Queen Series: Ang Roell on Queen Breeding and Hygienic Genetics (385)

Queen Series: Ang Roell on Queen Breeding and Hygienic Genetics (385)

Candice Cosiba
Hi, my name is Candice Cosiba from Sonoma County, California. I own Sonoma County Bee Company and I practice beekeeping. We manage hives for other people and we also have a product line. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jeff Ott
Welcome to Beekeeping. Beekeeping today podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman
And I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff Ott
and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out All of our content on the website. There you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episodes' transcripts, leave comments, And feedback on each episode and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www. beekeepingtoday. com. Thank you, Candace from the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association, for that one. Opening from the floor of the North American Honey Bee Expo way back in January. That seems like so long ago.

Becky Masterman
We have different weather then back in January.

Jeff Ott
Oh my gosh, that was strangely it was warm there this year As I recall, for most of the days, except for the very last day, then it got cold. Nowhere as near as cold as the Midwest honey bee Expo, but that's not a reflection of either expo, it's just the way the weather turned out We won't talk about getting snowed in to in Louisville last year.

Becky Masterman
You're never gonna forgive Louisville for that weather.

Jeff Ott
I have pictures of my footprints going across the parking lot To the one open restaurant because everything else was closed.

Becky Masterman
Foraging for food.

Jeff Ott
Well, Becky, today we continue our series on Queens I probably admit this at the beginning of every episode, but every time we do this it reinforces to me how little I know about Queens. And it's purposely one thing that I've never really focused my beekeeping on is raising a queen. So I've always been happy to just order my queens or go find my queens and bring them home and install them. Because the dedication and time commitment it takes to properly raise queens is phenomenal. It just amazes me what these people are doing.

Becky Masterman
It is not easy. It it is not easy to graft, to figure out the timing, to deal with weather delays because you can't slow down the production of a queen. And so so you have to figure out and either push through it or reorganize your schedule. I I really think that every beekeeper really got just how much work was put into every queen, we'd be willing to pay even more for our queens because, Well we don't know.

Becky Masterman
I'm sorry. It I just asked for a five percent increase across the board and what we're paying for queens. No. I am so happy to pay for queens. I order queens from many different producers. I really do appreciate getting a queen that's well mated and has had some effort put into the genetics of the Queen and I appreciate the diversity of the genetics in my apiaries and honestly I think we're gonna learn more about just why we're willing to pay for queens today when we talk to Ang Roell.

Jeff Ott
For our listeners may recognize that name. Ang is one of our regional beekeepers. And we've invited Ang to the show today to talk about their queen breeding operation. And what they're doing to maintain the purity and maintain the genetic qualities that they're looking for. This will be a great conversation

Becky Masterman
I'm looking forward to it and Ang another one of those beekeepers who you talk to them and you're like, Whoa You're a scientist. Ang could be a bee professor, and I think we're gonna hear that in today's episode.

Jeff Ott
And we'll be talking to Ang right after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff Ott
Hey everybody, welcome back. Sitting in the Beekeeping Today podcast recording studio virtual table. You know how this goes. Along with Becky and me, we have Ang Roll. Ange, welcome back to the show. Ang is one of our regular regional beekeepers, and we've invited her back today to continue our conversation about queens. Welcome Ange.

Becky Masterman
Hey Jeff. Hey Becky. Thanks for having me. We're really excited to talk to you because we always get to hear how the bees are, kind of how your operation is, but we're going to do a deep dive into your bees and your process and the queens that you sell and we might just have to book another hour with you. You have a lot to tell us.

Jeff Ott
So Ange, for our listeners who are new to the show and or may have missed some of the regional episodes, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into Bees, and then Just a little bit about your operation, because we'll go deeper into that as we go along in this episode.

Ang Roell
Yeah, great. Uh my name is Ann Schroll. I've been a beekeeper for thirteen years. I've been doing it in the professional arena for gosh, I was doing this math the other day. I think it's Ten years, which makes me feel ancient. I started as a backyard beekeeper with a friend with two hives. I think they were packages or nooks. And by the end of the season they were out of the hobby forever and I was like I had like four hives that I uh started putting through the winter. And I had really great sort of like like peer support. I had met a group of people who are also beekeepers and into these and together we built this beekeeping club in Boston. So it was really just like engaging time. And because of that energy, I was really captivated to try to pursue it as part of my professional career. And here I am like 13 years later doing that.

Becky Masterman
When did They Keep Bees get established? That is your company.

