Meaning doing things to benefit their health and resistance to ???
I have noticed in the past and the present as well, we hear about a brood pattern, as in, if you have a spotty pattern it is time to replace the queen. Then we are told to do this or that to see how many brood the worker bees remove for the test we are doing.
The spotty pattern may not be a failing queen. How much stuff is out there that bees cannot be bread resistant to?
As for as Genetic background, we cannot tell what kind of bees the queen will produce. Unless she was artificially
bread. We do know that most colonies will remove larvae that is not going to develop into a good bee drone or worker. If enough of these occur in a hive and the workers remove them then we know they have that trait. The spotty brood resulting. where is the trade off. Of cource if that is the case it is the queen. But she is not failing, she was bred to the wrong drone. or more.
Did the queen cause this or is it from a drone she mated with. What was in his gene line. Am I rambling?
I have a colony that came as a swarm out of the wild. I have not been in them but once in those two years. They are HOT!HOT!HOT.
I went and got myself a nuc of carnies and plan on increasing as many as I can from this nuc. I also plan on splitting the HOT hive up 4 or 5 ways in June as soon as I get some boxes and cells built. I am going to raise one queen from the hot hive to see if the off spring from it is still hot. I have no idea how long my carnies will stay gentle, the woods here is full of wild bees. My Farther-in law kept bees, he had swarms he did not recover. I have lost quiet a few my self. I have also had quiet a few come in out of the woods. I had a hot hive that swarmed a few years ago, could be they just came back home. lol. Yes I'm rambling.
But really, I do need to get into the hot colony to see what the Varroa , SHB,etc status is. maybe I can get a Varroa resistant strand started. They have not swarmed and all I have done to them was add another super. It stacks up like this, 2 mediums 2 deeps one medium. When they came they took the 2 deeps, Then I guess they cleaned the bottom mediums out and went down. They did not start using the bottom front entrance till about 3 month ago. Had a couple knot holes in the back and one side of the deep. That is where the swarm entered. This is a short bit of my 14 year be "story" and I'm sticking to it. ;) :) d2