# General beekeeping > Queen raising >  Timescale to mate of virgin queens.

## Neils

I admit it, I'm cramming up for module 6.

This seems like it should be a straightforward question and I have a timescale of about three weeks in my head but I can't find anything to back it up or tell me I'm wrong,

I know it's a few days after she emerges before she's ready to fly and I've known colonies take up to five weeks for a new queen to come into lay.  In theory she should be ready to start laying 2-3 days after her last mating flight so is "approximately 4 weeks" a more reasonable time to be thinking in terms of a deadline for a virgin queen to mate?

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## Jon

The queen will take her first orientation flight about 4-5 days after emergence depending upon the weather.
She can mate from this point on and usually starts to lay 2 days after mating.
The earliest I have ever seen eggs is about 9 days after emergence.

A lot of the books say that a virgin is 'stale' ie cannot mate after 21 days from emergence but I would put the figure nearer to 4 weeks.
You might get marked wrong for that answer though.
Average for mine is 14-16 days from emergence. In June this year it was about 3 weeks.

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## Adam

I recall a number of 42 days, but don't know where from. (I'll try to have a look at Winston's Biology of the Honeybee which may have a reference to it). I have read of queens coming into lay 4 - 5 weeks from emergence.

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## Neils

That tallies with my understanding and I'd be inclined to use it, I just couldn't find a website or study saying Joe beekeeper NDB says "virgin queens are  no good after x days/weeks".

Just as a side point on marking papers as we have a couple of people who are/were involved with the BBKA education programme in our association, they've always stated that in many cases if you provide justification for your answer, it is less likely to be marked wrong even if it appears to be slightly against conventional wisdom, as long as you're demonstrating an understanding of the matter at hand.

Granted this is a one point question on the paper so an essay isn't required, but I'd be inclined to answer something along the lines:
"On the basis that it can take up to 5 weeks for my new queens to start laying, a Virgin queen can mate up to approximately 4 weeks after emerging."

This isn't the first year that I've put frames of eggs into colonies after 4 weeks to find a laying queen on the next inspection.

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## Jon

It is also easy to miss a small patch of eggs checking after 3 weeks and when you look at 4 weeks there is a patch of sealed brood.

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## Black Comb

Winston says
"queens can postpone mating flights for up to 4 weeks after their emergence if weather conditions do not permit flight, but beyond that time they begin to degenerate and lay drone eggs"

Davies says
"queens are able to mate only during the first 4 weeks of their lives"

Laidlaw and page say
"under usual seasonal flight conditions the queen will take her nuptial flights between the fifth and fourteenth day after emerging from her cell. If she is confined to the hive by unfavourable weather conditions for a period of approximately 3 weeks ...... she may become a drone layer."

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## Neils

Now that ties into another area around unmated virgin queens, namely what happens if she doesn't mate?

The obvious answer is that she'll be a drone layer. But while doing some reading around I came across a number of discussions where various of Beekeepers were adamant than an unmated queen wouldn't come into lay at all.

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## Jon

Usually they turn into drone layers but this year I have come across a couple which laid worker brood for a few weeks and then just stopped altogether.
A poorly mated queen usually starts off laying a mixture of drone and worker brood and then quite quickly is laying 100% drone.

I had a queen last year in an apidea which I forgot to open for 11 days.
I opened it and the queen had started to lay 2 days later so certainly made up for lost time.
I still have that queen in a colony at the bottom of the garden which produced 90lbs of honey this year.

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## Mellifera Crofter

> ... what happens if she doesn't mate?





> Usually they turn into drone layers but this year I have come across a couple which laid worker brood for a few weeks and then just stopped altogether. ...


An unmated queen laying worker brood?  Did you mean to say she was unmated, Jon?
Kitta

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## Jon

Sorry I am complicating matters unnecessarily!  I reckon those ones mated but mated very poorly and for some reason then stopped laying altogether.
They usually turn into drone layers when they run out of sperm in the spermatheca so I don't know why they just stopped laying altogether in these cases.

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## Jon

I took an unmated virgin out of a nuc yesterday and united the nuc with a queenright colony beside it.
I still have two virgin queens in apideas, one 26 days after emergence and the other about 35 but given the weather forecast these have no chance of mating now.
I just left these to their own devices out of idle curiosity to see if I could get any late matings this year.
the last of my queens to mate successfully this year flew around 8th September.

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## Poly Hive

The problem with these exam questions is they are book based, and a lot of the information that went into the books was book baased, perpetuating the "given lore" as I like to think of it. So you are told eggs stick out then begin to go over and they can be timed from this information. We now know this is piffle. I have several books in my library that say you can time the egg, and hence the queens presence by the angle from the dangle of the egg. Rubbish. So due to the web we are communicating now much more effectively and what one person saw as an unusual event, and would have shrugged after consulting the books or written a letter to the SBA is now posted and discussed and it comes to light that it is in fact not that rare. 

I would answer the exam question with "The texts say a classic 21 days, but the web forums are now revealing that it is not unusual to have success up to four to five weeks in inclement weather." Belt and braces anyone?

PH

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## gavin

Better to say 'respected beekeepers report' than 'I read on the internet' I suppose!

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

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## mbc

a bloke down the pub says......

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## Jon

You guys will be telling me next there are factual inexactitudes in Wikipedia!

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## Neils

Funnily enough PH we had a discussion along those lines within the study group.

What came out of that was the time to effectively mate is still regarded as being within approx 3weeks from emergence owing to the development and thickening of _stuff I forget the name of_ in the spermatheca.

But that other factors can inhibit/encourage  the queen actually starting laying past that point.  That it can take upwards of 4-5 weeks I don't think is in dispute.

For what's supposed to be a one point question I think it's badly written unless you're just happy to bite your lip and put "approximately 3 weeks"

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## mbc

My theory is that the hardenning/drying of the virgin queen's vagina is retarded by endless bloody rain.

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## prakel

> But that other factors can inhibit/encourage  the queen actually starting laying past that point.  That it can take upwards of 4-5 weeks I don't think is in dispute.
> 
> For what's supposed to be a one point question I think it's badly written unless you're just happy to bite your lip and put "approximately 3 weeks"


I think that there will always be a grey area with regards to questions like these unless of course someone can furnish absolute proof that all queen bees develop at exactly the same rate. 

Being unencumbered with exam questions my personal interest is purely practical -if a queen takes five weeks to mate will she (all other things being equal) be as good as one which has mated within a more accepted time frame or am I more likely to find that she's turned drone layer by the following Spring? I don't know the answer but rightly or wrongly I would be inclined to cull her there and then, in practice this is an event which would only be likely to happen if I'd been too ill to check the mating nucs or unexpectedly working away during the weeks following emergence; at all other times she'd be culled before being given a chance to mate at five weeks -at most times it's easy enough to produce replacement queen cells so unless we're rapidly approaching the end of the season why take the chance if we don't need to?

nellie's comment about later laying not necessarily being the result of later mating is perhaps the most important point to be mentioned in this thread and may well even work to advantage with some of the later supercedure queens in strains which are early to limit brood rearing, but if we're talking of a queen which we're rearing for increase or controlled replacement why would we leave her in a nuc for that length of time on the off-chance?

I'm doubtful that many of us would rush to buy a £35 queen which was advertized (even on the internet) as 'guaranteed to not have been mated before the end of week 4'. I wonder why?

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## Jon

One problem with apideas/mini nucs is that the population dwindles from day 1.
After 5 weeks there are hardly enough bees left to incubate brood.
You sometimes find a queen in an apidea with a lack of bees which has mated yet has no brood.
You can tell by her size, gait and behaviour.
If you introduce these queens to a decent number of bees they often start laying.

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## prakel

A slight move away from the specific topic, but this is quite a nice article (available online as a pdf too but I've never worked out how to link pdfs!) with at least some relevance.


http://www.extension.org/pages/28328...en-spermatheca

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## prakel

> One problem with apideas/mini nucs is that the population dwindles from day 1.
> After 5 weeks there are hardly enough bees left to incubate brood.
> You sometimes find a queen in an apidea with a lack of bees which has mated yet has no brood.
> You can tell by her size, gait and behaviour.
> If you introduce these queens to a decent number of bees they often start laying.


Yes, I can see how that could be a problem demanding it's own management criteria.

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## Black Comb

Thanks.
That's answered a question for me from earlier in the year. 
I had exactly this happen.

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## Neils

I do wonder what,if any, effect the pheromones from brood have on a new queen's willingness to start laying.  I've had more than a few "I wonder" colonies where I've introduced a frame of eggs and the next week there's a laying queen.

It might not be pheromone induced if course, but I've seen it a few times now.

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## Jon

I know what you mean as I have been there done that as well.
But it may well be that the point of beekeeper exasperation by coincidence more or less coincides with the point where a queen starts to lay.
Open brood pheromone is known to delay the onset of laying workers.
Michael bush suggests that if you introduce a frame of open brood to a laying worker colony once a week they are likely to start drawing queen cells after 2 -3 weeks and at that point they can be requeened.

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## prakel

> I do wonder what,if any, effect the pheromones from brood have on a new queen's willingness to start laying.  I've had more than a few "I wonder" colonies where I've introduced a frame of eggs and the next week there's a laying queen.
> 
> It might not be pheromone induced if course, but I've seen it a few times now.


There's little doubt in my mind that stronger (in the sense of being well balanced) nuclei result in better queens than unbalanced units, although I have no data to prove my observations. This is often born out by queens which are produced in full size colonies. Off the top of my head I'm finding it hard to think of a strong well-found colony going to pieces because they failed to raise and mate a queen other than at the most unsuitable times of year.

In the past I often used to make 'walk away' splits and rarely had failures. Infact some of the queens which they raised were close to exceptional in one or more characteristics. This isn't to say that it always worked but the balance was in favour of success otherwise I wouldn't have continued to use the method. It was only the loss of production and sometimes the shortage of time in which to build up for winter resulting from the method which focussed my mind on raising cells and maintaining mating nucs.

