Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner. Группа авторов

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Honey Bee Medicine for the Veterinary Practitioner - Группа авторов


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Photo depicts a good queen pauses on the comb, an ad hoc group of adjacent nurse bees will turn to face her, offering her food, and antennating her to pick up her pheromones. Photo depicts a well-fed queen is an egg-laying machine, capable of producing an egg per minute, 24 hours a day.

      Queen Diet

      Queen Mating

       Practical application: It's important to know that if a virgin is constrained from mating by weather, that the chance of her ever successfully being mated decreases greatly after three weeks.

Photo depicts the untrained eye, virgin queens are difficult to spot. Photo depicts the leading edge of a drone comet chasing a virgin queen. At the top left you can see a drone starting to mount the queen. Slightly lower is what appears to be the previously-successful drone paralyzed and falling to his death after his explosive ejaculation.

      After mating, the queen homogenizes the received semen, and discards roughly 95% of it, holding the remaining mixed spermatazoa in a clear sac called the spermatheca, in which the spermatozoa can remain viable for years.

       Practical application: Temperature extremes, or certain insecticides and beekeeper‐applied miticides, may diminish the viability of the spermatozoa, causing early failure of the queen. The seminal fluid received may confer some immunity to pathogens (as well as pathogen exposure), and affect the spermatozoa of other drones.

Photo depicts a freshly-returned no-longer-a-virgin exhibiting mating sign. Photo depicts 10–14 days after emergence, a queen mated and commence laying the first of the half a million eggs that she may produce over her lifetime.

      Be aware that an egg may carry virions on its shell (notably Deformed Wing Virus), but inside carry proteins that confer transgenerational immune priming to her offspring (Salmela et al. 2015).

      Queen Performance

      A queen's performance is mainly measured by how eggs she lays each day.

       Practical application: A queen's potential performance is often throttled by the number of prepared, thermoregulated, empty brood cells available in the hive. A good queen cannot exhibit her full laying capacity until the cluster covers at least 10 deep combs, and even then she would be limited if there were appreciable amounts of honey or beebread in those combs. The exceptional queen can nearly completely fill 10 deep combs with brood.

      Young queens are typically more “exuberant” in their egg‐laying than are older queens (newly‐mated queens may even lay multiple eggs in a cell if there is not adequate room in the cluster). Young queens as a rule outperform older queens, although many queens are highly productive in their second year (which then often leads to swarming).

       The performance of a queen is based upon a few main factors (listed in approximate order of importance):

      1 How well she was fed and cared for during her larval


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