How I select my ‘Breeder Queens’

At the start of a new season I like to make a shortlist of which queens are good enough to breed from, in other words, to become my breeder queens. I do this by looking at the current condition of the colony as well as looking at the record of past performance.

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Sustainable Bees & Queens

For Everyone using low-cost, simple methods:
There is growing concern amongst beekeepers of all abilities and experience about the ever-increasing importation of bees and queens. This is on several grounds, including the possibilities of introducing pests, diseases and pathogens, aggression in subsequent generations and the unsuitability to our fickle climate.

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Tolerance to Varroa destructor in Ireland

In North County Dublin, Ireland, a region that has a relatively self-contained beekeeping regime with little movement of colonies or queens into the area, tolerance (co-adaptation) to varroa mites is becoming established.

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Estimating C-lineage Introgression

Conservation efforts for A. m. mellifera are underway in multiple European
countries requiring reliable and cost-efficient molecular tools to identify purebred colonies. Here, we developed four ancestry-informative SNP assays for high sample throughput genotyping using the iPLEX Mass Array system.

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