A tale of two queens
4 August 2008 20:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enismirdalSpent the weekend with the lovely ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tuxedo_elf and family, in which we went to a dog show, introduced Jupiter to the joys of agility training, ate doughnuts and saw Prince Caspian (which is fun, if corny, and seems to consist mostly of scenes apparently borrowed from LOTR, but Caspian is and a dish and was clearly sleeping with Peter whilst pretending to go out with Susan for appearances' sake).
Today...back to work. And so, about the queens.
A couple of weeks ago, my Everlasting Colony (seriously, the queen died 1.5 months ago and yet it's still got quality workers and is yielding excellent data) somehow produced two queens. This came as some surprise, since their mother had been dead for around a month, the colony at the time they must have been laid wasn't anywhere near failing (no males, which is the usual sign of an old colony, and when you'd expect to see the first queens), and since a week after the queen died I more or less stopped feeding the colony pollen since I didn't anticipate any new bees except worker-laid males to appear from then on1. So these queens had taken a month to develop, on a near-starvation diet. Which explains why they're unusually small - more like large workers.
In fact, initially I thought they were large workers. Until some males emerged, and I caught one of them at it with his dear sister.
At which point I decided that here was an opportunity to learn about bee-breeding. I had two free queens. One, I knew, was mated. The other, I wasn't so sure about, so I put her in a pot with a couple of hunky males from another colony, but she didn't seem interested and they didn't seem that fussed either, which is odd considering normally males will mate with anything that moves. So I figured her brothers must have got to her as well2.
In any case, the next step after mating is hibernation. So the queens went in some little pots in the fridge. My original plan was to give them about five weeks in there, and then bring them out and try and make them found colonies, which wouldn't ever be very good3, but it was all in the interests of learning.
However, that changed today. A postdoc in my lab sometimes orders in very small, young colonies as he's hoping to look at queen foraging, and the queen will only forage when there aren't enough workers to do it. However, with colonies so young it's a bit touch-and-go whether they'll actually work out, so the loss rate of queens is fairly high (indeed, my Everlasting Colony was one of these - the queen died fairly early on, but in that case she'd laid enough eggs that it still had a lot of mileage left). One of the queens died over the weekend, leaving a tiny tiny colony with eight workers and a small cluster of larvae. This would be experimentally useless - there simply aren't enough bees to get decent foraging data - and lacks the queen, which is what he was interested in.
However...under some circumstances it's possible to persuade a new queen to "adopt" a previous colony. Brood release pheremones that say, "Love me! Feed me! Nurture me!" So if you remove all the adult workers from a colony (as these will attack a foreign queen and probably kill her), and pop a mated queen on the brood, sometimes she'll start caring from the brood as her own. And then maybe she'll start laying her own eggs, and the colony will thrive. It's far from reliable, but we realised we had two mated queens in the fridge, an "orphaned" colony in the bee room...and so I have decided to see what happens. I took out the eight workers (they've gone into a box with some workers from my Everlasting Colony - I'm trying to get them to form a worker-made colony, which will of course only produce male brood, but if I then give that to my second queen, she might take to that and start laying...) and put one of the queens into the nest. A couple of hours later, I noticed my newest colony had some newly emerged workers4, so one of them went in to help her.
She took to the nest after an hour or so - I'm not sure if she's got the hang of feeding the brood, but hopefully she'll work it out. She's sitting on it, anyway, and so is her little helper. So I'll keep an eye on things, and if we're lucky, we'll get a free, albeit rather mediocre colony.
1I probably explained this really badly. For people who aren't as bee-enthused as me: the queen has mated and lays the eggs, which I assumed took about 1-2 weeks to develop. Queens can produce new workers, new queens and also new males. Workers are physically incapable of mating, but sometimes do develop ovaries and lay unfertilised eggs, but these only ever develop into males. So a dead queen = all subsequent eggs and larvae will be worker-laid, therefore male, therefore experimentally useless.
2Bumblebees typically only mate once. The mating male leaves a waxy plug in the mating tract of the queen, preventing her from mating again. Which is hardly polite, but better than honeybees - the honeybee male's genitals break off in the honeybee queen's sexual tract, blocking it temporarily and killing the male soon after. Poor chaps.
3Because of the way sex is determined in bumblebees, if a queen mates with her brothers, odds are that instead of producing lots of workers and then a few males when the colony is on the way out, she'll instead produce equal numbers of males and workers throughout the colony life, somewhat impeding my ability to get useful data from the colony.
4A callow (newly-emerged) worker doesn't yet know who she belongs to (she picks up the scent from the other bees, or the nest, or something), so she'll happily be moved elsewhere and just accept it without objections. By contrast, putting in a mature worker would have resulted in a large fight.
tuxedo_elf and family, in which we went to a dog show, introduced Jupiter to the joys of agility training, ate doughnuts and saw Prince Caspian (which is fun, if corny, and seems to consist mostly of scenes apparently borrowed from LOTR, but Caspian is and a dish and was clearly sleeping with Peter whilst pretending to go out with Susan for appearances' sake).Today...back to work. And so, about the queens.
