Queens, Drones and DCA's with Chip and Gard (342)

342 - Queens, Drones and DCA's with Chip and Gard

Amy Seiber: Hi, this is Amy Seiber. I'm really excited to be back at the North American Honey Bee Expo. I work at Foxhound Bee Company. I live in Alabama. I'm an Alabama master beekeeper that just graduated this year. Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

[laughter]

Jeff Ott: That works.

[music]

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

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee 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 episode 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, Amy Seiber from Alabama, for yet another great opening.

Becky: Isn't that the first state? If you start singing the state song alphabetically, isn't it Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut?

Jeff: I don't know, why don't you sing it for me, and let's figure it out.

Becky: I can't sing, so I'm going to have to stop there.

Jeff: [chuckles]

Becky: That's exciting. We should have started with Alabama and just done the whole thing alphabetically.

Jeff: Yes. Well, thank you, Amy.

Becky: Thank you, Amy. Oh hey, that was well timed.

Jeff: Speaking just in harmony. Thank you. Amy will talk to us at the North American Honey Bee Expo in January. Thank you, Amy. Becky, what have you been up to in the bee yard?

Becky: I have been having so much fun in the bee yard. You know that this is the year of queens for me, where I'm taking queens very seriously. I'm buying a ton of different stock. Today I was in the bee yard helping an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota set up an experiment. When it comes to queens and her setting up the experiment, she had to pull out a queen from a colony, cage it, and then do a maneuver with the colony. I don't want to give it away because it's very exciting.

I saw her pick up the queen with the wings, which is a very valid way to do it, but it freaked me out because I usually pick them up by the thorax. When you pick them up by the wings and you try to put them in a cage, all their six legs can stop them from being put into a cage.

[laughter]

Jeff: Like a cat. [crosstalk]

Becky: Exactly. I wish I had taken a picture of it because you could just hear the queen go, "Uh-uh, I don't want to go in there." Jeff, how do you pick up queens, or how do you move them from one place to another?

Jeff: I'm not really good with queens. I admit that freely. Every spring I have to go out and start practicing again with drones. I try to pick them up by the thorax. Sometimes it's whatever I can grab. I'm not really good.

Becky: My guess is that if you have really big hands, it's hard to grab them by the thorax and actually maneuver them. If I'm picking them up, I'm either moving them or picking them up to mark them, as many times as I've picked up a queen, I've never picked them up by their wings, but that is a very valid method.

Jeff: I have never tried picking them up by the wings. To even think about it, I just go back to thinking as a young boy and trying to pick up things by wings and having the wings fall off or accidentally pull the wing off the insect. I'd hate to do that to a queen. That would just freak me out.

Becky: I think I was just freaked out at first when I saw her grab it, just because, like I said, it doesn't immobilize them. It's a safe way to grab them, but it doesn't necessarily keep them from moving around a little bit. I wonder if there are any other ways. You don't want to pick them up from the abdomen. No swooshing that soft tissue.

Jeff: A lot of people just resort to whatever tool they have. The little queen hair clip thing that looks like-

Becky: -you could cut her in half if you lose.

Jeff: Yes.

[laughter]

Jeff: There's a couple other contraptions I've never tried. There's one that looks like a crack pipe, and I'm not sure how that one works.

Becky: Katie Lee just pulled that out, and I looked at that, and I said, "How? That looks confusing." It also looks illegal. [laughs]

Jeff: No. Not that I know what a crack pipe looks like, it's what I've seen in movies.

Becky: Yes. Well, I just admitted that I did, too.

[laughter]

Jeff: We'll have to ask our guests how they recommend picking up queens today. We have a couple of great researchers I'm looking forward to having on the show. We have "Chip" Taylor, who's been on the show before. Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor. He's the founder and director of Monarch and is an emeritus professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas. I met Dr. "Chip" Taylor. A long time ago, I did an article for Kim in Mexico and met "Chip" there. Then also one of his former students, Gard Otis, who's now a professor emeritus at University of Guelph. They're going to talk to us about honeybee mating and--

Becky: Drone congregation areas. What a fascinating conversation. I can't wait to have it.

