MASS STORAGE OF HONEY BEE (HYMENOPTERA: APIDAE) QUEENS DURING THE WINTER

Mass storage of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) queens over the winter was investigated in colony banks, with each queen held in her own cage within a colony. The major treatments included: (I) a single queen wintered in a small nucleus colony (control); and colony banks with 24 or 48 queens, each held individually in (II) screen cages that prevented workers from entering the cage, but allowed access for queen tending, (III) queen-excluder cages (queen-excluder material has openings of about 55 mm that prevent the larger queen but not the smaller workers from passing through the material), or (IV) screen cages until January and subsequent transfer to mini-nuclei until late March. Queens held in excluder cages showed poor survival in all 3 years of testing, and this system was not viable for commercial use; survival for any 1 year, or any excluder treatment, was never greater than 25%. In contrast, a 2-year average of 60% queen survival was found for queens that were stored in individual screened wooden cages within queenless colony banks. We found no differences in survival of banked queens that were moved between colonies monthly and those that remained in the same colony for 6 months. The success of these systems required the (a) preparation of colony banks that contained large numbers of adult workers produced by maintaining colonies with two queens during the previous summer, (b) removal of laying queen(s) during the storage period, (c) feeding of colonies well, and (d) insulation of colonies in groups of four, to preserve heat and reduce worker clustering in the winter. Surviving queens from winter storage systems were virtually identical in quality and colony performance to control queens the subsequent season. The annual profit for a commercial beekeeper who does his/her own labour for storage and hires workers for queen production was calculated as $16,625 when 4800 queens are stored over the winter, and sold for $10 each in the spring. Thus, mass queen storage using our successful systems is both biologically and economically viable.