Ang Roell
We started in 2019 as They Keep Bees, but I started this sort of based genetics and equipment and sort of foundation of the project in 2016. So at that time I was working with Russian bees from Dan Conlin and some survivor stock from Kirk Webster and then sort of selecting for that and trying to create a sort of closed breeding operation, but at that time I was so small I had like fifty hives. It was a reach goal. But in that that like three year period I learned a ton. I worked with other beekeepers and queen producers. And I sort of figured out my systems along the way. I think as I have grown, that's ever changing because you need different efficiencies at different scale. It's been a journey, and here I am.

Jeff Ott
Where are you located in the country? Are you still in the Boston area?

Ang Roell
Right now I am in the western part of Massachusetts, which is like just under the southern tip of Vermont. So about two and a half hours from Boston and two and a half hours from New York. And that's always where our home base has been. But for seven years they keep these was a migratory operation and we had a site in central Florida on the central east coast in Fort Pierce and Vera. And then we had our northern hub here in West Rumass in a town called Montague. And then for several years we also had bees in the western part of North Carolina as like a stopover point between those two spots.

Becky Masterman
You're one hundred percent in Massachusetts now? There's no more moving? There is no more moving bees right now.

Jeff Ott
You mentioned something that kind of leads into a question we have from a listener. We have an ongoing promotion with Hive IQ where listeners can send in a question, we answer it, and if we use their question on the air. they receive a hive IQ hive tool. Really cool thing. We just received a question about uh placement of colonies and raising queens for local stock.

Becky Masterman
How far apart do apiaries have to be for queens and drones to mate with each other? Do you want me to tell you why Pat wants to know?

Ang Roell
Yeah, tell me why Pat wants to know. Because I wanna know what Pat thinks we know about what it takes to raise queens.

Becky Masterman
So Pat goes on to say we have six hives and are continuing to grow and we want to improve our genetics and mite resistance. But if we buy mated queens Any of their daughters would be open mated with whatever wild genetics happens to show up. Would it be feasible to have two yards close enough, each with improved genetics, in hope they would supply drones for each other?

Ang Roell
I think Pat that that's a great practice. You want those two yards in this particular scenario to be within two miles of each other so that there is some drones produced in that second yard, presuming the first yard is your mating yard where you make your split. Queen emerges, leaves the hive to go out to mate. Your second yard would be your drone genetic yard, and that's like a high a yard where you maintain those bees like you would for honey production, but they are from the selected genetics that you're trying to cross with that. mother line who's in your first yard. You know, with two yards and six hives, you're still going to have an open mated queen. She is going to mate with drones that are within a two mile radius of there, and unless you have a very detailed map of the beekeepers in your area, where there may have been swarms in the past. You don't actually know what all of the genetics that that queen is mating with are. Because when you're trying to create a sort of closed genetic pool, you're trying to reach a saturation point where you have so many of those drone producing hives within a two mile radius that the chances of your queen from a mother yard mating with your drones is much higher, right? putting three hives into the area versus putting fifty or a hundred hives into the area, your chances are going to be. quite different. Also again, results may vary depending on ecology and other hive locations. But I think it's like nonetheless, you know, six hives and we're trying to learn about and strengthen our genetics, it's a great practice. It's a really good place to start, to start understanding like how many relationships with different farms am I going to need in this area if I'm trying to saturate the drone mating pool. And also like just another layer to put in here is like we think we know how drones and queens mate. We know they made in the air We know that like there are DCAs, but also some beekeepers have seen con queens mate in mating yards with drones that are in the same yard, right? Or just happen to be there at the same time. So I think there's a lot that we know much like everything in beekeeping, and there's a lot that we don't know, but we have ideas about that are influenced by whoever we are and whatever our lived experience is. This is getting philosophical. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is. But yeah, I think that's that's it's a great thing to try. I like to be within the two mile radius and understand what it takes to maintain a sort of drone production yard and a queen production yard. And then, you know, also you don't always want to have that cell razor in the same place where we're going to like make queens. So then you need a third yard that's your cell razor yard. So you start to understand what are the the needs and the inputs of what I'm trying to produce. with queens, much like you would do with honey. Like how do I have to set this up? What are the systems I need so that I can make this happen? And even at a small scale understanding that allows you to then expand it. But I also I guess there's so much in this question because there's also like bringing in other genetics, right? And I think as a backyard beekeeper, a small scale beekeeper You should be bringing in diverse genetics for your gene pool. So maybe you have two different families of one particular line or you have two different producers whose bees you like a lot and you're trying to maybe cross those. There is this this idea and this question of like wild bees and and this what the genetic pool is out there, you should be trying to cultivate genetics from people who have been breeding queens and have these systems in place and understand what this takes at scale and how to do it well if you are a small scale producer because you're going to improve your stock by working with somebody that whose systems you you've seen and understand and know are going to lead to good results in your AP. Don't think you know it all when you have six hives is what I'm saying. There's always my own.

