April 27, 2026

Queen Biology and Quality with Dr. David Tarpy (382)

In this episode, Jeff Ott and Becky Masterman launch a new series focused on honey bee queens with leading researcher Dr. David Tarpy. From the start, the conversation challenges a common oversimplification: the queen is not just an “egg-laying machine,” but part of a dynamic, cooperative system shaped by both biology and worker perception.

Tarpy explains that queen quality extends beyond visible traits like brood pattern. Instead, it includes physical characteristics such as body size, mating success, and sperm viability—factors that set the upper limit, or “ceiling,” of colony performance. However, he emphasizes that brood pattern is often a colony-level trait, influenced as much by workers, environment, and disease pressure as by the queen herself.

A key insight from the discussion is that colonies do not evaluate queens based solely on pheromones produced by the queen. Brood pheromones and, importantly, the workers’ ability to perceive those signals play a major role in whether a queen is accepted or replaced. This helps explain why strong queens are sometimes superseded while weaker ones persist.

The conversation also explores the impact of queen handling and shipping. Temperature stress—both overheating and chilling—can reduce sperm viability without visibly harming the queen, leading to premature failure later in the season. For beekeepers, this underscores the importance of careful handling between receipt and installation.

Tarpy shares insights from his long-running queen health clinic, where most “problem queens” sent in for analysis turn out to be biologically sound. In many cases, environmental factors such as pesticide exposure or colony stress are the underlying issue.

This episode sets the stage for the series by reframing how beekeepers think about queens—not as isolated individuals, but as part of a complex, responsive colony system.

Websites from the episode and others we recommend:

North Carolina State Apiculture Program: https://www.ncsuapiculture.net
North Carolina State Queen & Disease Clinic: https://pollinators.ces.ncsu.edu/apiculture/queen-disease-clinic/
Honey Bee Health Coalition: https://honeybeehealthcoalition.org
Project Apis m. (PAm): https://www.projectapism.org
The National Honey Board: https://honey.com
Honey Bee Obscura Podcast: https://honeybeeobscura.com

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Betterbee is the presenting sponsor of Beekeeping Today Podcast. Betterbee’s mission is to support every beekeeper with excellent customer service, continued education and quality equipment. From their colorful and informative catalog to their support of beekeeper educational activities, including this podcast series, Betterbee truly is Beekeepers Serving Beekeepers. See for yourself at www.betterbee.com

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We hope you enjoy this podcast and welcome your questions and comments in the show notes of this episode or: questions@beekeepingtodaypodcast.com

Thank you for listening!

Podcast music: Be Strong by Young Presidents; Epilogue by Musicalman; Faraday by BeGun; Walking in Paris by Studio Le Bus; A Fresh New Start by Pete Morse; Wedding Day by Boomer; Christmas Avenue by Immersive Music; Red Jack Blues by Daniel Hart; Bolero de la Fontero by Rimsky Music; Perfect Sky by Graceful Movement; I'm Not Running Away This Time by Max Brodie; Original guitar background instrumental by Jeff Ott.

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WEBVTT

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Howdy, this is uh Caleb Jacobson from Fort Worth, Texas.

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Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee.

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Your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment.

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I'm Jeff Ott.

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And I'm Becky Masterman.

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all of our content on the website.

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com.

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Thank you, Caleb Jacobson from F

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Fort Worth for that wonderful opening from the floor of the North American Honey Bee Expo last January in Tennessee.

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What a great opener.

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Thank you.

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Yeah, I can't believe that was already so long ago in January.

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Time's flying and we're gonna be talking about getting our colonies ready for winter pretty soon.

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Oh hush, hush.

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We're just barely getting into spring.

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Today is an exciting day, or this episode is an exciting one because we are launching our series of

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episodes focused on queens, queen behavior, and honey bee queens in general.

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I think that it is going to be so valuable for our listeners and and us to

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gather experts from queen health to queen breeding and put it all into one place.

