On rereading this, I realise that for those who have not read the article I was
perhaps not clear when I referred to swapping queens. What I mean is that two
hives, one with a "poor" queen and one with a "good" queen have their queens
swapped over, so the "good" queen goes into the "poor" hive and vice versa.
On 3 Nov 2019, at 14:45, Gareth John (Redacted sender "grjohn" for DMARC)
<dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for that link, Paul. As you suggest, queen viability is something to
which I have given a lot of thought over the years.
As this will be a long post, bottom line up front: in my view there is no
such thing as a queen problem. Rather, what one sees is a hive problem which
shows itself most obviously in the queen. This is not to say that the
practice of requeening never works. Sometimes it does but that is just
another way of saying that the queen is part of the hive and, replacing the
queen is replacing part of the hive. Often, however, changing the queen does
not fix the problem. The article referred to demonstrates this when it
refers to swapping "poor" queens for "good" ones. The "good" queens become
poorer by an amount about equal to that by which the "poor" queens become
better. (In passing, I doubt that the difference between the two types of
swap -good for bad and bad for good- is quite as statistically significant as
the article suggests.)
Which brings us to the question: what is a "poor" queen. Laying pattern is
the standard measure but, as the article illustrates, by all other measures
of health, vitality, fecundity etc, laying pattern indicates nothing. hence
it is a poor metric.
But let’s look again at what constitutes a "good" pattern. The article says
this is:
<170708-06.jpeg>
But a natural pattern looks like this:
<PastedGraphic-1.png>
This spiral pattern was first discussed in the late 19th century by a German
beekeeper called Ferdinand Gerstung. Given the chance, the queen lays in
this spiral pattern in 3 dimensions through the hive. If the combs were laid
side by side, the laying path of the queen would look like this:
<Gerstung Sharpened.png>
So the "good" laying pattern "of a frame packed, wall-to-wall, with sealed
brood" is not a natural pattern at all but a likely artefact of the internal
geometry of the hive and frames.
The "bad" pattern is shown as this:
<20140622-0012.jpg>
The author says of this frame: "It was the only one I could find with a poor
brood pattern." So maybe it is a case of something about that particular
comb, rather than being an issue with the queen. Who knows?
And this, it seems to me is the essence of the issue: who knows? The bees
do, but we don’t. Sure, if every comb looked like the "bad" one, or there
was no brood in the hive apart from a couple of combs that looked like that,
I would say "failing queen". But, as I indicated above, that is just another
way of saying "failing hive". And hives fail for all sorts of reasons. If,
at the population level, bees are to be vibrant we have to allow them to
select out the hives/queens/bees that are not, in their terms, up to scratch.
That can be hard when one only has a hive or two, but is very necessary.
And we cannot see which bees are up to scratch merely by inspecting combs
(which is the whole point of this article). The bees have to do that for us,
and we have to trust them.
First and fourth photo from The Apiarist
<https://theapiarist.org/spotty-brood-failing-queen/>
Gareth
On 3 Nov 2019, at 12:24, Oxnatbees <oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:oxnatbees@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Here is a post from a blog I sometimes look at:
https://theapiarist.org/spotty-brood-failing-queen/ ;
<https://theapiarist.org/spotty-brood-failing-queen/>
The author ruthlessly pursues honey and profit, but if you can ignore that
there is plenty to learn from what he says.
What's interesting about this post is
The discussion of queen quality reflects what I've heard from Gareth: humans
have no idea of the quality of a queen and have arbitrary preferences;
BBKA training stresses this brood laying pattern stuff, but it doesn't match
my experience. They say you want a big solid patch of brood, this indicates
a "good" queen. I rarely see such large uniform expanses of brood and my
bees seem happy and healthy. I assume it's something to do with laying rate.
I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on the obsession with brood
patterns among commercial beeks. Is it really significant?
Paul