A couple of weeks ago, my Everlasting Colony (seriously, the queen died 1.5 months ago and yet it's still got quality workers and is yielding excellent data) somehow produced two queens. This came as some surprise, since their mother had been dead for around a month, the colony at the time they must have been laid wasn't anywhere near failing (no males, which is the usual sign of an old colony, and when you'd expect to see the first queens), and since a week after the queen died I more or less stopped feeding the colony pollen since I didn't anticipate any new bees except worker-laid males to appear from then on1. So these queens had taken a month to develop, on a near-starvation diet. Which explains why they're unusually small - more like large workers.
In fact, initially I thought they were large workers. Until some males emerged, and I caught one of them at it with his dear sister.
At which point I decided that here was an opportunity to learn about bee-breeding. I had two free queens. One, I knew, was mated. The other, I wasn't so sure about, so I put her in a pot with a couple of hunky males from another colony, but she didn't seem interested and they didn't seem that fussed either, which is odd considering normally males will mate with anything that moves. So I figured her brothers must have got to her as well2.
In any case, the next step after mating is hibernation. So the queens went in some little pots in the fridge. My original plan was to give them about five weeks in there, and then bring them out and try and make them found colonies, which wouldn't ever be very good3, but it was all in the interests of learning.
However, that changed today. A postdoc in my lab sometimes orders in very small, young colonies as he's hoping to look at queen foraging, and the queen will only forage when there aren't enough workers to do it. However, with colonies so young it's a bit touch-and-go whether they'll actually work out, so the loss rate of queens is fairly high (indeed, my Everlasting Colony was one of these - the queen died fairly early on, but in that case she'd laid enough eggs that it still had a lot of mileage left). One of the queens died over the weekend, leaving a tiny tiny colony with eight workers and a small cluster of larvae. This would be experimentally useless - there simply aren't enough bees to get decent foraging data - and lacks the queen, which is what he was interested in.
However...under some circumstances it's possible to persuade a new queen to "adopt" a previous colony. Brood release pheremones that say, "Love me! Feed me! Nurture me!" So if you remove all the adult workers from a colony (as these will attack a foreign queen and probably kill her), and pop a mated queen on the brood, sometimes she'll start caring from the brood as her own. And then maybe she'll start laying her own eggs, and the colony will thrive. It's far from reliable, but we realised we had two mated queens in the fridge, an "orphaned" colony in the bee room...and so I have decided to see what happens. I took out the eight workers (they've gone into a box with some workers from my Everlasting Colony - I'm trying to get them to form a worker-made colony, which will of course only produce male brood, but if I then give that to my second queen, she might take to that and start laying...) and put one of the queens into the nest. A couple of hours later, I noticed my newest colony had some newly emerged workers4, so one of them went in to help her.
She took to the nest after an hour or so - I'm not sure if she's got the hang of feeding the brood, but hopefully she'll work it out. She's sitting on it, anyway, and so is her little helper. So I'll keep an eye on things, and if we're lucky, we'll get a free, albeit rather mediocre colony.
1I probably explained this really badly. For people who aren't as bee-enthused as me: the queen has mated and lays the eggs, which I assumed took about 1-2 weeks to develop. Queens can produce new workers, new queens and also new males. Workers are physically incapable of mating, but sometimes do develop ovaries and lay unfertilised eggs, but these only ever develop into males. So a dead queen = all subsequent eggs and larvae will be worker-laid, therefore male, therefore experimentally useless.
2Bumblebees typically only mate once. The mating male leaves a waxy plug in the mating tract of the queen, preventing her from mating again. Which is hardly polite, but better than honeybees - the honeybee male's genitals break off in the honeybee queen's sexual tract, blocking it temporarily and killing the male soon after. Poor chaps.
3Because of the way sex is determined in bumblebees, if a queen mates with her brothers, odds are that instead of producing lots of workers and then a few males when the colony is on the way out, she'll instead produce equal numbers of males and workers throughout the colony life, somewhat impeding my ability to get useful data from the colony.
4A callow (newly-emerged) worker doesn't yet know who she belongs to (she picks up the scent from the other bees, or the nest, or something), so she'll happily be moved elsewhere and just accept it without objections. By contrast, putting in a mature worker would have resulted in a large fight.
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Date: 4 Aug 2008 19:28 (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Aug 2008 19:46 (UTC)We have a lamb's ear plant in our front yard in full bloom and the thing is absolutely COVERED in bumblebees every day... Every time I walk past it I think of youuuu! ;)