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So I'm really looking forward to this series

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Queens are so essential to our colony health.

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It's fun because so much of what's taught to beginning beekeepers is, well, queen is

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egg-laying machine, or you know, she rules the roost.

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I'm mixing metaphors there.

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She rules the hive.

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She rules the colony.

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And the research indicates that

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that's not really quite all that she does and that's just an oversimplification.

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So this series really should highlight

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the value of queens and all the nuances of the Queen Bee's life.

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And we're gonna hear, I think, a lot about what can go wrong from the people who are looking at the science.

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and the people who are actually raising those queens.

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So it'll it'll be very informative.

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I have never in all my years of beekeeping, I've never focused on raising queens.

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And th I know that's a weakness in my roundedness of a beekeeper as being a beekeeper, I've never gone out and raised my own queens or anything

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And that's okay.

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And maybe one of these days there's still time left.

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But I've always understood the importance of the queen to the health and the viability of my hives that I'm working with in my year's honey production

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And so having a a better understanding of the Queen is gonna be really fun to look into.

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You're giving me a squinty eyed look.

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Have you ever done a walkaway Queen Jeff?

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You have to have.

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Not intentionally.

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Are you serious?

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Yeah, really honest.

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Okay, I'm sorry.

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I don't there's no judgment here.

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I just something it's baby.

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You'd be the first person.

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You would be the first person.

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But oh that's that's interesting.

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Okay, well that has to be a twenty

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twenty-six goal.

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One walk away.

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One walk away.

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All right.

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Although I will say if I lived in Washington, I would not walk away a queen.

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because of your weather.

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They need to fly and meet and you just don't have that predictability, I think.

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Well, yeah, we do in June, July, August.

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you know, in September, but at that point y it's you know, June and July maybe.

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September, of course, no, I don't really want to do that to a colony.

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You're right.

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I mean I judge a little, but I'm not judging.

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And I know none of our listeners are judging.

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That's great, because we have great listeners.

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We do have great listeners.

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And they're not gonna remember that you also did raise bees in Ohio and Colorado.

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And so three states have had that opportunity.

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I've neglected my many opportunities.

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Today's episode will be really fun and a great way to kick off our understanding and study of queens through this series because if you go into any of the research, any of the popular literature

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One name stands out, and that's Dr.

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Dave Tarpey of North Carolina University.

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And he's our first guest to help kick this off

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I'm so looking forward to talking with David and learning everything he knows.

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Okay, not everything.

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We don't have that much time.

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But I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

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Okay, let's listen to David right after these words from our sponsors.

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00:06:56.420 --> 00:06:58.340
Hey everybody, welcome back.

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Sitting around this great big virtual beekeeping today podcast table, stretching coast to coast on the East Coast in North Carolina.

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We have Dr.

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Dave Tarpe.

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And in St.

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Paul, Becky, and I'm in Olympia.

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David, welcome to the show.

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We appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to join us on Beekeeping Today podcast.

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Yeah, of course.

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Thanks so much for having me.

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You are all over the place as far as Queen Health and Bee Health.

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So you're doing some pretty amazing things.

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Are you collaborating with everybody or just most of those the researchers out there?

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Or subset.

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It's a pretty small field.

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So yeah.

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Um

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The the nice things that we have a really great community of scientists and so it's really easy to find areas of overlap.

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You know, I think one of the

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things looking looking back on my career is that a lot of, you know, smarter, more qualified people have been doing some things in workers.

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And then I often go up and ask them, well, what about queens and drones?

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And then you can do the exact same thing in in the queens and drones, which are often neglected.

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And so you can learn a a lot more, you know, of about the the whole colony biology by by studying all of the castes.

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Before we get going too far, David, can you tell us

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A little bit about yourself, your background, and how you get started in in the whole area of bees.

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Sure, my origin story.

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Your origin story.

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As an undergrad, my junior year abroad at Oxford, and I was in the zoology department there, and I was studying birds, bird behavior, and things like that.

