Abstract

The management of honey bees in Alberta is important both for pollination and economic purposes. However, Albertan beekeepers face many challenges – overwintering colony loss rates approaching 50% being one of the most prolific issues in recent years. One of the most frequently cited reasons for overwintering failure by beekeepers is poor queen quality. The queen may be only one individual among thousands in a given colony, but as the mother of all other bees in the hive she has potential to influence colony-level behaviours and success, both through her own behaviour and the genetic attributes she passes on to her offspring. Beekeepers face trade-offs in selecting genetic stock when purchasing new queens, and evaluating a queen’s quality before placing her in a colony is very difficult. Here, we aim to both evaluate differences between queens from local and non-local lineages, and to test the efficacy of a variety of queen-specific physical measurements and behavioural tests on predicting eventual colony success. 45 queens from three different breeders (Alberta, Quebec, Hawaii) were evaluated by physical and behavioral traits in a central location prior to being distributed to three locations (Northern, Central, and Southern Alberta) and placed in colonies for a period of two years. During this period, colony-level attributes, such as temperature variation and disease level, were recorded. High honey production and overwintering success are desired by beekeepers, thus queen and colony level traits were evaluated as predictors of these parameters. Our results indicate that queen traits, both physical and behavioural, are poor indicators of colony success. However, disease level does appear to influence overwintering success, indicating that environmental conditions may predominate. Additionally, overwintering success, honey production, temperature variance, and queen longevity vary by stock. Despite the general assumption that locally-adapted queens outpreform queens shipped from other locations, we found queens of Albertan stock to underpreform, and queens from the Quebec breeder to preform the best.