Jeff Ott
The art of beekeeping. Well, thank you, Pat, for that question and thank you, Ange, for answering that and helping us Help our listeners become better beekeepers. Expanding beyond that, that takes us into really kind of the high-level understanding of the complexity of your operation of keeping and and raising queens. So let's just use that as a segue into tell us about your operation and what do you do and what are you raising there in western Massachusetts.

Ang Roell
Yeah, so at They Keep Bees we are trying to raise Varroa-sensitive hygienic stock, and to assess that we use harbo-assays, we use Mite washes, we use hygienic testing, and we use integrated pest management. In the last three years, we've started using instrumental insemination which is the collection of drones semen or germplasm and then insemination into virgin queens. And we are working with a couple different lines. We're working with carniolan spartans from the mixes in Central Florida There are also pol-line queens mixed in with those lines, as I understand it. And then we're working with carniolan Queens from Megan Mahoney, who's in North Dakota and Texas. I've kept a lot of different kinds of bees in my time. I've worked with Russian bees, I've worked with carniolans, I've worked with Pol-line bees. And really for the Northeast what I find is that we need a a darker bee who is who has some viral resistance and also is conservative with food stores through the winter because much like you, Becky, our winter’s long and cold. Our spring is mercurial at best. And our summer, like our our nectar flow is like big and hard and fast and like you have to be able to sort of like grab onto each of those moments and really maximize your production. And so as a a small startup apiary, the reason that we quickly became sort of migratory is that we realized that we needed sort of multiple queen seasons in a year to get really good at this. Um and so we started migrating to Central Florida so that we could get an eight week clean season in there, sell early season queens and then come back up here and from the overwintered stock Do a set of northern queens. We did that for seven years, produced about a thousand queens a year. And then in 2024, we were moving our Florida the Florida arm of our operation to North Carolina to get out of the path of hurricanes more consistently. And we got walloped by uh Hurricane Helene. And so And it's aftermath because there was other hurricanes and tornadoes in Florida. It was a wild agr natural disaster time to be a migratory beekeeper. And so Over the last year, we've done some assessment and analysis and decided that we are going to primarily root in western Massachusetts and focus on both our ongoing breeding cream operation but also deepening our practice in instrumental insemination so we can continue to sort of close the breeding pool and and cross back into the genetics we have to increase their value for us and hopefully for our customers. And that's gonna take a lot of very detailed and complex work here on the farm. So we really can't be doing like a double clean season and scaling the instrumental insemination in our apiary. We really need to be. in one place to achieve that, to have a lab, to have the infrastructure we need here to be able to do that, because it is very detailed microscopic work that needs to be Incredibly clean.

Becky Masterman
I have a question about timing because one of the reasons you went to Florida was to get the the early season queens. And in Minnesota, usually we need queens sometime in in May. I'm finding that I need queens now because colonies are so big and so strong. and I I want to be able to manage them and it's hard to have five deep boxes on a colony. That's a really big brood nest. So So but but my question to you is that I also want to be able to buy your queens. And so that means that when I go into my system, I need to do mid season divides or late season divides and requeening. Are you finding that you are having to Do you have an educational system for your customers so that they can accommodate a later queen introduction before the divides? Or are you timing your queen production for divides? That was a long question, but you handled the apiary distance one so well. I'm sure you could do this one.