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And I got really turned on to

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this confluence of behavior, evolution, and ecology.

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And so when I did my senior year project, it it dealt with with that and insects and then

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I didn't I knew I wanted to go into grad school, but I didn't really know what or or where.

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And a faculty friend of mine, who turned out to be my my mentor and master's advisor.

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He handed me uh a couple textbooks.

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One was by Mark Winston, nineteen eighty seven, the other was by Tom Seeley, nineteen eighty-four.

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And he said, I think, you know, with your interests, I think you might kind of like this.

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And

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And both of those I read from cover to cover without putting them down and knew that's exactly what I wanted to do.

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Which we don't all have that kind of aha moment, right?

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So I f consider myself very, very lucky.

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to be bitten by the b bug from the biology side, right?

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So at this point I'd never, you know, been into a hive or anything like that.

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And so, you know, I kind of pursued a a master's degree with David Fletcher, my my mentor, and then a PhD out in California, and then uh postdoc at Cornell.

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And I like to tell beekeepers that

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You know, by by getting into honey bee science, I was keeping bees and doing beekeeping for five or six years before I realized, hey, you know what?

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I might want to read a beekeeping book.

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Because all it was one if you if you understand enough about the biology of of the super organism, the rest of it's just kind of putting boxes on top of each other, you know?

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Like it's

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You know, I think a lot of our extension work and everything that we do really focuses on the biology because that gives you the why you're doing the beekeeping, not the how and when.

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And that to me is is really what distinguishes you know a good beekeeper from a great beekeeper.

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So I kind of tell that origin story to to a lot of folks here in North Carolina and and beyond to

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to really underscore why we as scientists are so interested in doing the biology because it does manifest in beekeeping eventually because

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They're so complex and and there's so much more that we still have to learn that eventually does percolate into our management.

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That's really good.

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And that's one of the key points that Becky and I always try to bring back around is that you have to understand the biology and the behavior.

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to effectively manage the honey bee.

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So that's great.

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Well, we invited you here because we have launched this spring our series on queens and queen management and

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Queen biology.

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And when you start looking at the research in Queens and honey bee health and everything, your name comes up consistently.

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You've authored and co-authored so many different papers that are instrumental to our understanding of honey bees.

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For our listeners who are new to honey bees this year, or or maybe into their second year, can you give us a high-level overview of the queen and her role and her position in the colony?

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That's a great question because I think the answer to that can can often come down to a matter of perspective, right?

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I think there's kind of a duality there.

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I think a lot of textbooks and a lot of beekeepers just think of the queen as

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An egg-laying machine, and you know, that's her only purpose and her only role.

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She's very boring.

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There's only one of her, you know

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And that now they everybody agrees and knows that she's very important, but you know, they kind of just look at her as as an egg cow, right?

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To just

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provide the eggs and then everything else goes from there.

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Another way to look at it is that, you know, the queen is

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repressing all of her daughters within the colony with these pheromones, and so she's this dictator and you know, controlling, you know, everything within the colony.

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Both are true, but neither is at the same time, right?

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I think it it really shows that there's this collaboration between the queen and and her worker offspring and they both are are important and needed for proper colony function, right?

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And so

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The Queen's life cycle is, you know, for the most part pretty boring where she is just kind of laying

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Eggs and being tended to by the workers, but it does go beyond more than that.

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When when colonies make new queens

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They raise, you know, one or two dozen naturally, right?

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Not in beekeeping where you graft them and you know raise them on purpose, but naturally when when colonies make new queens

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The mother queen represses the workers from raising new queens, and so either when she gets old um and she can no longer repress them, or when she swarms away.

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the colony left behind they're they're making new new daughter queen cells.

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When the colony makes, you know, a couple dozen queen cells, what ends up happening is

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you know those those queens only can be one successor.

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So what they end up doing, which this is really what got me into queen biology and and my ma it was the basis of my master's degree

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Which is, well, how do these virgin queens then fight to the death to claim the colony, right?