Jeff: I know they're out in the Green Room. Let's invite them in, and we'll learn all about this.

[music]

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Jeff: Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table, we have a great couple of guests sitting at Guelph University, Guelph, Ontario. We have Gard Otis sitting in Lawrence, Kansas. We have "Chip" Taylor, and sitting in St. Paul is Becky, of course, and I'm sitting in Olympia, Washington. Welcome to the show, Chip, Gard. Thank you.

Dr. Orley "Chip" Taylor: Well, nice to be here.

Dr. Gard Otis: Yes, it'll be fun.

Becky: Very exciting. There's so much knowledge that we have in this hour that's about to come forth. I can't wait to learn a lot. Thank you for joining us.

Chip: Thank you. You don't know there's so many things we don't know, and we're going to get into that a little bit.

Becky: Okay. More questions?

Gard: Oh yes, lots of questions.

Becky: I want some answers, though. [laughs]

Chip: Oh, well, [crosstalk]. We've got answers, and we've got some facts, but there's a lot of interpretation problems with this biology here.

Jeff: For our guests who do not know either of you, introduce yourselves, and then we'll get into the research about the honeybee mating behavior and DCAs.

Chip: I'm the old guy here, so I'll go first. We got started in the African bee situation in 1974. One of my colleagues, Charles Michener, came back from Brazil when this problem was first developing in Brazil. Came back with lots of stories about it. At that particular time, I was extremely allergic to an insect I was working with. I needed to make a transition in my life. I had some early experiences with bees, having started bees when I was 14. I knew a little bit about bee biology, and I knew enough to write a proposal to the USDA, to Department of Agriculture. We got funded for a four-year project, which was ultimately started in French Guiana, which is where Gard was.

One of the questions that first came up through all the things that were known about the African bees at that time is that they were extremely successful in mating with whatever virgin queens appeared from apiaries. Almost all the queens in apiaries in Brazil., so we were told, were mating with African drones. The question is, "How is that possible?" What were the dynamics of the interactions between the virgin queen flights and the drones that were out there? Why weren't they mating with European drones? That was the fundamental question that piqued my interest in this right from the beginning.

One of the things that I did was get in touch with Norm Gary at that time. I went out to California, we had a nice visit with Norm. I asked Norm about attracting drones because he had been attracting drones to queen lures, and to queens, and so on. I said, "Norm, there ought to be a way of trapping them. There ought to be a way of bringing them to a queen in a way that we could trap them." He said, "Well, I've done that. I've got something of a trap."

Well, the conversations went on, and nothing seemed to happen from that. He never was able to show me his trap, so I had to figure out how to design a trap. I figured that, "Well, these are insects, they'll follow a signal or a stimulus until they can't anymore. It should be possible to trap them in some way."

I designed a conical trap, and I'm sorry we don't have a picture of it that we can show everybody, but we can provide that for people who are interested. We had a conical trap which dangled the queen below it. The drones, in turn, would fly up at the odors and this little stimuli that we put around the bottom of the trap, and they would fly into the top of the trap and never come out. Very few that would come out. They'd get stuck at the top of the trap. Therefore, we could reach into the trap and sample the drones.

We could therefore do some interesting things. We could paint color them so that we could determine the ages of them, we could determine the origins of them. We even used queen-numbered markers of different colors on drones for various tests, and so on and so forth. It turns out that that was a really interesting device, and it opened up all sorts of opportunities to look at mating biology. That's where Gard came in. Gard came in--

Gard: I'm just going to interrupt because one thing Chip didn't make clear there is that the drones are flying around 30, 40, 50 feet up in the air, you've got your trap on the ground, so how do you get it up there? People have used all sorts of devices from kites to helium balloons, but when I was working with Chip in Venezuela on this in 1980, we were using weather balloons filled with helium.