Ang Roell
Yeah, so it's sort of like how how are we uh selling queens in light of the fact that we're not doing earlier season queens this this year? 'Cause usually for us you could get our earl you could get queens from us starting in March, so we have customers. up and down these co coasts. So it is quite a change. And so this is like my first year doing it. I think first and foremost I'm finding for if even from last year, because we sold less early season queens last year as we were recovering, I have a lot more local customers, so they can in our in our ecology, a savvy beekeeper can sort of like equalize and then grow those hives so that they can do later season divides. And I think some people also will venture their own splits and know that, you know, if they make five only venture their own walkaway splits. If they make five, only two of them are gonna take and they'll re-clean the others with mated queens. I'm finding we have a little bit more of a local interest in our hives and also people who are like on a same ecological timescale. Something that we are gonna try to do in the face of not being able to um supply these earlier season queens for our northern customers is to do cells and virgins because then people can make their own splits and work with those queens early in the season, much like we're working with those queens early in the season. But yeah, because we won't have that early season opportunity to maximize the southern apiary, we do have to change how we do things. And and it's a good point. We have to sort of be able to educate our customers. I think I see a big opportunity for us in educating people around cells and virgins who aren't as Savvy is like commercial beekeepers use those all the time in their operations, but it's quite a different thing when you only have a few hives to do that There's more to know. There's there's a fine-tuned timing in which when everything is ready, it is ready and it cannot wait a day or an hour. It needs to happen now. And I think that that's not always easy as as someone who's not doing this professionally, right? When you're a queen producer or somebody who's making a lot of splits professionally, you have a system, you have a team, you can you can make three hundred splits in two days when you've got fifteen hives and a job, that's like a different different set of demands. So yeah, I think that's gonna be an opportunity for for us to grow, for customer base to grow. And I think there are people already doing that. I know Corey Stevens is doing a lot of education around Virgins, Meghan Mahoney and Ellen Toppitzhofer did a great series on queen cells and shipping them and handling them and what they can take and what they can't take. So like I think that's slowly happening in our sort of cohort of peers. I think that only creates more opportunity for more diverse customers to engage with us and also for us to be able to value this work of queen production at like all these different scales and charge an appropriate fee for a queen cell or a virgin or a mated queen and have people understand the level of inputs that go into each of those things and value them as separate sort of products from the hive.

Becky Masterman
That was such a great answer. And I think that what I'm thinking is that there's that standard, you learn how to keep bees, you learn how to do your spring divides. But then there's so much more beyond that. And I know I've I've talked to be commercial beekeepers who are even thinking about like the making making a later season divide, and that's my colony that's gonna make it through the winter.

Ang Roell
Yeah, totally. I mean that's a huge part of northern beekeeping. Yeah, absolutely.

Becky Masterman
And I don't think there's a a ton of education out there. I think there are people doing it, but there's not that This is the system. If you want to do that later split and then go ahead and and that's the calling that that you really think it's going to make it. through the winter, how do people do that? And so I love the fact that you are so education based and you've you've provided a lot of information out there for beekeepers. So I'm hoping I'm hoping that you're gonna give us a really good step by step.

Ang Roell
You just gave me a really great idea for like content for the season. How do we teach people how to do late season splits that we can re-queen for overwintering? And then also how do we like when is the right time to use queen cells and virgins? in the early season to maximize splits and maybe try to open mate them in our own yards.

Jeff Ott
Let's hold that thought. We're gonna hear from our sponsors, but I'd like to come back and talk a little bit more about the whole concept of using the cells and the virgin queens, because that's a topic that's really not discussed much. So we'll be right back after these words from our sponsors.

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Jeff Ott
And before the break. You were talking about how people are using the Virgin Queens and the Queen Cells, and most beekeepers will know that you can get queens, mated queens. in the wooden box or a little plastic tube and that's what they're familiar with. But you're you're talking now about getting the cells and and the Virgin Queens. Can you talk a little bit about why a beekeeper would choose one or the other And the pros and cons of either.

