Abstract
Failure of the queen is often identified as a leading cause of honey bee colony mortality. However, the factors that can contribute to “queen failure” are poorly defined and often misunderstood. We studied one specific sign attributed to queen failure: poor brood pattern. In 2016 and 2017, we identified pairs of colonies with “good” and “poor” brood patterns in commercial beekeeping operations and used standard metrics to assess queen and colony health. We found no queen quality measures reliably associated with poor-brood colonies. In the second year (2017), we exchanged queens between colony pairs (n = 21): a queen from a poor-brood colony was introduced into a good-brood colony and vice versa. We observed that brood patterns of queens originally from poor-brood colonies significantly improved after placement into a good-brood colony after 21 days, suggesting factors other than the queen contributed to brood pattern. Our study challenges the notion that brood pattern alone is sufficient to judge queen quality. Our results emphasize the challenges in determining the root source for problems related to the queen when assessing honey bee colony health.
Highlights
The queen is arguably the most important member of a honey bee colony
Beekeepers are appreciative of queen health, as healthy queens lead to greater revenue generated from the sale of surplus bees, hive products, and pollination services
Are the signs and symptoms used to discern a good queen from a failing queen sufficient to inform management decisions? Finding an answer to this question is needed as queen health is a current issue in the beekeeping industry
Summary
The queen is arguably the most important member of a honey bee colony. She is tasked with the production of daughter workers that forage for resources and care for the brood—eggs, larvae, and pupae—and sons that support genetic diversity among colonies through mating with virgin queens from other colonies. Beekeepers rely on various metrics associated with a queen’s reproductive output when surveying their colonies to establish the health status of their queens. They use this information to make management decisions based on whether a queen is judged to be “good” or “failing”. Beekeepers repeatedly identify queen failure as a significant contributor to colony mortality in their responses on annual colony loss surveys, with commercial beekeepers—beekeepers that manage >500 colonies—ranking it as the first or second contributing factor [1,2]
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