# Evaluating Queens - How long before you know?



## Brandy (Dec 3, 2005)

Totally up to you and what you have in your apiary. Pick the best from whatever you have. Just do it!! Doesn't matter if you have 10 hives or 100, pick the best you have with whatever traits you admire the most. I've had some swarms that were off the charts I've grafted from after 3 weeks, some over a winter, some two winters. Doesn't matter whatever trips your own trigger...


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

The longer the better. Three years of production records is nice, 4-5 years is exceptional.


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## Honey-4-All (Dec 19, 2008)

Seriously! ?????

How many 4 year old queens do you have floating around? 

What % last past 3.5 years? 

We are not talking about your grandfathers queens. 

Now a days if I hear of a queen older than 3 years its a rare exception?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I will instantly know when I got the breeders from a reputable bee farm that this queen was good
to graft from. The eggs they laid are straight on the bottom of the cells. They are gentle to work
with coming from the gentle stocks. After one month of solid laying pattern on the sealed broods,
I knew she was a keeper to do a graft. I believe that there are standards for a breeder queen's evaluation.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

If you believe you are good at making evaluations, take grafts from 1 year old. It makes breeding go faster. Length of the generations is one of the key factors in breeding progress. 

Of course older queens are more precisely evaluated, but because of the risks of losing the queen become bigger, two year old are a good compromise. 

Use spring crop (weight increase) as a prediction to whole year performance, save one year.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Other than looking at the queen's performance also look at
her ability to fend off the mites. If you are keeping the VSH 
bees then the F1 daughters have to take almost an entire year from Spring til Fall
to see if this hive is doing well on the mite control aspect. So for the F1 daughters you have
to wait until the following Spring to take a graft from. Of course, the drones play a big role in your area too.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

JSL is correct in that the longer you can observe a queen's performance the better. H4A is correct too. How many years can a queen last before she is superseded. Surely longevity must enter the equation in some way.

As a minimum, I would say....

You raise your queens in mid-summer and winter them in nucs or full sized hives. Come spring, you establish them in production hives. You follow their performance throughout that first summer rating them according to your selection criteria. You take those daughters through the second winter, and rate them in the spring for their ability to winter with a strong cluster. You follow that colony and her performance until queen rearing time and then make your breeder queen selections. So, the daughters go through two winters, one production season, and half of a second. If you can follow the daughters through another entire production season and the third winter, then so much the better. Good records are a must, and the facts rarely lie.

But then, as Marla says, sometimes it's just a gut feeling.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Michael, do you feel queen longevity can be bred for or are you mostly making the point that longer life just makes for a better time frame for evaluation.


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

H4A

The percentages are very low. When I first started, I could hardly find Italians that lasted into their 3rd season. Carnies were a little easier to find. The percentages and age are slowly increasing, but the Carnies still hold the records in my operation. They just seem to last longer. Older queens allow for longer evaluation, plus, I can test their daughters while the old mom is still around. Some queens are more capable at passing their desirable traits onto the next generation.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

I wonder. Have no proof that selecting 3 year old breeders will result in more queens that perform well for 3 years. Surely following queens for more years will result in more intelligent selection. 

I will say that a big complaint by beekeepers is that queens don't last as long as they used to. How are we supposed to have queens that perform well for 3 years or more, if we re-queen every colony every year? I don't re-queen by the calendar, but by performance, and I have lots of queens that perform well in their 3rd season.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> I wonder. Have no proof that selecting 3 year old breeders will result in more queens that perform well for 3 years. Surely following queens for more years will result in more intelligent selection.
> 
> I will say that a big complaint by beekeepers is that queens don't last as long as they used to. How are we supposed to have queens that perform well for 3 years or more, if we re-queen every colony every year? I don't re-queen by the calendar, but by performance, and I have lots of queens that perform well in their 3rd season.


