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Funny, I went out on hive maintenance round with a local beekeeper here in the Netherlands, and he was telling me about bee thefts. Not even whole hives, he’s h

by jna_sh 2y ago

Funny, I went out on hive maintenance round with a local beekeeper here in the Netherlands, and he was telling me about bee thefts. Not even whole hives, he’s had other beekeepers go in and steal just the queens, effectively killing the hive in the process.

cryptonector 2y ago
Taking the queen doesn't kill the hive, not if they have enough 1- or 2-day eggs that the bees can make new queens out of. But it does happen that there aren't enough sometimes, so taking the queen can kill the hive. For example, I did a split about twelve days ago, and the new hive started making queens. Now this was a very aggressive hive, so we wanted to re-queen it, so about eight days in we went back and destroyed every emergency queen cell, then two days later we went back and gave them a new queen that we purchased -- one bred specifically for mite resistance and which is not africanized. If we hadn't done this then that hive would be about to get a new queen naturally (and that queen would then kill all the other about-to-hatch queens). Though, even if they make a new queen, there will be a brood break. A brood break is a time period during which no new eggs are laid. Here it would be about three weeks, and maybe a few more days. It takes time for the new queen to hatch, get mated, and start laying. If this happens at the height of a honey flow then the hive will be made much weaker because the workers live just six weeks in that time of the year. Beekeepers tend to force a short brood break in the fall to forestall the mites, but this is a bit much. I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would expect that stealing queens will typically cause loss of maybe 50% of hives -- more or less depending on the time of the year. Also, if the beekeeper inspects hives weekly (a big if, especially if the beek has thousands of hives) they will notice that the hive is queenless and will probably re-queen it sooner than the time it takes the hive to make a new queen, thus reducing the loss rate. Commercial queens are about $45, but they're not available year-round. A commercial beekeeper might even raise their own queens for themselves, so they might have better availability. So hive loss rate might be lower, though still, it's not cheap, and it's labor intensive to inspect every hive weekly.
- jna_sh 2y ago
  Thanks for the detailed explanation!
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    Though, thinking more about it, stealing queens seems... unlikely. It takes a lot of work to find a queen! Even if she's marked you still have to open the hive and pull out and examine some number of frames. If it's a big hive (say, "two deeps" and several "supers", that could be fifteen minutes if you're very good at it, or an hour if you're not. And you'd be very vulnerable to getting caught while doing it. If the queen is not marked then it takes that much more skill to find her, and you might have to look at every frame. So queen theft gangs seem unlikely to me.
    - jna_sh 2y ago
      It was a marked queen in a small hive, this happened at a (shared, membership based) bee park where the keeper keeps hives for breeding, not production. There’s some longer backstory to why the queen was targeted that I probably shouldn’t post, but otherwise that’s what I was told. I’m not a beekeeper, just someone who signs up to help with too many things, so your barometer will be a lot more accurate than mine!
      - cryptonector 2y ago
        Oh, now that makes sense. Yes, there are beekeepers who produce lots of queens for sale. The process for doing that involves first grafting a bunch of 1-day eggs into little cups that are placed in queen-less nukes so that the nurse bees there will feed those eggs royal jelly. Then when the queens get close to hatching each of them gets placed into a finishing nuke (since otherwise the first to hatch will kill the others). Beekeepers who produce queens for sale breed them for various attributes, such as mite resistance, gentleness, and productivity (of honey). The queens that they use for the first stage (for making the eggs that will be grafted) are quite valuable. Though it's still not worth stealing unless you can set up a similar operation, which means there wouldn't be very many suspects. (There are also beekeepers who artificially mate queens to better control for male genetics. That is a very labor-intensive process, and those queens are correspondingly more expensive, but the main queens probably aren't any more valuable than in the process I described above.)

by jna_sh 2y ago

cryptonector 2y ago

Taking the queen doesn't kill the hive, not if they have enough 1- or 2-day eggs that the bees can make new queens out of. But it does happen that there aren't enough sometimes, so taking the queen can kill the hive. For example, I did a split about twelve days ago, and the new hive started making queens. Now this was a very aggressive hive, so we wanted to re-queen it, so about eight days in we went back and destroyed every emergency queen cell, then two days later we went back and gave them a new queen that we purchased -- one bred specifically for mite resistance and which is not africanized. If we hadn't done this then that hive would be about to get a new queen naturally (and that queen would then kill all the other about-to-hatch queens). Though, even if they make a new queen, there will be a brood break. A brood break is a time period during which no new eggs are laid. Here it would be about three weeks, and maybe a few more days. It takes time for the new queen to hatch, get mated, and start laying. If this happens at the height of a honey flow then the hive will be made much weaker because the workers live just six weeks in that time of the year. Beekeepers tend to force a short brood break in the fall to forestall the mites, but this is a bit much. I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would expect that stealing queens will typically cause loss of maybe 50% of hives -- more or less depending on the time of the year. Also, if the beekeeper inspects hives weekly (a big if, especially if the beek has thousands of hives) they will notice that the hive is queenless and will probably re-queen it sooner than the time it takes the hive to make a new queen, thus reducing the loss rate. Commercial queens are about $45, but they're not available year-round. A commercial beekeeper might even raise their own queens for themselves, so they might have better availability. So hive loss rate might be lower, though still, it's not cheap, and it's labor intensive to inspect every hive weekly.

jna_sh 2y ago
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Though, thinking more about it, stealing queens seems... unlikely. It takes a lot of work to find a queen! Even if she's marked you still have to open the hive and pull out and examine some number of frames. If it's a big hive (say, "two deeps" and several "supers", that could be fifteen minutes if you're very good at it, or an hour if you're not. And you'd be very vulnerable to getting caught while doing it. If the queen is not marked then it takes that much more skill to find her, and you might have to look at every frame. So queen theft gangs seem unlikely to me.
  - jna_sh 2y ago
    It was a marked queen in a small hive, this happened at a (shared, membership based) bee park where the keeper keeps hives for breeding, not production. There’s some longer backstory to why the queen was targeted that I probably shouldn’t post, but otherwise that’s what I was told. I’m not a beekeeper, just someone who signs up to help with too many things, so your barometer will be a lot more accurate than mine!
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      Oh, now that makes sense. Yes, there are beekeepers who produce lots of queens for sale. The process for doing that involves first grafting a bunch of 1-day eggs into little cups that are placed in queen-less nukes so that the nurse bees there will feed those eggs royal jelly. Then when the queens get close to hatching each of them gets placed into a finishing nuke (since otherwise the first to hatch will kill the others). Beekeepers who produce queens for sale breed them for various attributes, such as mite resistance, gentleness, and productivity (of honey). The queens that they use for the first stage (for making the eggs that will be grafted) are quite valuable. Though it's still not worth stealing unless you can set up a similar operation, which means there wouldn't be very many suspects. (There are also beekeepers who artificially mate queens to better control for male genetics. That is a very labor-intensive process, and those queens are correspondingly more expensive, but the main queens probably aren't any more valuable than in the process I described above.)