Ang Roell
Yeah. So let me just just so we're like talking on an even playing field, to make queen cells, you you want these sort of ten days after grafting cells. To get those ten days after grafting cells, you have to graft from a 24-hour old larva. And you want that to be pretty precise. And then you put that into a cell raiser, cell builder And that is a usually a queenless colony that produces pulls down a bunch of those cells. Leave those in there. Often you recombine that with a cell finisher, which is a queen right colony, and those cells are sequestered. from the queen so she doesn't tear them down. And then at day ten you go in there and you hold those cells and then you have twenty four hours to make your mating nooks, put your cells into your mating nooks before your queens are going to emerge. So what what I'm talking about is those how what we're talking about right now is how can be keepers use those cells. If they're used all the time at a commercial level, I mean cell production is huge part of early t queen season and there are some incredible cell producers at a commercial scale across the southern uh United States. Folks are making small splits and they're adding a queen cell to those splits. The queen emerges in that mating nook and she goes on a flight. and hopefully comes back, doesn't get eaten by a bird, has is ready is ready to lay eggs, right? So there's risk associated with this, right? But usually queen cells are a little bit cheaper And I think at a smaller scale, what Queen Cells lend the opportunity for is to get sort of mother stock lines from different beekeepers whose lines you think might do well in your in theory. and then cross them or open mate them with the stock that's around you. Now, this kind of goes back to Pat's question from earlier, right? Like, well then how do I start saturating my own yards? You can kind of do that if you're if you're producing honey in some yards. And then you have uh your nooks made up in another yard, you're already influencing the breeding pool and you can have more or less control over that depending on how many hives you have. what scale you really want to be saturating at. And that gives you the opportunity to try different things in your APR. It lowers the cost per sort of unit of making a split. Most of the time these are made early in the season, at a at a commercial scale, at R scale. We're making those splits early in the season from overwintered stock, putting queen cells in them, letting those queens mate, and we still have time to maximize the primary nectar season 'Cause hopefully if all goes well, there's mating flights, there's no birds, those queens will be mated, and then that will be a nook that can actually produce some honey and also as as Becky was saying earlier, go into the winter season as something that's gonna overwinter and come out the other end. That's not the same as like a later season split because some people will make will do the same thing in the later season after the honey flow. They'll break down all of their hives and make like mating nook splits and then put those nooks into the winter season. That's pretty specific to the Northeast because we have a fall nectar flow and not everybody has that. So W they really need that for build up. I don't know if you could do that if you didn't have a fall nectar flow in the same way that we do. Or maybe if you have like a full summer nectar flow, you could pull that off. But yeah, so anyway, there are many ways. What I'm saying is there are many ways you can take these cells and for a lower cost you can produce more splits and sort of maximize your output. Now you're gonna have attrition at every scale of like queen production, whether you're grafting or dropping cells or putting in virgins, but you're also gonna have that with mated queens too and it's a higher cost of input. So that's the that's kind of the reason for for commercial scale beekeepers to do that, right? It's it lowers a cost of input, you can maximize your production But I think there's also incentive there for smaller beekeepers, 'cause you can do both of those things, see which queens do well, cull ha you know, half of them or a third of them, um, recombine and put those bees through the season. And now you're practicing and getting into the rhythm of what it's like to participate in green production. You are not doing everything you're not doing everything required, but you're beginning to participate in that. And I think that that To me, one of the reasons I love teaching that stuff is because it makes you a better beekeeper. You're able to keep a calendar, understand the inputs and the systems that you're gonna need to achieve a goal, sort of like have an orientation of sustainability and production from within your own APRA that I think is great. Do I think like one small VKeeper can Save the world with their queens? No, probably not. But I think all of us working together can have a bigger impact on what's happening with the genetics in our area as well as in our industry at large, you know?

Jeff Ott
And the Virgin Queens are pretty much the same thing, but later? I mean you're not inserting a cell in the in the nuclear.

Ang Roell
Virgin Queens are basically emerged queens that are shipped within twenty-four hours and they need to be introduced quite quite quickly to the hive to survive. I've had the most success introducing virgins to hives that are sort of hopelessly queenless, meaning they have no eggs and no open larva, um, and introducing virgins into those in cages. is successful, but that does mean that you're sort of dequeening the hive going back in and tearing down cells during a queenless period when the hive's not that happy to see you. So I find virgins Introducing virgins is similar to introducing inseminated queens, you have to set up that same kind of system, but with inseminated queens you have a push-in or a sculvini cage It's just a grumpier experience. I'm like for the bang for the buck, I'd rather just do the cell, you know what I mean? Because I can do the cell the twenty-four hours after the split and I'm I'm done. And for Inseminated queens, you have to do all these extra steps because they're like a higher value queen. So for me, I'm trying to do those extra steps for those higher value queens. But sometimes you ha you just have extra virgins, and so how do you take advantage of that is what That's how they work in my system.