Short queen longevity does seem to be a universal complaint. I assume first season losses are some combination of poor matings and virus issues. This summer we saw a failure rate somewhere between 15 and 20 %. It seems to be the new normal, at least for my operation.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I think it is more personal for the queen selection process either it is a local mated queen or an II breeder queen.
Mike has a point for the after the solstice queens. When we are talking about the II breeder queens, we don't want to wait
a season or 2 before grafting. In this case we want to make as many F1 daughters as we can from this queen. There are breeders that sometimes failed too. 
And adding to the mixed gene pool is where the drone come from. On the local mated queens, every batch of eggs that got laid by the breeder queen the daughter queen is a bit different since 50% of her genetic comes from the different local drones too. So is there a difference when you waited for 2 brood cycles or waited for the 2nd or 3rd years to do your graft? Surely, you can choose the breeder that already had overwintered the year before. And she also passed all your evaluation and selection criterias.
I'm sure if you are breeding queens for longivity then you will have to wait into the 3rd years to do your graft from. I have often wonder if the queens in the colder regions have a shorter life span than the queens in the warmer regions coming from the same bee farm. And also the reverse is true or not?


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Well, breeder queens are supposed to have been selected by some process, so why wouldn't you be raising daughters immediately? But to keep that line going, those daughters should be evaluated over time. 

If you select a breeder queen after 2 brood cycles, what have you selected for? Production? Swarming propensity? Hygienic, temper, or ability to winter? Nope, you've only looked at the brood pattern for a very short period of time. You might have several sisters that have great brood patterns after 2 cycles. Which one do you choose as your future breeder?

I would think that queens living in colder climates would last longer, as they shut down for a number of months each year.


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## mbc (Mar 22, 2014)

There's also the issue that an older queens eggs can become thinner, resulting in less vigorous larvae. Ideally one would raise lots of prime daughters from potential winners when they're younger but keep them for as long as possible for further evaluations and choosing the best lines to keep going with retrospectively.


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## Mbeck (Apr 27, 2011)

Can someone in the know comment on this thought.

The mixture of different drones and their genetics that an open mated queen contributes to her offspring may collectively make for an awesome hive. Individually those drone/queen combinations could vary from average to useless for grafting to produce queens. 

The practical application of selecting Queens to improve stock is more like picking a general direction than a specific target (or so it seems to inexperienced me).


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## JSL (Sep 22, 2007)

Mbeck,

A queen can have a "good genetic makeup" and be a productive individual, but based on her genotype may not produce consistently productive offspring. Progeny testing is one way to identify exceptional queens that produce a high number of exceptional daughters. If you ever read any of F. Ruttners writings, he referred to "blender" queens. These were great production queens that produced poor daughters.


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## Mbeck (Apr 27, 2011)

Thanks for confirming and explaining my thoughts. 

So is it fair to say that the only thing an open mated queen that heads a exceptional hive has "proven" is that her genetics blended with the combination available at the time of mating to produce the type of combination desired not that her offspring has the required genetics or is capable of replicating this perfect "genetic" storm?

Edit....
Looking back at what I wrote hopefully you can clean up that thought too


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## WBVC (Apr 25, 2013)

This is an interesting thread. 
If one was trying improve stock be it horses,cattle etc and you had no control of the sire side it would be somewhat of a crap shoot. Often the female genetics outweighs the male when one is looking at phenotypic expression or performance. Is this the same with bees. Some mares produce well with a wise selection of sires, others have poor offspring even with great sires.
In bees are the female traits stronger than male traits?
Just wondering.


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

JSL is correct. The F1 is great for production queens. However, I am hesitant to graft from them for the next season. Instead I will go back to the breeder queen to make more F1 to head my production hives again since so many F1 waiting to be evaluated.

mbc, I have a thinner egg Cordovan F1 daughter queen and a F1 very thicker egg daughter Italian/Cordovan queen to head my production hive. The larvae and workers from the F1 thin egg Cordovan queen are the same as the Italian/Cordovan hive. Both are laying and brooding now from a hive check today. I don't see lesser vigor of the larvae from both hives. The only difference is the Italian hive have more sealed broods than the Cordovan hive. Maybe the Cordovan hive already have the broods hatched. Both hives have fresh eggs too. The vigorness is about the same though the Italians are more prolific in gathering pollen today. The Italian has 8 frames while the Cordovan F1 has 12 frames.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Mbeck said:


> Can someone in the know comment on this thought.
> 
> The mixture of different drones and their genetics that an open mated queen contributes to her offspring may collectively make for an awesome hive.


