I bought me a mail order Carnie queen (somehow that just sounds wrong lol) and she is tiny. She is only very slightly larger than the carnie workers that came as attendant bees. I used an overpopulated Italian hive as the source for workers and brood but I have 2 concerns... 1) since she is so small is it likely that the Italians will reject and supercede her? 2) is there much/any difference between the egg laying ability of a large vs a small queen? And once again as a newbee I truly appreciate any answers.
thanks and God Bless
Pill
G'day Pill,
I'm a newbie myself so please take what i say in light of that but my experience is this...
A few weeks ago i found a queen in a log hive i had been given (tiny log, two small combs, maybe 150 bees) she was noticeably a queen but smallish... four days ago i had to get the queen and cage her so i could introduce her in to a nucleus! she was massive! my point is that maybe the queen you have has only recently been mated and she might still be growing.. don't fret - if she's a queen no matter what size she is she will release a queen pheromone. So long as you follow the proper procedures of re-queening the hive should accept her. Once she is laying and you can observe her brood pattern and how proliferous she is then you will know if she is a good queen. For now just go with the flow (pardon the pun :-D)...
Ditto
Let her lay eggs for 2 weeks then check her. She will surprise you.
Queens fatten up a lot when they start laying.
I thought the same thing when I got some queens this summer that were banked for who knows how long. They were hardly any bigger than the workers in cage with her. After a couple weeks they fattened up considerably. I can remember for sure the figure but a queen can lay half her weight or more once she gets going in a single day. I believe much of here size when laying to full capacity is probably that she is full of eggs ready to lay. Also when laying eggs the nurse bees feed the queens as much as she can eat. When she is not laying she is on a major diet. You will also notice that a queen that is being prepared for swarming is shrunk down a lot.
The last queens I got must have been taken right from a nucleus colony before they were shipped which I got one day later. Upon inspection one week later they were some of the biggest queens I have yet seen. There are studies that say when a queen rearer does not allow a queen to get in full swing before they bank her she will not develop as large of ovaries as a queen which has been allowed to lay for a longer length of time. From what I have read, most queen rearers like mini mating nucs with as little as a cup of bees in them. As soon as she is mated and laying they put her in a cage and stick her in a colony which only purpose is to feed these queens in there cages till they are shipped. This is one more reason it is best to raise your own queens if you can.
I got two batches of queens that were banked for a long period and Im guessing half of these were superseded in a months time. So my opinion is that the sooner you get a queen from mating nuc to cage and back into a colony to lay the better. And if you can get your queens locally and they grab the queen strait from a nuc (and not a mini nuc) and stick her in a cage when you arrive or shortly after is the best option next to raising your own.
I also ordered queens this year and was surprised at how small they were until I did more reading here. I ordered 8 and out of that 4 were superseded immediately. Since the colonies that received them had been queenless to begin with, the new queens had at least provided the eggs for that process. Not the most perfect of scenarios, but it worked out well in the end.
thought the same thing when I got my first purchased queens. but they have fattened up quite nicely now
My wife did the same thing.............whoa did I say that out loud.
:lau: