Overview of the 2022 season for instrumental insemination of honeybee queens

Photo: Instrumentally inseminated Ligustica queen.

The active season for beekeeping in 2023 is quickly approaching, but before that, we can look back at the fruits of our labor from last year. The past season presented a significant challenge, with an extremely short instrumental insemination season lasting only three weeks. Both mature queen bees and drones are necessary to perform instrumental insemination. To obtain high-quality inseminated queens, queen bees that are 5 to 14 days old and drones that are 14 to 21 days old are used. Using older drones increases the risk of residual sperm accumulating in the queen's oviducts, which can cause death to the queen. To obtain drones of a known origin and specific age, targeted drone rearing is necessary. This involves preparing a strong bee colony with a good supply of food and preparing drone combs that will be laid by the selected queen. The drone rearing process is time-consuming and labor-intensive, taking an average of 40 days from the preparation of the drone-rearing colony and the drone combs to obtain mature drones. In 2021, the first drone combs were obtained as early as May 15th, which was later than planned. However, due to a long and cold spring in 2022, the first drone combs were laid significantly later, on June 1st. In the Vidzeme region, the first bee colony inspections were possible in the second half of April when the high snowdrifts around the beehives began to melt, and the air temperature rose above +10 degrees Celsius on some days. May was also much colder and windier than in previous years, resulting in a delay in bee colony development, and bees were reluctant to build drone combs. The situation improved with a few warm days in the second half of May, during which worker bees had the opportunity to collect abundant dandelion and fruit tree nectar. This was followed by a prolonged period of nectar shortage in June, which required additional feeding of bee colonies to maintain the mood for drone rearing. Despite our efforts, some bee colonies decided to eliminate the drone brood, resulting in a decrease in the number of available drones for queen insemination. Therefore, instrumental insemination of queen bees was only possible starting from July 6th, when the available mature drones had reached sexual maturity. We conducted intensive instrumental insemination for three weeks, which was an unprecedentedly short period of time, considering that we also planned and made trips to beekeepers. Theoretically, insemination can also be done in August, but it should be noted that after the Midsummer festival (June 24), drone rearing becomes very challenging, and there is an increased risk that the worker bees will decide not to take care of these drones. Additionally, it took time for the queens to start laying eggs, with some queens beginning to lay within a week while others took 2-3 weeks after the insemination day. Of course, the rate at which egg-laying started was also influenced by factors such as the age of the queen on the day of insemination, the time of nectar flow, and other circumstances.

In the end, despite the short insemination season, we managed to inseminate 172 queen bees for our service visits to Latvian beekeepers and an additional 121 queen bees for our own needs. Of all the queen bees inseminated for our service, 55% were Buckfast, 24% Carnica, 17% Finnish-Italian, and 3% Carpathian queen bees. For both queen and drone rearing, a diverse genetic material was used, with origins from Latvia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Finland, Belarus, Russia and Germany. We often received questions about which country has the best honey bee queens or whether beekeepers have already "marked" countries based on their experience or what they have heard from other beekeepers. I answered this question as follows: regardless of the queen bee's country of origin, the best queen will be the one whose colony performance in each beekeeper's priority characteristics is the highest in that beekeeper's specific apiary. It should be noted that the characteristics of bee colonies determine genetic diversity, individual interactions, genotype, as well as external environmental factors, such as resource availability, climate, disease prevalence, and other factors. Therefore, a queen bee that is adapted through selection to a specific country, climate, and even apiary can produce very different results in another apiary, even within the same country (these principles are more extensively described in the Biškopis magazine, December 2021, issue 6, and February 2022, issue 1). If queen bees are imported from other countries, this factor must be considered when evaluating new queens. This, in turn, justifies how crucial it is for each beekeeper to evaluate their own apiary's performance, define and implement their own evaluation system in beekeeping, as finding their best queen bee will be very challenging without it.

I would like to thank the Latvian Beekeeping Association for their support in making the instrumental insemination service more accessible to members of the LBA! Thank you to beekeepers from Kuldīga, Cesvaine, Cēsis, Nītaure, Daugavpils, and Krāslava regions, who showed interest and used the instrumental insemination service for queen bees during the 2022 season, to preserve the best genetic material of their honey bee colonies and continue evaluating new queen bees and their daughters in the new season! This year, we are also committed to continuing our work in providing the instrumental insemination service for queen bees in Inčukalns! I wish everyone to fulfill their New Year's wishes in beekeeping!

Photo: Instrumental insemination of queen bees in the summer of 2022 at the farm "Jaunspieķi" with beekeeper Jānis Puriņš.

Published in the journal "Biškopis", the first issue of 2023, published by the Latvian Beekeeping Association.