Chip was an avid fisherman, so he knew all about fishing poles and fishing lines. He had a great little reel and a really heavy test line, and we would just roll that thing up in the air. It was like instead of fishing for fish, we were fishing for bees. He was happier than a you know what and you know what. It worked. Kept him really happy, and out we went to trap these drones up in the air. [laughs]

Becky: Gard, why don't we take this chance to have you tell us a little bit about your background?

Gard: Chip was interested in tropical biology, and I was. I gravitated to the University of Kansas and studied tropical butterflies for a couple of years, which probably wouldn't have been a very productive career. Then Chip got this grant from the USDA to study these honey bees. I guess he'd figured I'd already proven myself in running around in Costa Rica on my own, so I could handle being down in South America on my own.

He kept writing me, roping me into this, "Don't you want to go to French Guiana and study killer bees?" and I'd be like, "Nobody in their right mind would say yes to that." Then next month I'd get another letter from him, "Don't you want to go to French Guiana and study killer bees?" After about four of these, it's like, "Yes, I'll even do that to go back to the tropics."

I came into bees through the back door. Man, I've been with bees pretty much ever since. That was 1975 that we started working with him. I'm in my 50th year, almost exactly from when we first went to French Guiana together to study bees.

Chip: We started in French Guiana. I put up my first trap close to the ocean when we were in French Guiana, and we got some drones. That was exciting, but we didn't have an opportunity to really use the drone trap very much in French Guiana. We hadn't really thought about how to use it all and we were involved with other things at that time. We went until we got to Venezuela and that's where Gard and I came together and used this trap to trap drones at various distances from colonies in which we had drones that were of known age, in which we dabbed with a little bit of paint.

After you run out of the primary colors when you're doing drones, you have to make up a lot of colors. We had a lot of fancy names for the colors of the bees that we caught because we had about 30 colors by the time that we ran through the whole gamut of things. We had these drones marked. We had a procedure for marking the drones when they first emerged, these baby drones. We put them back into colonies and then we subsequently went out and trapped drones.

Gard was game for all of this. He was instrumental for doing a lot of the sampling and recording a lot of the data. The interesting thing was that the very younger drones we would catch closer to the colonies, maybe 800 meters or so. When we got out there to about 3 kilometers-- Isn't that correct, Gard, we were out there about 3 kilometers?

Gard: Yes, I think our furthest one was about 4 or 4.2 kilometers away.

Chip: Well, you have a better memory than I do, and that's not surprising. When we looked at the drones that we were getting out there at 4.2 kilometers, they were old. We didn't catch an eight-day drone out there. We caught 43-day-old drones, we caught 39-day-old drones, we caught 40-day-old drones. It was apparent in looking at all of the data that the drones were going further and further as they got older. You saw not only age increasing, but you saw the numbers actually decreasing. In other words, dilution was space. Of course, we were doing all of this on a linear thing and we weren't doing it more than one direction.

If you think about it, if you do it in all possible directions, what you have is a distribution curve. Assuming that everything is flat and everything is normal and there's no biases in their behavior, that you get a dilution that essentially forms a cone from a colony or from the apiary. It's a cone of numbers that drops off very, very fast, so that the effective density of drones from an apiary or a colony where it peaks is about 800, 900, or 700 meters. Somewhere in there. If you get beyond that, what you're dealing with is a lower number of drones from that particular source.

All of a sudden, the lights went on and said, all right, each apiary is a drone distribution point. It's a gametic shadow. The colonies and apiaries are casting a gametic shadow that has this cone-like effect. What happens when there's another apiary close by or what happens when African bees are close by?

Gard: Then you got a whole series of intersecting gametic shadows, or umbrellas of drones, if you will, that are all intersecting and with literally drones everywhere across the landscape coming from every possible direction, really.

Chip: It's really nice to have a good student.

Becky: [laughs]

Gard: Have a what?

Chip: Good student. You got the message. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You've got all these gametic shadows and they're all interacting. What that means is, fundamentally that when a queen leaves an apiary for a mating flight, if it flies beyond the highest concentrations of drones for its own colony, it's likely to meet with drones from other colonies.

What happens when African bees move into an area where apiaries, there are virtually no wild colonies of European bees in almost all the places we were in South America, so European bees were just the little islands.

Becky: Oh, sure.

Chip: African bees move in and now you've got lots of little islands surrounding the big island of European bees, and the queens are mating with African drones. This was the solution that we think makes sense. Now, arguably, people say, "Well, maybe the queen should only mate close to the colonies because they want to avoid predation and things of that sort."

Well, what they really need to do is avoid mating with their brothers, right, because of the problem of producing diploid drones. This sums up about five years of work trying to figure this out.

Beyond Venezuela, we've had to do a lot of testing of where drones went. We had to establish these joint abundances. Assuming that you have two apiaries or two colonies with equal numbers of drones, based on all of the things that we deduced here, you should be able to predict the joint abundances depending upon the distance between them. Working in the Flint Hills in Kansas, we would put up three or four traps a day at different distances from two colonies in which we had marked drones. We could determine the joint abundances of drones through space, which meant if we had two colonies that were a mile apart or half a mile apart, at any point between the two colonies, we could predict the joint abundances.

If we were closer to colony A than we were to closer colony B, we would have more colony A drones. We could predict how the dilution would work through space. You're really dependent upon how many drones that you have flying on a given day, so it's never exactly equal, but the data came out really amazing so that it appeared that you actually can predict joint abundances. It works out that way.

Jeff: Many beginning beekeepers, and we have many as listeners to the podcast, have a very generic idea of what a drone congregation area is or a DCA, and they just really see it in many diagrams as a blob somewhere that drones congregate there. A drone congregation area, as we understand it, or as often described, is that misleading?

Chip: A drone congregation area where they form is really curious, and it took us a long time to figure out why drone congregation is formed or where they do. A lot of times, we can't explain them. My first insight as to where drone congregation areas formed occurred on the Flint Hills. When working with Wayne Wolf and Gerry Loper out on the Flint Hills of Kansas, we were looking for drone congregation areas, which we could see on the X-band radar unit that they hauled out to Kansas. It was an old military unit that went on wheels, and we could haul this X-ray radar around.

It was odd to see this military piece of radar out on the Flint Hills. Anyway, it worked fine to detect the drones because they have plenty of water in their bodies, and you could see that. We'd see these little white figures on this dark screen, and you could see the ebb and flow of these developing congregation areas. Early in the day, there was nothing there. Then you would see it build up and build up, and there'd be more and more bees occurring in these congregation areas. Then at the end of the day, you could see it collapse a little bit. It was really neat.

When looking at these congregation areas, one of the things that was really apparent was that when the drones come into these areas, they come in at a relatively low level, which is still 30 or 40 feet off the ground. Then they rise up and they may go up to 60 or more feet, and then they don't leave. They drop down in the congregation areas, and they leave from where they entered, at least at the bottom of the column. They're not leaving from the top. They're not just going way up to the top and then leaving. They're coming back down again in some way.

I'll get to how we're interpreting all of that in a moment. One day, when walking across this plain area in the Flint hills, I had a balloon and I had my fishing line, as Gard was describing, and we had gusting winds. All of a sudden, the line snapped, and the balloon went to Nebraska or someplace like that. I was stuck with this fishing line, but I still had the queen. I still had the queen in the cage at the end of the fishing pole.

As I was walking across this level area, I came across a little gully. It was about 20 feet down in the bottom of the gully. The whole thing was about 150 feet across or something like that. As I got to the edge, I hesitated to see where I was going to go down the mini gully and come up on the other side. All of a sudden, I had drones coming to the queen, and I'm going, "Well, that's odd." I'm standing there, and my pole is up there, and the drones are coming in at a height of about 8 to 10 feet rather than 40 feet. Well, that's weird.

I proceeded to walk down to the bottom of the gully. All the drones disappeared. Then I walked up to the other side of the gully and there was no drones on the other edge. I walked back to where I originated and the drones assembled began. I said, excuse me if I say this, "Hot damn. I know what they're doing. They're following an edge. They have a pathway. They have a pathway. That is awesome. Now I know how they're getting to the congregation areas."

