - you will see a marked improvement in your colonies ... and your enjoyment of beekeeping.

Go forth and multiply.

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References

Harpur, B.A., Kadri, S.M., Orsi, R.O., Whitfield, C.W., and Zayed, A. (2020) Defense Response in Brazilian Honey Bees (Apis mellifera scutellata × spp.) Is Underpinned by Complex Patterns of Admixture. Genome Biology and Evolution 12: 1367–1377 https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaa128.

{{1}}: Oorlich, as they might say in Scotland, meaning damp, chilly and utterly unpleasant. Or perhaps, sh*te, a term both distinctly Scottish and - unlike oorlich - universally understood.

{{2}}: Swot.

{{3}}: So yet more slaving over spreadsheets, nights in cheap New York hotels or evenings on the M25, as your profit from honey sales has just taken a nose-dive.

{{4}}: Though it does involve a gene designated, appropriately, sting-2.

{{5}}: A contraction of never-do-well ... meaning rogues, vagrants or vagabonds i.e. good for nothings.

{{6}}: Don't make up a nuc with her 'just in case' or, worse, give her to another beekeeper (!) ... you're replacing her because she's a bad 'un.

{{7}}: There are hundreds of alternative ways of introducing queens ... I've not tried them, and don't need to as I have a method that works for me.

{{8}}: Old, hard fondant. Tesco's wedding cake fondant! ... as I'd got no candy in my bag.

{{9}}: That's an overestimate for emphasis. Assuming I've only ever bought 12, and that's 1%, that would mean I've 'used' 1200 queens ... assuming annual replacement, that would allow requeening my 20 colonies for 60 years. I'm not that old.

{{10}}: There are a couple I've seen promoted online that are laughably unusable. I use a 5 point scale (1 = poor, to 5 = excellent) and am seriously considering reducing this to just 3 points (1 = bad, 2 = OK, 3 = good).

{{11}}: At least at the level I'm discussing here.

{{12}}: Where reputation is determined by the purchaser not the social media presence or advertising budget.

{{13}}: And it's almost certain that the brood pattern and the quality of that brood will not have been tested ... you're buying a recently mated queen that probably came from a mini-nuc a few days ago.