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How do they become the heir?

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And I and I like to make the analogy that

00:14:10.640 --> 00:14:18.480
That kind of episode is like watching the last episode of the Kardashians where they all kill each other off until one takes over the empire, right?

00:14:18.720 --> 00:14:22.080
It's just kind of how it how how it goes.

00:14:21.940 --> 00:14:30.500
And s and then only after she's vanquished all of her rival sisters does that successful mother queen or uh daughter queen

00:14:31.300 --> 00:14:40.100
Fly from the hive and then mate with dozens of drones from all the surrounding colonies, and then comes back to the hive.

00:14:40.100 --> 00:14:42.180
She stores a proportion

00:14:42.720 --> 00:14:45.040
of the sperm from all of her mates.

00:14:45.040 --> 00:14:49.040
So she actually mates with this, you know, very large number of males.

00:14:49.040 --> 00:14:51.440
So all the workers kind of form this genetic

00:14:51.640 --> 00:14:55.720
cosmopolitan population within the colony when she's laying eggs.

00:14:55.720 --> 00:15:03.800
And so that was actually the basis of my PhD work of saying, well why do queens mate so many times when only one male is enough, right?

00:15:03.800 --> 00:15:05.960
So I think there's a lot of that

00:15:06.560 --> 00:15:14.880
fundamental biology of queen life history that goes on within just the first two weeks of her lifetime.

00:15:14.880 --> 00:15:20.960
But then once she starts laying eggs, she, you know, never leaves the hive again.

00:15:20.240 --> 00:15:24.960
She doesn't, you know, really do much other than fertilize and lay the eggs, right?

00:15:24.960 --> 00:15:34.000
But understanding that brief period early in her life can have profound ramifications for the rest of the of her life and her colony's life

00:15:33.660 --> 00:15:36.380
It's key to the success of the colony at that point.

00:15:36.380 --> 00:15:37.020
It is.

00:15:37.020 --> 00:15:46.700
How well mated she is, how well reared she was, all of these things, the quality of the queen goes into her performance.

00:15:46.640 --> 00:15:52.240
within the colony and you know and our work and others have has shown that queen quality varies.

00:15:52.240 --> 00:15:56.880
You know, there are some really good queens and there's some not so great queens.

00:15:57.320 --> 00:16:04.200
And the the quality of the queen kind of forms the ceiling of how good the colony is going to be.

00:16:04.200 --> 00:16:06.280
So if the if the if you have a subpar

00:16:06.820 --> 00:16:10.180
queen, she's smaller, she doesn't mate as many times, so on and so forth.

00:16:10.180 --> 00:16:15.380
They kind of have a lower ceiling of how big the colony's gonna get and how productive it's going to be.

00:16:15.380 --> 00:16:17.540
But if you have a a better queen

00:16:17.839 --> 00:16:21.360
the ceiling is a lot higher and and the colonies can be uh much better off.

00:16:21.680 --> 00:16:29.920
Well that's an interesting question because we often talk about queen quality and and you hear r references to the queens are not as good as they used to be and

00:16:30.420 --> 00:16:36.980
When you, as a researcher, talk about queen quality, what specific traits are you actually measuring?

00:16:36.980 --> 00:16:40.980
How do those traits translate into colony performance?

00:16:40.759 --> 00:16:48.440
Well that's a very important question, Jeff, because I think again there's different ways that beekeepers look and assess

00:16:48.860 --> 00:16:50.780
what they mean by queen quality.

00:16:50.780 --> 00:16:57.580
What I'm referring to in that context is kind of her physical prowess

00:16:57.560 --> 00:17:03.880
That is her body size and other metrics of just how large she is, bigger is better.

00:17:03.880 --> 00:17:06.120
But then also her mating success.

00:17:05.800 --> 00:17:07.960
So how many drones did she mate with?

00:17:07.960 --> 00:17:15.880
How mu how that sperm storage organ that she gets filled up and and stores the sperm from all of those mates, the spermithica.