Drones of an open mated queens can be "pure". That is why F1 freemated daughters of on II queen are used for drone production.

About the uncertainty, as Prof. Dr. J.P. Praagh put it in the last Buckfastimker magazine: "The amount of expected shared motherside genes within two daughter queens (or workers) varies from 0,001 to 49,999%."


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I don't get it. How can the drones from the F1 queen are pure? I thought the F1 queen
will be mated with 7 to 14 drones from different genetic lines say some carnis, italians, russians etc. in a
DCA. In some months I saw workers with different color so how can this be. Please explain.


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## mbc (Mar 22, 2014)

beepro said:


> I don't get it. How can the drones from the F1 queen are pure? I thought the F1 queen
> will be mated with 7 to 14 drones from different genetic lines say some carnis, italians, russians etc. in a
> DCA. In some months I saw workers with different color so how can this be. Please explain.


Drones come from unfertilised eggs, no sperm involved.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>I'm wondering how old a queen has to be before you consider it for grafting.

I want queens that have wintered with their bees (her offspring) at least one winter. Preferably two. Three doesn't hurt my feelings...


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## dsegrest (May 15, 2014)

When we look at the longevity of a queen or are we looking at the length of her laying viability.

The length of time a queen lays is based somewhat on how much sperm she acquires on her mating flight and how good it is.

I have heard that queens use the best sperm 1st, so the earlier the grafts are made, the better the male part of the genetics should be.


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## dsegrest (May 15, 2014)

Drones do have a granddaddy. The genetics are carried forward.


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## mbc (Mar 22, 2014)

dsegrest said:


> I have heard that queens use the best sperm 1st, so the earlier the grafts are made, the better the male part of the genetics should be.


I had heard otherwise, once the sperm have migrated into the spermathatica the queen has no control over which ones fertilize the eggs, in effect they are fairly randomly mixed and it's a tombola which ones pop out first.


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## snl (Nov 20, 2009)

mbc said:


> tombola


Mmmmm.........first time I've ever seen that word..............had to look up its meaning. Good usage!


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

A breeder can actually "cheat". Graft from a breeder queen early in the season. Before the virgin queens are mated, Instrumentally inseminate some. At 49 days in to the cycle, I am evaluating brood patterns, BUT THERE ARE HER EGGS PERHAPS 2 WEEKS BEFORE THAT. Grafting from the daughter queen's earliest larva, another generation can be made. If the daughter queen happens to prove out good, and the subsequent 3rd generation does, too, you are a year ahead in your genetic progress. There is still time for another generation in the same year in the Southern states in the U.S.A. and Southern Europe, even 5 generations in a year are possible.

This is admittedly speculative, but I'm trying exactly this with home made I.I. tools. The chances of getting consecutive generations of excellent bees are slim, so well-chosen queens and drones are a big help in bringing the chances up. Genealogy records must be kept, evaluations made, and "back-tracking" your data is now in order, but this offers me a chance at a great amount of genetic progress in a much shorter time if I get lucky in the selections.

The rest of the breeding program should go on as straightforward as primary business, and from that, I do not disagree with Dr. Latshaw or Michael Palmer about queens with good histories. For me, the data from the second year is usually the standard of judgement, when queens in the same yard really show me their stuff. If I start getting queens that last longer like they did a few years ago, I'll be comparing 3rd years, too.

I'm just cheating in hopes of making more progress faster by making a few extra bees and getting 2 or 3 generations out of one year.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

kilocharlie said:


> There is still time for another generation in the same year in the Southern states in the U.S.A. and Southern Europe, even 5 generations in a year are possible.
> 
> I'm just cheating in hopes of making more progress faster by making a few extra bees and getting 2 or 3 generations out of one year.


As I said in post 6, length of generation time ( two years, one year, one month) is one factor in making progress in breeding. But do you do any evaluations when doing 3 generations in one summer?


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

I would absolutely evaluate any potential breeder queen in a long season testing the overwinter
ability as well. Without these observation then there is no difference in picking a breeder from a 
production queen. Lots of good traits are lost if not keen observation and evaluation of a potential breeder.
I'm sure any good bkeeper has a way to do that to ensure a thriving apiary.


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