• Journal of Apiculture
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.285-293
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• 2019

The honey bee queen shows extreme polyandry and controlling the mating partners can only be possible either by artificial insemination or having remote isolated mating locations. Here we report on the German North Sea island of Heligoland. Because of its location 60 km from the mainland, the lack of a local population of honey bees, its size of just 1.4 ㎢ and suitable weather conditions during the months of May to July, it is considered an ideal location for controlled inseminations of high-quality virgin queen bees with drones deemed genetically superior to others. Methods how to rear virgin queen bees are described and information is provided on the numbers of queen bees, their supporting workers and drone bees that are taken to the island in the mating season. The bee most commonly involved in the Heligoland mating trials has become Apis mellifera carnica strain "Baltica". In one summer, for example, 80 virgin queens (belonging to beekeepers from nine different locations in northern Germany) each with about 600 worker bees plus two drone populations of around 2,000 drones were taken by ship to Heligoland. On their return to the mainland no later than 3.5 weeks after the mating exercise, the beekeepers could register a mating success rate of 80%. This information can help operation management of the new remote mating centre of Weedo Island, Jeonbuk in Korea, which is currently under construction.

• Journal of Apiculture
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.261-268
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• 2018

Queen honey bees (Apis cerana) can be reared artificially on demand by the use of grafting technique. The technique consists of grafting young worker larvae into queen cell cups and raising in a queenless strong colony. As the age of grafted larvae for queen rearing exhibited several aspects related to quality and reproductive potential of queen, this study were conducted to investigate the influence of age of grafted larva on morphological characteristics and lifespan of queen, and the growth of colony she headed. Our results demonstrated that queens reared from young worker larvae (i.e., less than 1-day old larvae) were significantly larger in size (i.e., body weight and thorax width) than that of queens reared from 2-day old worker larvae. Moreover, queens reared from younger worker larvae initiated egg-laying earlier, stored more spermatozoa in spermatheca and had a longer lifespan compared to queens raised from older worker larvae. We also found a significant positive effect of queen grafting age on the production of worker and drone brood, adult worker population in colonies headed by queens reared from younger larvae. These findings suggested that rearing queens from brood grafted at the earliest possible age could increase the reproductive potential of queen as well as fitness of colony she head.