00:17:15.939 --> 00:17:24.659
you know how how much sperm gets in there and and how viable it is because you know sperm can die and so sperm viability is very important.

00:17:24.659 --> 00:17:28.339
So I'm talking about the queen specifically.

00:17:27.760 --> 00:17:29.520
right of her quality.

00:17:29.520 --> 00:17:33.440
And again that translates to kind of the colony.

00:17:33.440 --> 00:17:35.360
But I think a lot of beekeepers

00:17:35.540 --> 00:17:38.500
assess the queen by looking at the brood pattern.

00:17:38.500 --> 00:17:45.140
So if you have this kind of solid wall of contiguous brood, they're like, ah, that's a great queen, you know, oh, I love that.

00:17:45.140 --> 00:17:47.380
And everybody loves those pictures, right?

00:17:47.380 --> 00:17:49.220
They show up good on Facebook.

00:17:49.720 --> 00:18:00.200
Yeah, and then and then the converse of that is if you have the shot brood where it's good there's a lot of holes in the in the brood and everything, uh, it's a bad brood pattern, it's a bad queen, you know.

00:18:00.200 --> 00:18:00.520
And

00:18:01.419 --> 00:18:11.980
Again, I think there are circumstances and and reasons of why the queen, as an individual, can be blamed for the brute pattern.

00:18:11.980 --> 00:18:12.299
But

00:18:12.440 --> 00:18:21.320
Our research has really shown in the narrative that that that we're really trying to put out there is that, well, the brood is actually a collective trait, right?

00:18:21.320 --> 00:18:23.159
Because the queen laid the eggs, but it's the

00:18:23.700 --> 00:18:25.700
bees that raised them.

00:18:25.700 --> 00:18:33.620
And so there's lots of different reasons why a colony can have a a bad brood pattern, not just because of the queen.

00:18:33.760 --> 00:18:41.919
And so, you know, you can take a queen that has a bad brood pattern, put her in a new colony, and her brood pattern is just fine, right?

00:18:42.679 --> 00:18:52.120
Or, you know, you put a a a good queen in that same colony and the brood pattern doesn't improve because whatever is behind that bad brood pattern is still there.

00:18:52.120 --> 00:18:52.360
Right.

00:18:52.440 --> 00:18:53.000
So there's

00:18:53.160 --> 00:18:56.440
There's many, many reasons why you can have a bad brood pattern.

00:18:56.440 --> 00:19:02.440
And what I like to say is that you need to rule all of the alternatives out before you blame the queen.

00:19:02.440 --> 00:19:06.520
But there's just something built into our beekeeper mentality

00:19:06.820 --> 00:19:10.500
That we just blame the queen when we see a bad brood pattern.

00:19:10.500 --> 00:19:14.260
And we need to be careful about that because we can overlook

00:19:14.780 --> 00:19:24.300
Mites, you know, colony being overrun by mites or AFB for God's sakes, or you know, like you know, like there's lots of different reasons why you can have a bad brood pattern.

00:19:24.060 --> 00:19:29.580
So you need to be very, very introspective and really think about that before you just blame the Queen.

00:19:29.580 --> 00:19:33.100
Dave, I know a lot of commercial beekeeping operations

00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:38.760
who are just every year requeening everybody.

00:19:38.760 --> 00:19:41.720
And so they're they're to the point where

00:19:42.500 --> 00:19:51.620
their access to queens is is affordable because they're they're doing their queen rearing and for them it it makes more sense

00:19:51.840 --> 00:19:55.360
to go ahead and just re queen the operation.

00:19:55.360 --> 00:20:00.480
And that might have been true for summer operations in the past, but not necessarily.

00:20:00.480 --> 00:20:02.880
Do you see that as a sign of

00:20:03.419 --> 00:20:16.620
this is where we are in Queen Health is that that we're safer in in bigger bigger operations to just go ahead and not take that time to say, is it the Queen, is it the colony, but just to go ahead and put a new one in there

00:20:16.540 --> 00:20:21.900
I'll kind of break that down into two parts because there's a lot to unpack unpack there.

00:20:21.900 --> 00:20:30.540
One of the issues is that we don't really have good baseline data of how long Queens used to live.

00:20:30.480 --> 00:20:38.720
You go to the textbooks and it's all, you know, three, four, five years, you know, like and we and we have we have this color coding system, right?

00:20:38.720 --> 00:20:41.600
Where you go through these five different colors.

00:20:41.540 --> 00:20:48.900
Because queens are, you know, expected to live about five years, so you make sure you have five colors to make sure that you know, you know

00:20:49.080 --> 00:20:58.200
And when I first started in in beekeeping, only some of the operations would requeen some of their colonies every other year.

00:20:58.120 --> 00:21:00.680
And then it went to every colony every other year.

00:21:00.680 --> 00:21:02.440
And then it went to every colony every year.

00:21:02.440 --> 00:21:04.920
And some of them are doing it multiple times a year.

00:21:04.920 --> 00:21:10.200
So I think there's anecdotal evidence to suggest that queens are not living as long.

00:21:09.740 --> 00:21:12.860
But we don't have good firm empirical evidence, right?

00:21:12.860 --> 00:21:20.300
And and so some people have accused me of tilting at wind windmills and that it's always been this way, and you know it's but

00:21:20.640 --> 00:21:33.920
You know, on on the other hand, you know, there there's definitely things within the colony environment that influence the colony's decision about whether or not to keep her around.

00:21:34.440 --> 00:21:46.600
And premature supersedure is, I think, definitely a management problem and concern that is, you know, manifests at the colony level of large and small operations.

00:21:46.220 --> 00:22:00.860
Large operations, that's the the the point of them doing that is that it makes economic sense to just raise a whole bunch of queens and just to go through and re-queen all the colonies, whether or not they have good or bad queens.

00:22:00.260 --> 00:22:02.660
And it's just, you know, simpler.

00:22:02.660 --> 00:22:04.740
But they have queens at the ready.

00:22:04.740 --> 00:22:06.020
They can do that, right?

00:22:06.020 --> 00:22:12.500
But but as a biologist, I'm more interested in this collective decision-making process.

00:22:12.640 --> 00:22:18.480
Of how a colony decides one day the queen is good and worth keeping around.

00:22:18.480 --> 00:22:21.040
Then the next day, off with her head.

00:22:20.940 --> 00:22:29.580
What is it that's going through the kind of social physiology of the colony in in in making that determination?

00:22:29.580 --> 00:22:33.580
And so, you know, I spent the first 20 years of my career

00:22:34.019 --> 00:22:38.100
Looking for the silver bullet of, oh, here's this one thing that's wrong with a queen.

00:22:38.100 --> 00:22:43.059
They don't mate enough, or they're too runty, or they're diseased, or you know, here's a pesticide that

00:22:43.300 --> 00:22:50.020
And we haven't ever been able to find a smoking gun and we've been checking off all of these things that it's not, right?

00:22:50.020 --> 00:22:56.340
And then so now I'm kind of flipping the switch and saying, okay, well it's not something with the queen that the

00:22:56.440 --> 00:23:05.799
workers are queuing in on, it's there's something in the environment, or multiple things in the environment, that change the worker's perception of her.

00:23:05.660 --> 00:23:07.580
You know, the queen can be good and bad.

00:23:07.580 --> 00:23:15.020
I've seen really crappy queens not get superseded, and I've seen awesome queens get superseded.

00:23:15.020 --> 00:23:20.460
So clearly that decision, whatever they're making, is not always perfect.

00:23:19.660 --> 00:23:26.860
And so what is it that's going into, you know, that gestalt perception of the queen by the workers?

00:23:26.860 --> 00:23:34.460
And and, you know, others and and we have have done a bunch of studies that I think we're starting to kind of understand.

