Failing Queens

[Jen]

Each time I get into my hives I'm finding supercedure cells. This is what is buzzing in my head ~

I was visiting with our bee guru in our area a couple of days ago. He commented that the new studies for mating queens says that it 'used to be' that queens needed to mate 15-20 times. But the average now a days, is 50-60 matings to be adequate for the job. If there is truth to this, it would make sense as to why there are so many failing hives these days, one of the reasons anyway.

Another reason why my hives might be continually superceding is the time of year in our area. We've had a unusually early spring for upper California. There may not be enough drones or mature enough drones to get the queen filled up so to speak. It makes sense that if this swarm hive that I was in yesterday has 6 empty queen cells... well it makes me wonder how many queens the hive has already been thru to get one that will lay properly.

[LazyBkpr]

A lot depends on the viability of the drone she mates with.
   I read a lot of the research done by David Tarpy. In that research they did DNA testing to see exactly how many drones a queen actually mated with.
   The answers ranged from ONE to forty. With an average of around 13 - 15 Drones.
   The interesting part was that he found that queens that mated with MORE drones were more....   adored, by the bees. a queen that mated one to four times was accepted, but a queen that mated ten + times was lavished with attention by the bees.
   Few matings could result in a queen being superseded, or failing early.
   Other research I have read indicates that pesticide, fungicide, mitacide, etc, etc, building up in combination within the hive caused... if not sterility in drones, then Low viability of the sperm, and consequently queens that were prone to failing early.
   One day I need to conglomerate all of this information with references to make it easier to find and verify.

[Woody Roberts]

I haven't read any studies. I have no real idea why some queens fail or are superseded early.
I do know from experience that queens raised too early run a very high risk of failing or being superseded before fall.
When I say too early, I never raised queens before drones were flying. That seems to be the advice I read most. You can raise a queen when drones are in purple eye stage, etc.

Personally I want drones flying at least 30 days before I raise a queen. I'm also of the opinion bees won't swarm until drones are ready.

I'm only going by my own experience in my own very small corner of the world. I'm sure theres places that drones fly all year long. Enough drones?

If someone asked me what date is best to raise queens it's June 21