Effect of Virgin Queens Storage on Their Survival Rate, Attractiveness and Acceptance by the Honey Bee Colonies

Abstract

Virgin honeybee queens, were held in the centre of brood nest of both queenless and queenright strong colonies using two types of cages and fed by workers through a wire screen holes, emerging cage (EC) with two wire screen sides and Benton cage (BC) with one side of wire screen. Mean survival rate of stored queens in both cage types were not differ significantly. Storage virgin queens within queen-right colony was influenced reversely by the presence of colony laying queen as the survival rate was significantly lower (68.0%) than queens stored in queenless colonies (77.4%). The attractiveness of introduced virgin queens 30 days old to workers increased when the duration of queenlessness increase from 1 to 7 days and also, the acceptance percentage of them. The number of workers attracted by virgin queens was increased with the storage periods (3, 15 and 30days) as the lowest significant number was for the 3 days period, while there were no significant differences between the rest of periods. The younger and older queens were most significantly accepted than the intermediate ones. Workers in the 5 days queenless nuclei were more attracted and easily accepted the introduced virgin queens than those in similar queenless strong colonies.