00:23:34.519 --> 00:23:38.840
Some of the moving m of the many moving parts that's going on.

00:23:38.840 --> 00:23:44.039
One that's really seems to be important is Queens getting infected with virus.

00:23:44.340 --> 00:23:50.899
And what that what tends to happen is that uh shrinks their ovaries, which means they lay less

00:23:51.460 --> 00:23:53.940
Which then decreases brood pheromones.

00:23:53.940 --> 00:24:02.020
So brood larvae produce pheromones that are important signals within the colony about how good the queen is.

00:24:01.919 --> 00:24:09.440
So even if nothing's really changing uh uh of the queen directly, there can be indirect ways that that the colony can figure out

00:24:09.519 --> 00:24:22.720
There are other things too that that there have been some really great papers of uh toxicologists and you know people studying effects of pesticides and and these kind of things, non-lethal effects of pesticides

00:24:22.500 --> 00:24:35.940
And one of the things that certain pesticides do is change the brain chemistry of the workers, which deadens their ability to smell, particularly things like queen and brood pheromone.

00:24:36.100 --> 00:24:50.020
So, you know, there's multiple things going on within the colony that can affect not the queen directly, but the workers' perception of the queen that can change their opinion pole.

00:24:49.640 --> 00:24:53.560
of her and then all of a sudden off with her head, right?

00:24:53.720 --> 00:24:57.640
So it's a very, very complex thing that I think we're on the right track.

00:24:57.640 --> 00:25:00.440
We certainly don't have, you know, solid answers, but

00:25:00.640 --> 00:25:08.400
I I definitely think we've uh kind of crossed a threshold where where we're we're no longer barking up the wrong tree

00:25:08.360 --> 00:25:17.880
That's really interesting because so often or for so long we've heard the implication is the decreasing availability of queen pheromone is the key indicator.

00:25:17.880 --> 00:25:20.200
You're saying that the abundance or the

00:25:20.740 --> 00:25:29.220
the availability of the brood pheromone also contributes as a combined factor or a secondary, if not an additional

00:25:29.440 --> 00:25:33.600
factor in like whether the colony accepts the queen or in fact it's more important.

00:25:33.600 --> 00:25:42.559
You know, people long time ago, once they found queen pheromone, they start throwing queen pheromone into colonies to see if it decreases suit procedure and it doesn't

00:25:42.679 --> 00:25:51.880
So, you know, queen pheromone is kind of is one signal, but I think those secondary fecundity signals of of the brood are probably a lot more important.

00:25:52.160 --> 00:25:56.560
But even more so, it's the worker's perception of it, not just the amount of it, right?

00:25:56.560 --> 00:26:05.040
So I think there's there's that interplay of the signaling from the brood, but then also the receiving of the signal that can change as well

00:26:05.120 --> 00:26:12.080
We can't forget the the receiver end as much as the you know the the sender end, right?

00:26:12.320 --> 00:26:17.280
How much does the drone brood pheromone factor into that as well?

00:26:17.440 --> 00:26:18.159
Good question.

00:26:18.159 --> 00:26:19.279
Don't know that yet.

00:26:19.279 --> 00:26:20.799
Yeah, because drones aren't important.

00:26:20.799 --> 00:26:22.080
They're useless, remember.

00:26:22.080 --> 00:26:24.559
So, you know, nobody nobody studies them.

00:26:24.559 --> 00:26:30.159
No, I th I think you know drones are clearly important for for mating and these other things and how much that

00:26:30.340 --> 00:26:36.660
helps to modulate or regulate those collective decisions is is still unknown, but it's an interesting question.

00:26:36.660 --> 00:26:37.299
Yeah.

00:26:37.380 --> 00:26:39.780
Hey, let's take this opportunity to take a quick break.

00:26:39.780 --> 00:26:42.500
We'll come right back and continue our conversation with Dr.

