Caring for Artificially Inseminated Breeder Queens

We want our breeder queens to have a long career in your care. We created this article to provide you with all the details to get you through the first year with her in one piece.

A perfect example of a successful AI breeder queen introduction and overwintering

Over the years we have received a significant number of questions concerning the introduction and care for artificially inseminated (AI) breeder queen colonies. We have taken the time to condense down some of our knowledge into a short summary of the first summer, winter and following spring care for your breeder queen colony. When you’re investing money and time into an AI breeder queen, you want to make sure you give them the best start you can. This becomes more important the later you start a breeder queen colony in the season.

Introducing your new breeder queen

This is the ideal set up for introduction. Emerging brood, empty cells for laying and open cells of nectar/honey are avaiable to the queen.

We encourage everyone that uses our AI Northern VSH breeder queens to confirm that the colony donating the bees and brood is inspected for their varroa load before use, no matter the time of the season. Again, it’s important to make sure you give your investment a chance at survival. We call this process a “clean start” for the breeder colony. This process involves selecting colonies that have low to no detectable varroa or using varroa treatment to clean a colony first before harvesting brood/bees from it. This gives the colony a fighting chance to survive the rest of it’s lifespan untreated and is a safeguard for your wallet.

Another important part of safeguarding your investment is using a push in cage to introduce your breeder queen. We won’t go into details about that here though. You can read all about the building process and proper use in our article by clicking the link here. One thing we will add about the queen introduction process is that you should never put a nuc with an AI queen being introduced via a push in cage in full sun during late spring/summer. The bees inside will beard outside the box, but the queen will be stuck inside getting cooked. This will result in destroying the sperm in her spermatheca or her death.

Seasonal timing of breeder queen installation

When installing a breeder queen in May/June, you are giving the colony more time to establish itself. This extra time will hopefully allow them to reduce the varroa population to a manageable level, but that is not a guarantee.

You can see the push in cage has just been removed and the queen is accepted.

A colony started in May with high levels of varroa can still crash, regardless of the quality of mite resistant genetics. Starting in July/August is a completely different challenge. The threat of using brood and bees with a higher varroa load is very possible. Another pest that can cause issues is the small hive beetle. If they get into the push in cage where your breeder queen is being sequestered, they will overrun the whole caged area with their larvae. AI breeder queens are best introduced using a 3-5 frame nuc. In areas where this pest is endemic, this can be a problem and vigilance is required. Remember, you can always add more frames of brood once the queen has been successfully introduced and laying well. This will boost the strength. The tradeoff is that if you want to perform a VSH assay on this colony, you will want to make sure you calculate this brood addition into the 12-16 week wait time before performing the assay.

Maintaining your breeder colony

Once you have successfully introduced your breeder queen, inspect her colony every 7 days.  It's quite common for the nucs of AI queens to start some supercedure cells.  The behavior will diminish over time as the population turns over to the new queen's genetics, but your money will be wasted if you allow a cell to emerge and kill her.

After you have an AI queen that has been laying well and accepted, it’s time to consider what the best use for her is in your operation. If you have not been selecting for VSH in your apiary or do not have any verified VSH stock previously, then we encourage those folks to graft some queens immediately off of the AI Northern VSH breeder queens that they receive from us. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that no matter the VSH

score of the breeder queen, this addition of genetics will be a positive contribution to the quality of stock in their apiary. The second is that it will allow the user to have a collection of overwintered open mated daughter colonies to select from in the spring. These daughter colonies will be important for providing drones for the upcoming season and will give the user a full season head start. After the first season, we do not advocate using this strategy. It becomes increasingly more important to be aggressively selective in your apiary after the first season. You want to keep seeing improvements in the results of mite resistance and overwintering, aggressive selection matters.

If you have not been selecting for VSH in your apiary or do not have any verified VSH stock previously, then we encourage those folks to graft some queens immediately off of the AI Northern VSH breeder queens that they receive from us.

Winter preperations

To prepare your breeder colony for winter, we advocate keeping them in a 5/5 nuc. This tall and narrow colony shape has served us well for overwintering in the far north. If you want to learn more about overwintering in nucs, we highly suggest the book “The Cavity Compromise” by Adrian Quiney. We also suggest performing an alcohol wash, recording the results and feeding the colony to bring it up to winter weight. We want this colony to have 8-10 seams of bees by late September in our location. Once this is done, leave them alone until spring arrives.

Spring assays and summer maintenance

We use early spring here in the far north to perform our VSH assays before preparing to graft. We like to think of this as “trust but verify” that the process of VSH selection is working. We even encourage you to VSH assay the breeder queens you have bought from us. You can read our very thorough explanation of why this is in our article here. Once the VSH assay has been completed, we break down the colony by splitting it. Keeping the colony a manageable size allows us to easily spot the queen every time before grafting, a critical step to insure you know what you’re grafting from. This will also help to reduce any swarming impulse the colony has as well. By keeping the colony no larger than 10 frames, it makes this process rather easy. In addition to the manageable size, research has shown that a smaller cavity can result in the queen laying larger eggs (Amiri et al, 2020). These larger eggs correlated with higher survival of the egg to adult bee emersion in the study. If you plan on performing any type of behavioral assays on the colony, you cannot do what we have previously mentioned. It’s important to not disrupt the colony’s equilibrium by removing brood or bees during the season. Again, this is why we perform our VSH assays in the spring on our overwintered AI breeders we use for ourselves.

AI queens often lay as strongly as conventionally mated queens, especially after their first winter when the colony will want to swarm.  Pulling sealed frames of brood to weaken it can help with that impulse, but sometimes one doesn't notice that the colony is outgrowing its 5/5 until swarm cells are started.  This is part of the learning

Swarm cells, the last thing you want to see in your breeder colony.

process - don't panic.  In this circumstance we perform these actions.  We kill all the swarm cells, we remove a few frames of sealed brood and donate them to a needy colony. Then, we move the colony more than 6 feet away from its location to a different place in the apiary; This divests the breeder colony of its foragers and stops the swarming urge.  It's better if there is a small colony near the original site to accept the boost given by the breeder's foragers.  If such a colony isn't there, it's OK to leave a cell on one of the frames you stole from the breeder colony and start a nuc on that site.  Do not simply swap the locations of a weak colony with the breeder's colony because that doesn't depopulate the breeder as much as when the breeder loses all foragers.

We remove a few frames of sealed brood and donate them to a needy colony. Then, we move the colony more than 6 feet away from its location to a different place in the apiary.

A successful season

This summary gave you all the tools and skills to keep your AI breeder queen alive and well for her first year of life. Remember though, things can happen and nothing is perfect. This is why our AI Northern VSH breeder queens have a two queen minimum purchase. This redundancy is the key to success. If you’re interested in an AI Northern VSH breeder queen, make sure to check out our breeder queen page for all the details and our shop if you would like to place an order for the season.