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Thanks for the detailed explanation!

by jna_sh 2y ago

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.)

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

by jna_sh 2y ago

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

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.)