Jeff Ott
A backyard beekeeper can do essentially the same thing if they have a queenless colony and they have a colony that they find swarm cells, they can take

Ang Roell
Yeah, it's called On the Spot Queen Rearing and there was a there's like a PDF publication out there that's really great where you can see Basically like do you queen a hive or you find swarm cells and like how do you use those? Where do you put them? What's sort of the the inputs of making a nucleus hive so that it will accept a a cell is a little bit different than it is for a mated queen, right? You can make a you can make a split that's gonna get a mated queen like pretty weak and once they chew that queen out of her cage they're gonna bond to her, she's hopefully gonna lay eggs and everything is gonna go well, but with the cell it's like y it has to be quite strong to be queenless for that period that it's going to be queenless for during the mating flights. and then come out the other side once she starts laying, like have enough bees to take care of the brood that's going to be emerging in spite of that brew break. But so there's a little bit more fine tune like you do there's some skill to it that that it takes learning and fine tuning, but I think it is a way you can take advantage of the cleans that are already being produced in your yard. If you like those bees. I mean if they're grumpy bees that aren't fun to work and don't produce honey, then maybe don't cut those cells out.

Jeff Ott
True Great.

Becky Masterman
And I want to take you back to something that you said because we have we have some newer beekeepers and you said something that was super interesting, but I don't think they understood what it was, but you talked about about using a push-in cage when you're introducing a virgin or or an inseminated queen. I I think you said for the inseminated specifically. Just for the inseminated, not for the virgin. And Okady Lee at Minnesota, if you ever have a queen that you are really worried about introducing, using that push-in cage is very helpful. And can you can you share that reasoning, please?

Ang Roell
When we are introducing an inseminated queen or like an older queen who we want to try to graft from a few more times, but we're putting her in a new like on fresh wax or so you know, s some way that she needs to be moved out of the hive that she's in and into a new place. We will use either a sculvaney cage, which is like a tiny kind of push-in cage, or a push-in cage where it's like it's an excluder cage where the bees can't get through it. And the r the reason you're doing that is because you're taking when you're trying to introduce and get accepted a queen who's a little bit more tender, a little bit more unique. you need to get the bees to accept her. So the first thing you do is this hopelessly queenless thing. You de queen the hive, you let all of the brood age up. uh and you go in and you tear down any swarm cells that might have been produced by that little split that you made. And then you can take your older queen or your inseminated queen and you can put her under a pushing cage give her time to lay in that area. It's gotta be open, brood. Don't put her over honey or nectar. So you're giving her those cells to lay in and like a few you know, you put a few workers in there as well to take care of her Um and when that allows us for her to start laying eggs and for that brood to age. Generally bees bond with the queen once she has capped brood. So it gives you this like window where the bees will begin to accept her more readily, right? Because they they take about three weeks, even even when they mate their own queen, um it takes about three weeks for that queen to be accepted in that hive as the queen. Um and anywhere in that window from virgin hood to being fully mated and accepted, they could be like, actually, nah. So what we're trying to prevent. with this pushing cage is the actually gnat. And so we're giving that queen time in a pushing cage to lay and for that brood to age up so that the bees feel bonded to her before we take her out of that pushing cage and allow her to continue to lay throughout the hive. The Sculvana cage is a little different. I don't think the eggs can mature there, but it just allows the inseminated queens to lay in that patch to increase her chances of acceptance. But I think I'm pretty sure that the brood cells are a little bit shallow, and so they can only really get to like uh like a larval stage in that little space, but even that is just enough for the vert for the inseminated queens to increase their chance of acceptance.

Becky Masterman
And did you mention a direct virgin just popping them in there and letting them go?

Ang Roell
No, I would I would do uh the hopelessly queenless thing, take you know, de-queen, let all of the larva age up a few days, go in uh before or five days, tear down the queen cells and then install her in the cage and then I'd go back twenty four hours a later and let her out if she wasn't sheed out already. Because you want it to be pretty quick. I want it to be pretty quick so she can still go on her mating flights. But A and generally if that's strong enough hive, they'll chew her out, they'll just eat the candy, you know. They don't tend to the virgins in the same way that they do the mated queens at all, but They will just be like, ah, move this.

Becky Masterman
I've mentioned before, but I talk about a SARE grant that you did, the walk away divide SARE grant.

Ang Roell
It was a few years ago, but it is it just got we just published a pa there was a pub paper published about it last year.

Becky Masterman
I love it because I think I found it too when I I had tried to do a lot of Walkaways and and when I was a beekeeper with one apiary, my walkaways I had really high success. It was fantastic. But I learned basically the statistic that you shared about two out of five are successful. I learned that as soon as I opened it up to many APARs and I I my love affair with the walkaway really did kind of end and I want somebody's mated queens now. So but but I I I wanna I want you to touch on the the the walkaway study, but you are also mentioning other grant reports, but You're a scientist as w as well as being a queen producer. You are always it seems like you've always been actively involved in information gathering and testing things and working with different projects, right? To get more information? Yeah, definitely.

Ang Roell
I mean I think inquiry and testing, you know, innovative ideas or ideas that we think are working, but like what do we actually What what happens when we apply them at a scale beyond three, you know? That's so important. Easy to be confident when it's like, well, you know, seven out of ten. So okay, so the the walk away study we did a set of studies where we we made splits from 10-day cells, two-day cells, like 48-hour cells, and walk and a bunch of different kinds of walkaway splits to see which ones really worked to produce queens. And as part of that, we made walkaway splits that we kept in their original location. We made walkaway splits that we put in closed conditions for 48 hours and then reopened. We made walkway splits that we moved from their original location. Wow, what a time.

Becky Masterman
Uh there were a lot of variables in that study. There are a lot of variables.

Ang Roell
What we found basically was that these walk aways that are made in their original location are the best, which explains why when you're, you know, a third year beekeeper making walk away splits and just nailing it every time as like you probably hit on some of the formulas from that study, um, which are really like Original location, open brood, strong field force generally will produce a really good walk-way split because it's basically mimicking a swarm, right? You're like taking the original queen, some of the field force, moving them to a new location Her original location gets field force, food, excitement, like a a sort of a group of bees to go out with that Virgin Queen on her first mating flights as her attending cachet. Like it gets all the the best parts of making a new queen and is often successful. Once you start trying to do it without virgin queens, queen cells or mated queens, without any of that sort of content and move them around in Apiary, it gets much more chaotic in my opinion. But I do think that at a very small scale, if you're using like a formula, you can make good walkaway splits as well. And you can also employ these concepts You're talking about earlier of on the spot queen rearing. Make a good walkaway and then cut out go back in on day ten and cut out all the best cells and split them between a bunch of splits from another hive or sort of how do you leverage those pieces to make your own little system for queen production And for uh for me, like coming to Queen Production from being first backyard beekeeper that was excited about this Those walkaways, those little practices were such good entries into then going on to learn about larger scale queen production and what it took and what the inputs were, because I could translate that information in my head. But I think also because of that small scale and curiosity, that sort of thread of inquiry has really carried forward in my work. There's a lot aga I talked about this earlier. Like there's a lot we think we know and we there was just that huge review of drone congregation area literature and it's like Turns out we don't actually know that guys. Everybody, rewrite everything. Thank you for being honest. That would be true across the board, right? It's like A good scientist will tell you they know a lot about one thing, but like to know a lot about everything is just hubris. And so I have always tried to approach this work from the standpoint of like, well, what do we think we know and before we go deep diving into scaling this part of our operation, let's try let's like trial what we think we know and see how it pans out if we test it across multiple variables. And we've had great support and success with working with SARE, both the Northeast SAR and the Western SAR, with some Western collaborators. And so it's been a good opportunity to try different things in our apiary. This year we are going to look at the heritability of VROA-sensitive hygienic behavior. We are going to look at four different essays and determine which ones predict or assess that hygienic trait that we're looking for sort of the most effectively. And of those, which ones track on the heritability? So which ones show that the F one daughters of those queens that were hygienic also retain some of that hygienic trait. So that'll be a two-year study. We're actually going to get to work with the Dicey Lab at Cornell on that one and uh collaborate on some data collection. And I know right now there are several other beekeepers across the labs and beekeepers across the country asking that same question and sort of trying to create some replicable data that we can compare and contrast to have conversations about. what it is we think we know and then what it actually says when we test it out in the field. And I think that's so important because beekeeping is hard. Like facing uh sort of sticker and like other other sort uh other emergent pests and trying to figure out the solutions to that while also maintaining the genetic diversity of the Populations that like aren't endemic to here but are here with us and our entire food system is reliant on there's ways that we produce products and make a living, but it's it's not an easy thing to do in the face of just like everything we're facing down in the world right now. So I think that in that line of like inquiry and asking and trying to figure it out, like that always needs additional support. There needs to be more collaboration between practitioners and scientists, as far as I'm concerned, because These are two different spaces. Like what's happening in a lab or in like a tr in a s scientific inquiry aperture is not the same as what's happening in a field where people are relying on inputs to make a living, you know, like relying on their bees being healthy and producing honey or producing nooks or producing something that they're gonna do they're gonna make their living off of. And I think it's important to honor that like those folks have incredible skill and knowledge about how to do this well and and how do we sort of marry that with the science So that we can all be doing this better is kind of a big driver for me.

