# Can I clip a virgin queen?



## Ben Franklin (May 3, 2011)

I have a virgin and a mated queen.

I know I can clip the mated one, but would a queen mate inside a hive if she is clipped?


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Since queens mate while FLYING thru drone congregation areas clipping a virgin queen would be a bad move.

Are these 2 queens in different hives?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Ben Franklin said:


> I have a virgin and a mated queen.
> 
> I know I can clip the mated one, but would a queen mate inside a hive if she is clipped?


Since your profile lists 40+ years in beekeeping I will assume you are joking. Sooooo of course they can.


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## Ben Franklin (May 3, 2011)

Yes, well yes and no,
the one is a swarm, now I can't be sure if she is mated or not but I also do not see any drones.
I do have drones at the bee yard.
I was just wondering.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Maybe you do need to update your profile, since what Jim says is true. 40 - + years a beekeeper and you don't know that queens mate on ther wing and finding swarms w/ virgin queens is somewhat rare?

Maybe you profile should read 4 - + years owning bees?

What kind of farming did you do?


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

I do get my education on here....

I kinda thought they had to fly to mate. So it would be very very hard to have a controlled mating flight, unless it was in a big barn or something, then you could choose the drones?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Gypsi said:


> I do get my education on here....
> 
> I kinda thought they had to fly to mate. So it would be very very hard to have a controlled mating flight, unless it was in a big barn or something, then you could choose the drones?


I know things are pretty big in Texas but I'm betting even you folks don't have a barn that big.


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## Ben Franklin (May 3, 2011)

Maybe I should say on my profile, had bees for 40 -+ years, and say bee keeper this year.

I just started working with the bees very close this year.

As to what type of farming I have done, well raising beef cattle and grains. Most recently before I retired I went back to my roots, growing produce and selling 
at
farmers' markets.

As for this swarm, the queen looks mated,, she is a real beautiful looking lady.

Some times the stupendous sounding question is the one lots of others are afraid to ask.


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

jim lyon said:


> I know things are pretty big in Texas but I'm betting even you folks don't have a barn that big.


:applause::lpf::applause:

I guess my days as a fish breeder, chunk the pair in an aquarium or small pond, might be showing? 

Seriously, it sounds, reading Russell's site, like he is artificially inseminating queens. Is that true? And is that common?


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Gypsi said:


> :applause::lpf::applause:
> 
> I guess my days as a fish breeder, chunk the pair in an aquarium or small pond, might be showing?
> 
> Seriously, it sounds, reading Russell's site, like he is artificially inseminating queens. Is that true? And is that common?


Sure that is a tool breeders have used for years. Not something you would do with production queens. Queen matings can occur in drone congregation areas which can be quite a distance from the hive possibly even a mile or more. Quite a miracle of nature, there is a lot of go info on this site about it. now about those barns......


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

I have never seen a mile long barn..... Still laughing. Things aren't THAT much bigger in Texas!


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>would a queen mate inside a hive if she is clipped? 

No.

http://www.bushfarms.com/huber.htm#letter2

"ALL the experiments, related in my preceding letter, were made in 1787 and 1788. They seem to establish two facts, which had previously been the subject of vague conjecture: 1. The queen bee is not impregnated of herself, but is fecundated by copulation with the male. 2. Copulation is accomplished without the hive and in the air. "--Francis Huber

If she is clipped as a virgin she will never mate and never lay.


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## Ted Kretschmann (Feb 2, 2011)

Mate she will not. She will lay eggs given enough time over thirty days after emergence and not fertilized. But she will only lay Drone eggs due to her infertility. Thus the term "Drone Layer"......TED


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

I have yet to see a virgin who couldn't fly every lay at all. Huber did a lot of experiments and came to the same conclusion. Maybe if you wait long enough, but I must have never waited long enough, although I've given them a month or so.


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## RAK (May 2, 2010)

I have waited 3 months until an unmated queen started to lay... the offspring was all big drones...


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Ben Franklin said:


> Maybe I should say on my profile, had bees for 40 -+ years, and say bee keeper this year.


Ben,
I'm just confused. Don't take this personally as an attack, but how can you have bees for 40 years and not know much about them? Was beekeeping something your wife or father did, but didn't involve you?

Ask away, but w/out our understanding where you are coming from w/ the question, our answers will be incomplete and perhaps meaningless.

Queens in swarms are usually mated queens. They are usually the queen which was in the hive of the swarms origin. If you now have this swarm in a hive, clipping the queen can be done. But, in my opinion, it isn't necassary. I have never clipped a queen and I don't think I have ever seen a clipped queen.

Gypsi,
Controlled mating is accomplished by having so many colonies of a certain strain of bee saturating a particular area that other starins of bees have little chance of mating w/ virgin queens of ones own production. Especially having many drone producing colonies around mating yards. Hundreds or thousands of mating nucs, hives and drone colonies.

