Abstract
A study was conducted in view of analyzing the responses of central highland honeybees (Apis mellifera bandasii) to Karl Jenter and Doolittle grafting queen-rearing methods at Holeta for two consecutive active seasons. The result of the study revealed that there was significant difference (p<0.001) between the techniques in percentage of accepted larvae and sealed queen cells. The acceptance rates for Karl Jenter and Doolittle grafting queen rearing methods were 78.19 and 50.81%, respectively while the rates were 42.75 and 25.56% for sealing, respectively. However, the result of the study showed that the rate of hatching (out of the total given larvae) into virgin queen stage in Karl Jenter and Doolittle grafting systems were about 23 and 23.8%, indicating no significant difference between the two techniques. From this study it is recommended that using Karl Jenter kit is an excellent option to overcome the problem of indentifying appropriate larvae for grafting under field conditions. However, there might be a difference in quality of the queens obtained from these two methods. Therefore, also further study recommended to evaluate the performance of queens reared using the two techniques.
Highlights
A honeybee queen alone has significant effect on the colony and is one of the most important factors in a bee colony’s production and productivity performances [1]
The most important factor could be due to lack of identifying appropriate age and injury to the grafted larvae in Doolittle grafting due to personal error compared to Karl Jenter system
Several investigators [2, 9, 16] indicated that the responses of colonies towards different queen rearing techniques are greatly affected by agro ecological conditions, race of honeybees and pollen source plants
Summary
A honeybee queen alone has significant effect on the colony and is one of the most important factors in a bee colony’s production and productivity performances [1]. Several production and productivity traits such as disease resistance, prolificacy, and early population build up, surplus honey storing tendency and many other behavioral characters are attributed to the nature of a queen [2,3,4]. In order to improve performances of a honeybee colony, better performing queen is one of the indispensable parts of beekeeping. In this regards, artificial queen rearing techniques, is one of the important approaches to help producing of queens with desirable characters in beekeeping to regularly re-queen colonies, to minimize swarming tendency, to enhance brood and honey production, and increase colony stock number. Researchers have tried to produce queens from appropriate larval stages by involving different queen rearing [2, 4, 8,9,10,11] no convenient and economical method has been developed as recipe to fit all races of bees, and all beekeepers and conditions [8, 9]
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