We proceeded on that basis to look for these pathways, and that led to a lot of discoveries, in that there are pathways with whole chains of congregation areas along these pathways. The pathways tend to be linear, but they sometimes change. If we looked at the drone behavior as best we could with the radar, it looked like what was happening is the drones were going out on a pathway, getting to a congregation area, and then leaving at a different direction from where they entered.

Then if we looked at that carefully, we could often see that what they were doing is that they were milling about at an area where the linear feature that they were following ended and then going ahead, they were following another linear feature, which might have been in the same direction or a different direction. One of the ways you can interpret what's going on with these drones is that they're getting into a congregation area, leaving it and going in a different direction. Then what they're doing in the congregation area is spinning up and getting a fix on where they're going next. In other words, they're looking at the horizons, they're looking at the linear features, and then they're following the linear features.

One interpretation of drone congregation areas is very clear, they could be mostly points of reorientation on linear flights that drones need to take as they get older, and older, and older. The interesting thing is that you don't catch all drones in close by congregation areas. It's really rare. It's like they learn the route.

Becky: Whoa, that's fascinating. That's what the bees who are orienting at home, that's how they start, right? That's their initial orientation. You are saying they're going out and reorienting.

Chip: Right. Here's the next part of the story. They're going the same direction day after day. I don't know if we have enough time to discuss a big project that we did with a bunch of students, but we marked with the queen markers, we glued queen markers on several hundred drones. Then we trapped drones in four different directions. The drones that went north always went north. The drones that went east always went east. The drones that went south sometimes went west. Drones that went west sometimes went south, but when it came down to where they were going, it was all a matter of declination. The number of drones that went west meant that it was large, and they went downhill. They followed a declination downhill.

The ones that went south also followed a declination, slightly downhill, but they had to fly higher to get to that declination. The drones that went north and went east had to climb up higher to fly in those directions. In other words, there's resistance, and in a sense that drones have a tendency when they leave a colony to use the lowest point on the horizon to fly to. Why they do that, I don't know, because that means that they have to climb back uphill when they're coming back. Nevertheless, going those directions show that they had fidelity. Fidelity to a direction, that they're learning a landscape and they're using that landscape over and over the same way day after day.

Anyway, one of the things that we did was we said, "All right. Let's see how much the drones know about the overall landscape." We would trap drones at the western location where we had most of the drones coming, and they all had these numbered tags on them. Then we would take a couple of them, put them in little dark block boxes at a particular time, and then we would send a team 1 mile away in the opposite direction. One team would hold the dark box with drones at the west location, which we call Big Sky, and the other ones would take this dark box over to Ozone, which is a parking lot on the other side of campus. At a particular time, we said, "All right. We're going to release drones from both locations."

The drones that we released from the west made it back to the colonies in about one or two minutes, and they were only about half a mile away when we released. The drones released in Ozone did a couple of loops and then headed east, absolutely opposite direction from where the colonies were. They didn't know the area, but here's the kicker. Some of those drones got back, but it took them 45 minutes to do it. Most of them didn't make it back.

The question then is, how does a drone who ends up going east make a decision that I'm going the wrong direction and somehow loop back to find its colony? A few of them did. I'm going, "Wow, I don't understand how that happened. What are they picking up? How are they using the environment?" They have never been to that location before. We know that they went west a couple of times, and then we release them east, they go the wrong direction and still get back to the colony. A few of them did. Some of them probably flew until they just died. They just ran out of ATPs, but some of them managed to fly for 45 minutes or longer, and still got back. That experiment really needs to be repeated. We didn't publish that-- well, I wanted to do that experiment over and over and over again, but it takes a team of about 15 people to really run that experiment thoroughly. That was really a great classwork problem, and everybody really enjoyed it. The kids were really excited because that was real data.

