Increased Mass-Rearing of Queens in High Royal-Jelly-Producing Honey Bee Colonies ( Apis mellifera ligustica ) Generates Smaller Queens with Comparable Fecundity

Buajiram Ahmat, Ting Yang, Chuan Ma () and Cheng Zong ()
Additional contact information
Buajiram Ahmat: College of Wildlife and Protected Areas, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
Ting Yang: State Key Laboratory of Resource Insects, Institute of Apicultural Research, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100193, China
Chuan Ma: State Key Laboratory of Resource Insects, Institute of Apicultural Research, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100193, China
Cheng Zong: College of Wildlife and Protected Areas, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-9

Abstract: The mass rearing of high-quality queen bees is an essential beekeeping practice for producing new queens to maintain colony productivity. A strain of high royal-jelly-producing bees (RJBs; Apis mellifera ligustica ) in China exhibits high potential for the rapid mass rearing of queens. To explore the potential changes in the quality of mass-reared queens, a set of morphometric traits and the sealed brood area were compared between the queens reared from 64 and 320 queen cells in RJB colonies. The increase in the queen cell number was found to induce a slightly but significantly reduced body weight and smaller wing length and thorax width in the reared queens at emergence. However, the ovariole number and sealed brood area, an indicator of the queen fecundity, were not observed to be significantly influenced. With respect to body weight and ovariole number, all the reared queens satisfied the current criteria for high-quality queens. Our findings provide evidence for the efficient mass production of high-quality queens using RJB colonies.

Keywords: queen cell number; queen quality; queen rearing; royal jelly; ovariole number; fecundity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/2/264/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/2/264/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:14:y:2024:i:2:p:264-:d:1334357

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().