00:26:42.500 --> 00:26:43.940
Dave Tarpey.

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00:28:37.000 --> 00:28:38.680
Welcome back, everybody.

00:28:38.680 --> 00:28:47.560
David, you mentioned queen quality and you talked about that it it was based upon maybe the nutrition they received when they were being reared.

00:28:47.360 --> 00:28:49.440
or the quality of mating.

00:28:49.440 --> 00:28:58.480
Can you tell us what you think about how the actual handling of queens by people, beekeepers?

00:28:58.419 --> 00:29:05.780
or sending them in the mail or raising them in mass, how does that impact the quality of queens

00:29:06.300 --> 00:29:13.900
Another great question that has a huge impact, you know, as as we transport queens and ship them through the mail, you know, and everything.

00:29:13.900 --> 00:29:15.740
That that does have an impact.

00:29:15.740 --> 00:29:19.020
Now a lot of the carriers and everything take great care

00:29:19.240 --> 00:29:27.800
A lot of the beekeepers that are selling queens make sure that they're well incubated with, you know, attendant bees and everything like that.

00:29:27.800 --> 00:29:28.120
But

00:29:28.419 --> 00:29:35.860
all that makes it all the more important of handling after they're received and before they go into the colony that's really important.

00:29:35.860 --> 00:29:39.220
And and we all know that, you know, if you overheat

00:29:39.540 --> 00:29:41.940
queens and bees, they'll die.

00:29:41.940 --> 00:29:47.780
You know, if they don't get enough water, if they can't, you know, cool off and everything, that can be, you know, detrimental.

00:29:47.780 --> 00:29:52.340
And so as we're shipping packages, we're shipping queens and everything

00:29:52.340 --> 00:29:59.220
we tend to overcompensate and make sure that we ship them cold because they can generate heat, right?

00:29:59.220 --> 00:30:00.419
And so they they're they're m

00:30:00.760 --> 00:30:09.880
they're less susceptible to to dying if they're cool because they can warm themselves up, rather than overheating, which can be harder, you know, to get back to normal.

00:30:09.880 --> 00:30:15.080
The problem is is that yes, if you overheat Queens, non-lethally, right, where

00:30:15.460 --> 00:30:18.580
They they get overheated for a period of time.

00:30:18.580 --> 00:30:27.940
They they might not die, but the sperm in their spermatheca can become sterilized, so they have zero vo or low sperm viability.

00:30:27.860 --> 00:30:30.580
And only live sperm can fertilize eggs.

00:30:30.580 --> 00:30:37.299
So you can have these queens that become premature drone layers or that are superseded early because they're they're not

00:30:37.740 --> 00:30:41.260
doing their function, right, of of laying the eggs.

00:30:41.260 --> 00:30:51.580
The problem is that our research, Jeff Pettis, uh Allie McAfee, who who's in our lab, but she's in Vancouver, Canada, there's a lot of people that are doing some great work and have shown that

00:30:51.840 --> 00:30:58.400
When you chill queens, again, it doesn't kill them, but it can also sterilize the sperm.

00:30:58.400 --> 00:31:00.880
So, you know, if you are

00:31:01.440 --> 00:31:10.240

David R. Tarpy

Professor

David Tarpy is a Professor of Applied Ecology and the NC Extension Specialist in honey bees. Among other extension initiatives, his program runs the Queen & Disease Clinic and the Beekeeper Education & Engagement System (or BEES). His research interests focus on the biology and behavior of honey bee queens in order to better improve the overall health of queens and their colonies. His lab focuses on the reproductive potential of commercially produced queens, testing their genetic diversity and mating success in an effort to improve queen quality. He has served on the boards of the NC State Beekeepers, the Eastern Apiculture Society, the Bee Informed Partnership, and the editorial boards of the top two scientific journals on apiculture. He is a highly sought-after speaker for clubs around the country and is in high demand to talk about the research coming out of his lab.

Queen Biology and Quality with Dr. David Tarpy (382)

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