# Mating yard questions.



## drlonzo (Apr 15, 2014)

It is common practice when setting up mating yards/locations to have the "Drone Colonies" there near the mating NUC's. It gives your drones the ability to find the local DCA where your queens will go to, in order to mate up. That gives you the best chances of getting the selected drone traits you want in your bees. 

Depending upon how far your home is away from the planned mating yard, you may be able to leave them there, but if they are more than about a half mile away, I would move the drone colonies to where the mating yard is.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

20 hives is not enough to run a isolation mating yard. If there are no bees (=drones) is the woods, you really need to get half of your colonies(8-10) there as drone producers to get properly mated queens. You run into inbreeding problems very soon unless you get new varroa resistant material regularly.

On the other hand if you have an idea that there might be some drones from wild beehives in the forest (could they be resistant to varroa?) it would be something interesting, and the number of dronehives would be lower. 

Make a test: set up 5 mating nucs with queen but without drones in the forest, put there no drone hives. Come back after three weeks and see how many queens are laying. If none, you have first class mating yard.


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## Andrew Dewey (Aug 23, 2005)

It is my understanding (based on things I've read - not from first hand experience) that drones and queens from the same yard will generally use different DCAs - with the queens flying to a more distant DCA. Based on this logic (and corrections are welcome!) placing both mating nucs and drone mother colonies at the same isolated location will not yield the intended matings.

I looked up the source for this for another thread and while I do not have the book in front of me as I type it was Larry Connor's Increase Essentials.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Isolation mating is when the distance to other bees is at least 8-10km. Then it is reasonable sure that the queens will mate with the drones provided.

I looked briefly in "Hive and the Honeybee", I could only find that "queens fly up to several kilometres from the apiary" and "drones usually fly within 3 km from the apiary"
I have never seen any study of the drones and queens flying on purpose to different drone congregation areas (DCA).


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

A study in 2007 by Koeniger in Germany (?) showed that queens fly only as long as it takes them to be sufficiently mated. Mating flights lasted from 10 to 30 minutes, with the shorter flights producing more sperm in oviducts than the longer flights. I read a study that said all colonies within flight distance from a DCA will have drones in that DCA, so any DCA should have enough foreign drones for mating. Isolated mating station studies in the U.K. found that when drones from foreign colonies were limited the queens mated with drones from their own apiary.


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## zhiv9 (Aug 3, 2012)

I think Larry Connor talks about this in a recent issue of the ABJ. Maybe in reference to a translated book/research by German brothers studying queens and drones? Unfortunately I don't have it in front of me to confirm.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

AR Beekeeper said:


> A study in 2007 by Koeniger in Germany (?) showed that queens fly only as long as it takes them to be sufficiently mated.


Makes sense and does not support the idea of queens trying to fly further away from their own hives DCA.

I have once met them on a beekeepers meeting, a couple that has studied for instance mating biology and bee races of Asia, he worked as head of the same Institute as Friedrich Ruttner. 

http://de.institut-fuer-bienenkunde.de/zusammenarbeit-mit-der-universitaet-frankfurt.aspx


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## BeeGhost (May 7, 2011)

Last spring I made up mating nucs which were also loaded with drones. I put those mating nucs right on the edge of a large, flat clearing that would seem to be the perfect DCA and im sure with the help of feral stock all my queens were mated very well and produced great hives. I also had a very high success rate of returning bred queens, like 100% of nucs that had a queen cells put in them and emerged!! I would rather have a queen mating yard void of dragon flies and low numbers of predatory birds than worry about "Sancho" drones breeding my queens!!

My bee yard sits right on the delta and although the queens that make it back are very well mated with foreign drone stock, not many make it back to the hives from mating flights due to dragon flies!!


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## dsegrest (May 15, 2014)

zhiv9 said:


> I think Larry Connor talks about this in a recent issue of the ABJ. Maybe in reference to a translated book/research by German brothers studying queens and drones? Unfortunately I don't have it in front of me to confirm.


Just read the article last night. Larry said that queens fly an average of 1.9 miles. Drones go to the closest DCA. The queen tries to go further than her brother drones.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

dsegrest said:


> Just read the article last night.


Are there any literature references in the end of the article?


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## THALL (Apr 6, 2010)

With only a small number of colonies and queens being raised within your apiary I wouldn't worry / invest so much time into propagating drones to target an isolated mating scheme. I found that I needed at least a 100 colonies made up with a handful of different families just to start to break the surface on selecting for potential breeder queens.


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## Ralf_H (Dec 20, 2013)

Hi Juhani!


Juhani Lunden said:


> Are there any literature references in the end of the article?


The only reference in this article is the book by Koeniger and Koeniger, J Ellis and L. Connor: "Mating Biology Of Honey Bee Queens"
In the german edition there are (to my surprise) also no explicit references. Mr. and Mrs. Koeniger write about their own work of the last decades partly together with F. Ruttner. Nevertheless it's a very informative book. The take home message according to DCAs is as dsegrest wrote: Drones choose the nearest DCA, while Queens tend to choose a farer away DCA, probably as a way to avoid inbreeding. Another aspect ist that a drone has limited "fuel" and therefore only a limited time in the air. So his chances to meet a queen decreases with growing distance to a DCA. In contrast for a queen the mating with enough drones only takes a few minutes, so she is able to fly more than 10 minutes in one direction = about 3 km without risk of not getting mated.
Ralf


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Ralf_H said:


> Drones choose the nearest DCA, while Queens tend to choose a farer away DCA, probably as a way to avoid inbreeding.


