Honeystone Varroa Resistance Research 2002

Thanks to a Specialty Crop Program Grant from the Oregon Department of Agriculture, the research project started two years ago will continue for another two years. Initially we set out to see if Russian bees really are resistant to the Varroa mite. We found that purebred Russian bees do show more resistance to Varroa than control bees and half-Russian hybrids. Last year, our testing process evolved into a queen breeding program as we began raising queens from the surviving Russian stock. This year we will evaluate the queens we have produced and propagate the most resistant lines.

			The winter of 2001-2002 was colder and wetter than usual. Several snowfalls made our Siberian bees feel right at home.

	Spring Management: The research bees required strict attention to swarm control. To prevent our carefully bred queens from leaving the hives in a swarm, we had to go through each hive and inspect every frame for swarm cells and queen cups.

		(left) The first step in finding queen cups is cracking the brood chamber and looking at the bottom bars of the top box. This reveals the easy ones. The rest can be anywhere else on the frame. (right) Several queen cups are visible here. All of these must be scraped off and removed from the hive to prevent swarming.

			(left) The structure at the top of the picture is a new queen cup. Just below it are two primed queen cups. The bees have "primed" them with royal jelly. As the larva grows, the workers add wax to the cup, stretching it into a queen cell. (right) This shows cups developing into queen cells. The third one down is a sealed queen cell, indicating the final stages of queen development. This cell is within days or hours of hatching. Above it, part of a queen pupa can be seen through a break in the cell caused by opening the hive.

			After making sure that none of our research colonies swarmed, it was time to pick our breeder queens for the season. We selected the queen shown here as the Honeystone research apiary's best. She has the lowest mite count and the calmest disposition of any of our Oregon Russian purebreds. The generally dark hues of her daughters suggest she mated exclusively with our Russian drones.

	This is an almost solid frame of capped brood laid by our selected breeder queen.

			(left)The breeder queen was transferred to a five frame nucleus box. The nuc was made up of a frame of capped brood, a frame of pollen and nectar, and a frame of pollen and open brood. Two empty frames of drawn comb filled out the box, giving the queen a place to lay eggs for the next 24 hours. (right) An extra "shake" of bees is added to the nuc box so lots of workers will be available.

			The tiny white comma shaped things visible in some of these cells are worker larva at the right stage of development for becoming queen bees. They were eggs for three days, then hatched, and are now a day old in the larval form.

(right) A larva being lifted out of a brood cell, to be placed in an artificial queen cup (below) This process is known as "grafting."

			Thanks to our grant funding, we were able to hire an expert to do the grafting this year. This is Debbie Delaney, a masters candidate at Oregon State University who has grafted professionally for Pat Heitkam, a leading California queen breeder.

The bars of grafted cells are placed in a frame. There are 15 cells on a bar and two bars in a frame.

			The frames of cups are placed in a queenless "swarm box". This is a nucleus box with a screened floor, screened vents in the lid, and a sealed entrance. The large population of young bees is confined with nothing to do but feed young queen larvae.

Four days after grafting, a stunning 93% of the larvae have been accepted by the bees as evidenced by the elongation of the queen cups. This is far better than any of us dared expect. The success is probably due to the skill of the grafter in lifting each tiny larva without damaging it in any way.

	About three weeks after grafting (right) Debbie displays a bar of ripe queen cells, ready to be placed in nucleus boxes (below).
		The nucleus boxes, or nucs (pronounced nukes), are placed in a circular pattern with entrances facing outward so each newly emerged queen can find her way back to her home with less danger of "drifting" between boxes after her mating flight.

A bee yard containing only Russian queens was established near the mating yard in the hopes of flooding the area with Russian drones. The location was chosen because there were no domestic bees kept in the area and no signs of feral colonies readily apparent. After the queens were mated and had started laying eggs, the nucs were distributed among the participating beekeepers and taken to over-wintering yards. click here for Honeystone Varroa Research 2003