Also one can go to remote places like islands and, like here in the Adirondacks, bee free areas where colonies are brought in for mating purposes. There is a place near Mineville, NY, where Cornell University used to do just that. There is little to forage on during the nice part of the year and during the winter it is quite harsh and unfriendly to bees, so no feral colonies are found there.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

I don't think one needs a really large barn, do they? wouldn't one expect mating to occur in an airplane hanger of sufficient size? Certainly really large ones are tall enuf. I bet there are some unused or abandoned ones somewhere around the country which could be used for this purpose.

Seems to me I recall Dr. Roger Morse setting up such a thing inside Dyce Lab at Cornell and there isn't alot of room there. He, and/or his Graduate Students, did some indoor experiments/observations concerniung flight and mating. I'll have to ask around about that, if I remember.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Interesting, I may have to stand corrected. I would assume that temps and sun angles all play a part and that matings would be virtually impossible. I know of a beekeeper who used to do a lot of queen breeding in a remote area of the Nebraska sandhills. I'm sure there are a lot of other isolated areas like that though I am sure that constant feeding would no doubt be the norm most years.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

You may be correct about that. Conditiuons may be critical. Beyond my knowledge.

RRUSSELL!!?


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## valleyman (Nov 24, 2009)

Someone please correct the statement that I am going to make. But please only do so if you are realitively sure of your correction.
Drones fly an average of 2 miles to DCA's and no more. Queens fly at least 3 miles to mate. These traits seem to be unchanged for millions of years. I'm sure there are an occasional mishap in their natural system of preventing inbreeding, but beebreeders understand this and can hopefully identify the inbred hive. The said hive is obviously going to have major problems. I also feel that one could get lucky and get a queen to mate in an airplane hanger, or a barn in Texas, but how could that be feasible especially when the breeders have II available to them. I understand that the II queens life and usefulness as layer is limited. Good luck with reinventing the wheel, and/or changing the queens, and drones natural instincts.
What we really need is some bird on here to straighten us all out with their incredible intelligence.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Valleyman: You may well be right though I might question your mileage assertions. Though I don't claim to be an expert in this field, my guess, is that nature does have some built in safeguards to minimize inbreeding. It may well be that one of these is the simple fact that virgins fly faster than drones (at least I think this is an accepted fact) and therefore would reach these DCA's (wherever they may be) well ahead of the drones from her own hive and may be well into the mating process before her own offspring arrive. The fact virgins are mated multiple times and make multiple flights may very well in itself relegate the inbreeding problem to minor status.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Many people from Huber on up to now have tried indoor mating and I have never heard of any consistently positive results.

"Mating in Confinement a Failure. 
"Some practical method of absolute control of mating has long been sought. At the University of Minnesota Prof. Jager succeeded in getting one queen impregnated artificially and for a time it was hoped that enough queens could be mated in this way for use in breeding experiments. However, after numerous trials on the part of Prof. Jager, C.W. Howard, and L.V. France, at the University, no further successful in-stances have been reported. 

"The A. I. Root Company tried some rather elaborate experiments in getting queens mated in large greenhouses, but these were likewise a failure. While enthusiasts have claimed success at different times by one method or another, their claims have generally been discredited, and up to the present, there seems little prospect of artificial control of the mating. About all that now seems possible, is to select isolated situations for the mating stations, or to limit the breeding of drones as far as possible in undesirable colonies, and encourage it in the colonies from which it is desirable to breed. "--Frank C. Pellett, Practical Queen Rearing


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## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

this thread should have been started by acebird.


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

will someone just tell me if giving robber bees a shower to get them off my hive was a good thing?


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## beeware10 (Jul 25, 2010)

not sure what giving bees a bath has to do with the mating of a virgin queen , but spraying water is not practical to stop robbing.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>will someone just tell me if giving robber bees a shower to get them off my hive was a good thing? 

It's not a bad thing. It will help in the short run, but you need to do something in the long run.

http://www.bushfarms.com/beesrobbing.htm


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

Thank you. I posted elsewhere, no replies. I've resumed yard feeding again tonight. Was trying not to.


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## rrussell6870 (May 14, 2009)

Gypsi, you are probably going to have to maintain some open feeding until: A... you hive is strong enough or has a mechanical method of defending itself... or B... you locate the robbing colony and do something about them, capture them and feed them internally, feed them heavily at their location, etc... you get the idea... 

Have you looked into that Country Rube brand robber screen? I never use robber screens, but my goals and situation are different than yours, so it may be helpful... I saw a video on here of that one recently and it appeared to be a good design...


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## Gypsi (Mar 27, 2011)

There are multiple robbing colonies, we are in extreme drought/dearth/heat. The weather is about to change, that may help. I am open feeding this morning and I got the duct tape back on my robber screen, the screen never came off, but they were giving a serious effort to getting in that side when I got the garden hose - ant space gap between screen wood and the hive body is now duct taped again. I've looked at the country rubes robber screen, but am just not ordering anything for bees at the moment. Short on cash. I am feeding the robbers in the shade on the other side of the lot, they found the quart jar feeder this morning, I turned it over for them. 

Sorry for the hijack


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