Hi Ralf!
Koenigers, Ellis and Connors book says so?

Maybe some pheromones guide the queens to fly to a different DCA..
I just wonder how they have been able to study this, I think they did not have possibility to glue some microchips to queens those days. Or did they use cordovan hives?


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## Ralf_H (Dec 20, 2013)

Hi Juhani,
the Koenigers write about many experiments from different scientists beginning in the 60th (J. Woyke) but don't give a reference. They don't tell in detail how those experiments were conducted. 
Sorry.
Best regards
Ralf


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

brandongunn2003 said:


> I currently have 20 hives at my house in town and plan to graft a few batches of queens next year. The valley I live in has only 4 beekeepers that I am aware of. I have a couple places deep in the forest where I can set up mating yards away from any other beekeepers. I have produced a few batches of queens and want to get the best results I can next year.
> 
> Should I set up deep in the woods with a few hives filled with drones, or will I be fine saturating my yard with drones here in the valley.


I think its a case of the more effort you put in, the more likely you are to get the sort of result you want. My apiaries contain a mix of bees bought in from something like a fifteen mile radius over 4 years, with about 40% being home-raised colonies using material from my best 4 or 5. That's in an environment where beekeepers have constantly been bringing in bees from heaven knows where for donkeys years, and where natural selection has been working on them (and likely remnants of native bees) all the time (though with a dip through the worst of the early varroa period). In my view there's almost no chance of inbreeding problems unless I try to concentrate a single 'line' massively - and I'm not about to do that.

I think we need to keep a firm grip on what we mean by 'breeding' here. I'm looking to keep in qualities of self-sufficiency - I don't want bees that need my help or undermine my local ferals - and productivity. That's all. Many of my colonies fit the bill, and will be used to make increase. Its broad health-reinforcing breeding, nothing more.

At the same time I allow the larger colonies to make more drones. I try not to interfere with their idea of when its a good time to be making drones. And I try to keep enough to allow my drones to be a major influence in each generation. 

I wouldn't worry too much - especially about inbreeding. That's a concern for people trying to do things like line breeding, not open breeders. I'd use a range of your best colonies for queen material, and have plenty of their drones and others from good colonies about - and as few as possible from treated apiaries. I'd go to the forest for more self-sufficient genes, and they'll be cycled into your apiary to the extent they help with your aims. 

I do think it might be worth having a few strong hives at points around your apiary, say a mile away. That way any queens inclined to fly away from your apiary will fly into their range. But mostly focus on not interferring with your bees, giving them the chance to express their capabilities, and selecting wisely from proven colonies for new queens. (Give them two or three years to fail...) Otherwise its about getting good material to start with and avoiding overwhelming concentrations of treatment dependent drones. Good luck with your efforts - you sound like you'll win through. 

Mike (UK)


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

Shame this was put in the TF forum - so many people simply avoid this forum. This would have been better served in the Queen Breeding forum.

Nice discussion.


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

You could always put a link there. It belongs here just as much. Unless they're going to rely on constant input of new mated queens from TF breeders, people interested in TF need to understand the critical importance of selective propagation, including avoiding treatment-dependent drones. You might be lucky and have self-sufficient ferals about - otherwise if you want locally adaped bees you need to take charge properly. 

In my view both the TF discussions and the queen rearing discussion are the same thing. They're just about how to keep bees sustainably, properly. Maybe there should be a section 'Sustainable Beekeeping' in which the traditional complete and rounded methods are discussed.

Fat chance.

Mike (UK)


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## Eduardo Gomes (Nov 10, 2014)

This link http://www.biobees.com/library/research_other/insecticides/DroneCongregationAreas.pdf gives us more information on this subject and some very accurate data on how the investigation was operationalized.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Brandon - Check with the other beekeepers and see if their bees have desirable traits, first, before attempting to isolate your mating yard from them. Group planning to put many drone colonies together in a community yard and take turns placing your mating nuc's might benefit everybody.


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## mbc (Mar 22, 2014)

Andrew Dewey said:


> I looked up the source for this for another thread and while I do not have the book in front of me as I type it was Larry Connor's Increase Essentials.


Larry Conner's bee sex essentials, same author, different book, page 148, in summary, he advises putting "drone mothers or drone holding colonies in locations 0.5 to 1.0 miles from your mating yard."


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## mike bispham (May 23, 2009)

Eduardo Gomes said:


> This link http://www.biobees.com/library/research_other/insecticides/DroneCongregationAreas.pdf gives us more information on this subject and some very accurate data on how the investigation was operationalized.


Very informative Eduardo, thank you.

The piece speaks about both the distance drones travel to reach DCAs, the terrific diversity that results, and the fact that DCAs often form near apiaries. I'm not sure, but I think that reads as: DCA tend to form more near high concentrations of colonies (where there will be strong demand), and are comprised of males from a good distance (i.e. not likely to be yours!)

All in all that seems to say to me: concentrate your energies on the female side, let the the drones do their own thing, and anticipate lots of duff input from treated hives. Unless you want to go down the II route.

Mike (UK)


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