BBKA Forum

British Beekeepers Association Official Forum 

  • Is the Brood Pattern within a Honey Bee Colony a Reliable Indicator of Queen Quality?

  • Queen breeding specialism discussion forum.
Queen breeding specialism discussion forum.
 #1790  by Chrisbarlow
 28 Jan 2019, 22:02
A very interesting peice of research. I have definately culled queens on poor brood pattern.

Failure of the queen is often identified as a leading cause of honey bee colony mortality. However, the factors that can contribute to “queen failure” are poorly defined and often misunderstood. We studied one specific sign attributed to queen failure: poor brood pattern. In 2016 and 2017, we identified pairs of colonies with “good” and “poor” brood patterns in commercial beekeeping operations and used standard metrics to assess queen and colony health. We found no queen quality measures reliably associated with poor-brood colonies. In the second year (2017), we exchanged queens between colony pairs (n = 21): a queen from a poor-brood colony was introduced into a good-brood colony and vice versa. We observed that brood patterns of queens originally from poor-brood colonies significantly improved after placement into a good-brood colony after 21 days, suggesting factors other than the queen contributed to brood pattern. Our study challenges the notion that brood pattern alone is sufficient to judge queen quality. Our results emphasize the challenges in determining the root source for problems related to the queen when assessing honey bee colony health.

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4450/10/1/12?fbclid=IwAR2lrcN8ZoyUvtKRFvWoNzSdR7ucdcrsYH4l-u9nvTxhhnUmRyOGve_9ofU
 #1793  by Jim Norfolk
 29 Jan 2019, 12:13
Interesting article and great that it is open access so we can read the detail. So its not the queens but something in the hive, not disease either. How about workers in some colonies are more zeolous at removing suspect eggs and larvae or some workers are not very good nurses?
 #1799  by AdamD
 30 Jan 2019, 09:45
The pattern was checked after 21 days only according to the summary - so the bees that were managing the brood-rearing were the ones from the 'other' queen. It would be interesting to know if the brood pattern subsequently deteriorated once the 'patchy' queens own brood got going - say after another 21 days, by which time the queens own brood would be involved in rearing larvae themselves.
 #1802  by Patrick
 30 Jan 2019, 18:29
Very interesting article, thanks for the link Chris.

Didn't exhaustively analyse it but a few points did occur. Firstly they selected 21 colonies or 21 pairs of colonies for the study out of 800 colonies and it says "An important lesson from this study was that it was difficult to find queens with poor brood patterns, without signs of brood disease". So to be pernickerty, it was not a randomised sample.

Worth noting that in the case of this study at least, most cases of poor brood patterns they encountered were a known or suspected brood disease issue, whether or not also linked to the queen.

Also not only did the "poor brood" queens improve after switching, but I think the good queens did not maintain their good laying patterns either after the switch in the following 21 days. That made we wonder about the level or quality of the nutrition being provided to the queen by the attendant workers in each different colony.

There may be an important difference between a commercial operation and many hobbyists in that you would not expect to many commercial operations to still have older queens whilst many hobbyists may keep queens longer or (if unmarked or unclipped) be entirely unaware how old their queens are. So in the hobbyist case it is quite possible that a declining queen may indeed still produce a poor brood pattern, as presumably no older declining queens were tested within this study? So a failing queen (becoming senescent) is not necessarily the same as a failure queen (a dud).