Becky Masterman
You look like you're gonna wrap it up. I do I do I do have a quick question.

Jeff Ott
Okay. Quick question and then we'll wrap it up.

Becky Masterman
Okay. Leave that part in. So and I know that you talked about having a big local customer base, but you do ship queens across the country. Could you tell us about your queens? Tell us what beekeepers can expect. I know carniolans are are lovely at reacting to the environment and so I'm sure you've heard some feedback from from people who've used your queens across the country.

Ang Roell
Yeah. Uh my favorite piece of feedback to hear and if you Have it, please share it with me, is I love hearing for people who've had our queens for like two or three, or sometimes like four years. I'm just like, that's incredible. That's really cool Like that happens in our A B and we really we ch we obviously we're we're not migratory anymore, so we're not doing two seasons and so it's easier to have northern genetics who have a break in their season, who live for longer periods of time. But it's always just so cool to me because it's more and more rare and it's hard to achieve. It's hard to achieve. So I love hearing about that. Um so expect bees who live a long time uh if they're cared for well. Yeah, so carniolans and our particular carniolans we're trying to select for the hygienic behavior for a burrow sensitive hygiene. So they are rigorous builders when they need to be, but they are also conservative consumers in their wintering. They do sometimes break their brood cycle if there's a dearth or a stressor, and that's something that you have to be prepared to navigate through feeding or or um supplementation. I think an important thing for me is like expect them to be like there is a Varroa sensitive trait in these bees, right? But that doesn't mean that you don't have to monitor for ice and treat them if the thresholds get too high. Like they're they're not all a breeder queen that they came from, right? And s and that's really important, I think, largely misunderstood in our sort of smaller beekeeper circles. It's like they are all from a mother line who is rigorously hygienic and has these virosensitive traits. And that is a heritable trait and it's not a guaranteed heritable trait. Genetics are a wild and wonderful world But I think that I think there is just this idea of like getting a silver bullet mated queen that I I want to always try to dispel. Like we make grapees and I'm really proud of them. And there's no such thing as a silver bullet queen. You know, there's just like Having good bees, having good diversity in your stock, and continuing to select for what works for you where you are, and continuing to select for that adaptability that you talked about earlier, Becky. And yeah, and we love to pr I prefer to ship queens in a box with cover bees. So I love when people like collaborate with their bee club or their beekeeping friends and like order multiples, because then I can ship in a battery box or a cardboard box with cover bees, which is a much less stressful shipping experience, I think, for Queens than when they just have a few attendants. But if we ship singles or doubles, we do tend to ship those with within the cage attendance 'cause it's just hard to ship two queens in a large box.

Becky Masterman
What's your what's your minimum for that box? Minimum number of queens? For those little bat we ship those little batteries with like six queens in 'em.

Ang Roell
That's that's great. That's yeah. Unusual actually. I like to have some space in there so that we can sheet cover bees into those Yeah. I prefer it that way and I find their acceptance to be better when they're less stressed out when they get to you.

Jeff Ott
So Angie, it's been wonderful having you back on the podcast to talk about your operation and help us expand on our knowledge of what it takes to raise queens and as a beekeeper what it takes in the background to raise those and get the kind of queens to us that are productive and healthy and useful for the season. So thank you for joining us again.

Ang Roell
Yeah, thanks for having me, y'all. Thanks for doing this.

Becky Masterman
Looking forward to listening to the uh whole series. Oh, thank you. We really appreciate you joining us and being a part of it.

Jeff Ott
There is so much to queen breeding and that whole process that the more we talk to these queen producers, the more appreciation I have of what they are doing.

Becky Masterman
And honestly, just appreciating a good quality queen, it does make a difference in your colony and what you're seeing as far as production. And I I was excited to hear about longevity. But what you're seeing is is their expertise going into that animal. And it makes us feel like, like Jim Hartman says, we're bee farmers and we need good animals in order to do our best and help them do their best.

Jeff Ott
And that about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today Before we go, be sure to follow us and leave us a five star rating on Apple Podcast or wherever you stream the show Even better, write a quick review to help other beekeepers discover what you enjoy. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab on the top of any page. We want to thank BetterBee, our presenting sponsor, for their ongoing support. support of the podcast. We also appreciate our longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Feedbooks for their support in bringing you each week's episode. And most importantly, thank you for listening and spending time with us. If you have any questions or feedback, just head over to our website and drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again, everybody.