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NEW ZEALAND BEEKEEPER, FEBRUARY 2017
Bee improvement comes from breeding from your best local hives. You will soon see which ones suit your style of beekeeping and your area. If the selected hives come from different families (or beekeepers), all the better, as some you can graft off and raise drones from the rest, hopefully by flooding an area with drones so the progeny produced will be as good as, if not better than what you have now. off her wings but somehow she survived and although another queen was present, she was eventually accepted and could be seen laying eggs on the same frame as the resident (I believe) queen. The most queens I have seen in a hive at the same time (in the spring) was three: two were on the same side of the frame together. There was an older, thinner mother, a big, fat, young laying daughter queen and another smaller (perhaps a virgin) on the other side of the frame. Rather than waste the young queen, I introduced her to a nuc and she successfully established a colony (see photo, above right). So even though most books say there is only one queen in a hive, perhaps as many as 20–30% of hives could have two queens at some stage during the season. Bee improvement comes from breeding from your best local hives. By all means, bring in different genetic material from different queen breeders and put them in the same apiary, set hives up equally and then manage them identically over one or two seasons.
A two-queen hive. Note the worn wing on the old queen.
References Jeffery, G. (2015, March). How to select a breeder queen. The New Zealand BeeKeeper, 23 (2), 26. Woodward, D. (2007). Queen bee: Biology, rearing and breeding. Telford Rural Polytechnic. Hooper, T. (2010). Guide to bees and honey (5th ed.) Hebden Bridge, United Kingdom: Northern Bee Books. Cramp, D. (2008). A practical manual of beekeeping. Oxford, United Kingdom: How To Books.
Mother and daughter queens from another hive. I marked the older one in red (at right). The young queen can be seen at the top of the frame, centre left. Photos: Frank Lindsay.
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