This is a video of what is going on in the beekeeping a little bit south from the Rio Bravo.
https://www.facebook.com/v/406488669416400
Saludos,
https://www.facebook.com/v/406488669416400
Saludos,
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Is this the Beekeeping Future?
- Thread starter Noe Palacios
- Start date
When a virgin queen leaves the hive she can mate with as many as 1/2 dozen drones. With naturally mated queens, you may get bees with less desirable traits: aggressiveness, bur comb, high swarming. If you get your queens from the southern US, there could even bee some africanized drones. So funny as it sounds, artificially inseminated queens are common.
A queen only mated by a half dozen drones is not well mated. Double digits in almost necessary and common. AI queens are mated with a slurry of semen from a large number of drones from the selected strain. It is amazing how many colors of bees you have in a given colony.
Drone bees have a crappy life. They annoy the workers (all female) and if there's too many devouring resources the workers will kill them off. This assumes that there isn't a virgin queen around in need of mating (which there probably isn't). If there is a new queen, then the drones mate with her and die!
Worker bees have a hard life too. They work very hard and don't live terribly long.
Only the queen gets any benefits, but she has to spend all day laying eggs, so I'm not sure that's all that great either. Don't think she's having a sex party all the time either; They mate once and that lasts them their entire life.
I don't loot the hive! I supply them as safe and productive a place to live as possible and encourage them to sucessfully reproduce more colonies (always the prime directive) and take honey that is surplus to their needs. Their needs are a $100 a week trip to Sams club every week for more sugar to make into syrup because the hot dry summer did not allow them enough resources to store winter rations let alone a surplus for me the loving symbiont to share. I think they and their life is purpose driven and may God grant me as much for as long as he sees fit.
I do love my bees! They are amazing wondrous creatures. Everyone should have a hive just to watch!
At My Honey Co, where I get much of my honey, they have a plexiglass hive in the store so you can watch the ladies at work.
