Post by cff on Jun 5, 2008 22:40:02 GMT -5
So... can you breed a queen from a wild swarm with domesticated ones, or are the wild bees just feral domesticated bees?
Johno"
A queen only breeds one time in her life, she may mate with 10 or more drone (male bees) on her mating flight but once she's been bred she never mates again.
So a feral queen could not be bred if she is already laying in a hive. She would produce drones that could integrate with domesticated bees and vise versa.
A few years ago I did a removal from a house, the bees were in the boxing of the house and they seemed to be feral bees. When I opened up the boxing to expose the bees I could see about ten feet of comb that was about fore inches in depth. The bees were small bees jet black about the size of your pinky fingernail. I stopped counting stings after 40 something; much more aggressive that your typical domesticated bees but nothing like Africanized bees .I never saw the queen; I may have killed her accidentally while I was removing the comb but I did save some of the brood comb that I later grafted from. The offspring queens from the cutout bred on my yard with Russian drones and produced some really nice queens that I put in out yards for honey production.
A lot but not all breeder queens are artificially inseminated to ensure good genetic diversity; inbreeding in bees generally produces a fairly warm bee to work with. I've wanted to learn to AI breed queens for a long time but the cost of the equipment is around $3,000 dollars = maybe someday.
Without AI breeding you have to depend on mother nature and open mating. My grafted queens will fly to a (drone congested area) mate with eight to ten drones of there choice and hopefully make it back to the starter hive. When I buy breeder queens I get two different lines of Russian queens to improve the genetic diversity in my home apiary.
I do think there are still some feral bees in this country and I never pass up a chance to try cross breeding's.
Sometime this weekend I'll try to snap a few pictures of some recent grafted cells and the method I use here.