This brings me around to one of the primary reasons for using mini nucs which I see mentioned -queens get mated quicker from them than they do from larger nucs/colonies. I'm not sure whether there has been detailed research on this subject but would welcome any links. Do queens mate quicker out of mini nucs? If so, what driving factor causes the earlier mating but fails to have any impact with regard to starting her laying? The first would appear to be an imperative need to get the queen mated sooner rather than later but to what end if she fails to start laying?

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## Jon

> There's little doubt in my mind that stronger (in the sense of being well balanced) nuclei result in better queens than unbalanced units, although I have no data to prove my observations.


I'm not so sure.
I only have anecdotal evidence but two of my strongest colonies at the moment are headed by queens with mated in apideas last year and overwintered in their apideas. One spent 7 months in its apidea and the other 8.
As soon as they were taken from the apideas and given a decent amount of bees the egg laying just took off.

I know people who argue that all queens from apideas are sub standard. I totally disagree with that.
I have a queen which mated from an apidea going into her 4th winter now and she fills a national with 10 frames of brood every summer and has never tried to swarm.




> If so, what driving factor causes the earlier mating but fails to have any impact with regard to starting her laying?


My guess would be the lack of bee population in both cases. if she has mated but the population is down to less than 100 bees, which happens quite often, there is no way they can generate the heat to maintain brood, let alone forage to feed the larvae.

Queens definitely mate more quickly from apideas in my experience although weather conditions trump most other factors.
The bees in the apidea seem desperate to push the queen out to mate.
You can see the bees harassing the queen to take a flight in this clip.
At about 50s you can see the workers driving her from the front of the apidea.
She returns at 1.38

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## prakel

> I'm not so sure.
> I only have anecdotal evidence but two of my strongest colonies at the moment are headed by queens with mated in apideas last year and overwintered in their apideas. One spent 7 months in its apidea and the other 8.
> As soon as they were taken from the apideas and given a decent amount of bees the egg laying just took off.
> 
> I know people who argue that all queens from apideas are sub standard. I totally disagree with that.


Possibly my writing style is at fault here as you seem to think that I'm saying something very different to what I actually mean:




> "in the sense of being well balanced"


was the definative point. A well balanced apidea would be no different in this context to a well balanced nuc consisting of five full size combs. I assume that you're not suggesting that you can't have a well balanced apidea?

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## prakel

> My guess would be the lack of bee population in both cases. if she has mated but the population is down to less than 100 bees, which happens quite often, there is no way they can generate the heat to maintain brood, let alone forage to feed the larvae.


But is this in itself sufficient to totally suppress the urge of a newly mated queen to start laying eggs even if they're not going to survive to maturity? Or do we have some other factor as well playing a part? 

I've no answers here but reckon it's worth throwing the questions out.

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## prakel

> I do wonder what,if any, effect the pheromones from brood have on a new queen's willingness to start laying.  I've had more than a few "I wonder" colonies where I've introduced a frame of eggs and the next week there's a laying queen.
> 
> It might not be pheromone induced if course, but I've seen it a few times now.


the interesting point with this and the Mike Bush observation which Jon mentions is that eggs and young brood are probably the most unnatural of all stimuli at the time of starting to lay, other than in pure queen right supercedure scenarios.

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## Jon

> A well balanced apidea would be no different in this context to a well balanced nuc consisting of five full size combs. I assume that you're not suggesting that you can't have a well balanced apidea?


Sorry prakel, my mistake, I misunderstood, I thought you were saying that the colony size was important.
It is though quite hard to maintain a well balanced apidea with brood all stages, foragers and nurse bees.
This is probably what Roger Patterson is getting at when his makes his claim that they are not suitable for beginners.
I disagree with that but i can see where he is coming from as there are a lot of ways to mess up the management of an apidea.
I tinker with mine taking out frames of sealed brood from those which are over populated.

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## prakel

> This is probably what Roger Patterson is getting at when his makes his claim that they are not suitable for beginners.


I'm always dubious of people who claim that something is too complex for a beginner when in fact beginners (at everything) come in all shapes and kinds. I personally see it as a rather arrogant stand to suggest that being a beginner means you don't have the brains to do something that maybe a more experienced exponent has found difficult, almost like discouraging a child from doing something incase they surpass their parent.

Some people won't get it but others will and to be truthful I don't think that it's got anything to do with the length of time they're involved.

The great and the good should perhaps be using their positions constructively to encourage people to 'have a go' and find out the truth for themselves, what's the worst that can happen?

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## Jon

In our queen rearing group some of the 'experienced' beekeepers had a disastrous season with queen mating and some of the first timers did very well.
One beginner who joined the group bought her first Apidea mid June and had got two mated queens out of it by mid August. She used them to requeen her two top bar colonies after removing the queens and introducing the new ones via a cage.
There are a couple of 40 year+ beekeepers in the group who cannot remove a queen from an apidea and put it in a cage yet a beginner can follow instructions and do it first time and successfully requeen two colonies.

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