By: Ruth Meredith
Note: The photo to the left was originally submitted as part of the image gallery contest. It was so unique that Jerry reached out for more information.
I was the recipient of the 2022 grant by a local bee club, the NansemondBeekeepers.com. They hold an annual Painted Hive Body Competition to raise awareness of honey bees and sell the painted boxes to raise money for bee research (they had an article in the January 2022 issue of Bee Culture on page 49).
Photo 1
Since I am a boutique queen producer, I wanted to study the effects of queen bee drifting in mating boxes. My only “open space” for the project in my ⅓ acre residential yard was on top of the shed roof, 10 feet up in the air. One side of the Mann Lake styrene double mating nucs was painted in colorful hues. The other side was the original white. Each nuc entrance was numbered and the virgin queens were painted with a different colored dot prior to their mating flight or a numbered disk was glued to their thorax. Box numbers and colors of the dot on the virgin queen were recorded.
Photo 2
I also did trials with temp queen vs. no temp queen in the mating box. Three full trials of virgin queens were conducted in the boxes with no noticeable drifting on the all white side, which is what I predicted would happen. Temp queen was so beneficial in holding worker bees to these small nucs that it was continued the entire three cycles. I also did not find any detrimental effects to marking a virgin queen prior to mating and this now gives me enough confidence that I pre-mark all of my virgins that emerge in the incubator so that I am certain of the race (Buckfast or Carniolan) that I have in the mating nucs.
Photo 1 is the photo of the white side of the mating nucs for the trial comparison. Photo 2 is loading them up (temp queen is the bundle of bees in the foreground). And yes, I did end up falling off the ladder at one point in the trials.
Contact email: ruthiesbees@yahoo.com