Jeff: That would've been exciting. Hey, let's take this opportunity to take a quick break, and we'll come right back after these words from our sponsors.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. Okay, there's a lot of information flying back and forth. Gard, you're actually doing a literature review, meaning you're reading all of the work being done about mating in drone congregation areas and queens. Maybe not all of it, but most of it. What can you tell us? What can you share and add to the conversation that you think our listeners would like to hear and know?

Gard: I have to back up to some of the early stuff we talked about, because first, I was involved with trapping drones with Chip, and that was way back in 1980. At that point, drone congregation areas were mating areas. That's what people were talking about. That's what I think we believed at the time. We were just out trying to figure out stuff about drone biology that Chip already discussed. Of course, being Chip's student, I've always followed what he's doing, like a good student. He got into all that radar stuff, and I went, "Wait a minute. This puts a whole new spin on what we think we know about what drones are doing because maybe they aren't really going to these drone congregation."

The story was, that got generally accepted is drones leave the colony. They go out to these magical places that nobody really knew exactly why they formed or they did. Then they just sit there and wait. They sit in the drone kind of tool around, wait, wait, wait, for queens until they're running out of food. They go home, get some more food, go back to the DCA, wait for queens.

Then, from the queen's side, the queens leave the colony, search for the DCA, mate with the drones multiple times, as we've learned, and then they go back. That's the conventional story that's gradually been accepted. The problem is that once we knew about drone congregation areas, if you're going to study drones, where do you look? Well, you look in drone congregation areas. If you see a virgin queen bee mating, where do you see it mating? You see it mating in a drone congregation area.

All of our observations of queen matings, which aren't that many, really, when you get down to it, almost all of them have been in drone congregation areas, maybe that's because that's where they mostly occur, and we know a lot of them do occur there, but it's also because that's the only place we're really looking.

Then you've got this alternative explanation, that maybe these DCAs are more reorientation points as the drones are flying through the landscape. I don't know about you, but if I'm lost in the landscape trying to get to a restaurant, I'm not looking for something else along the way, like I may not be looking for queens to mate with.

[laughter]

All of that said, it left me with this question of, "What are these DCAs?" Then, about three years ago, there was a group out of the UK that used harmonic radar. It's a different radar system. You put a little antenna on the drone, and as it flies out from the colony, you send a signal out. An echo gets bounced back to you, and you record it. You can track that individual drone in space. Chip and company couldn't do that. They could see these mass numbers of dots on a radar screen, but they couldn't track individual drones.

When Woodgate and his colleagues did this study, they basically got exactly the same results as Chip, Gerry Loper, and Wayne Wolf. The drones were leaving the colony, they were going almost in linear pathways out to where they could see on their radar there was a drone congregation area. Then they would tool around there and turn in tight circles. Then they'd move on down the line to another drone congregation and tool around there, and then come back.

They couldn't track queens. It just didn't work. Nobody has been able to track queens. As a result of that, we actually have, I would say, zero objective data on knowing when queens mate. That's a problem when everybody assumes they know when they mate, but we actually don't have any data that shows that that's really where they mate, then, as biologists, that's interesting. That means there is a big hole there, stuff we don't know, stuff we'd like to know, and then you focus research and try to figure out what's going on.

Chip: Well, I can jump in on a little experiment we did to try to answer that question. In the Flint Hills again, we set up two drone sources. One with wild-type drones and the other one with cordovan drones. We used cordovan queens and a bunch of little nucs. They were cordovan virgins. They flew out over this landscape where we pretty much knew the joint concentrations of cordovan drones and wild-type drones. What it appeared from looking at the progeny of all of those cordovan queens once they had mated is that most of them were flying about a mile before they were completely mated.

Some flew directly west, in this particular case, which took them all to places where there were virtually 100% cordovan drones. Some of them flew in the other direction, which took them to places where they made it exclusively with wild-type drones. With that experiment, which is one experiment, it's one data point really on this whole question, it would appear that queens are really out-flying the drones from their own sources, and as they should, it makes perfectly good sense. It should be an operating system.

You have to remember that bees did not evolve in apiaries. Bees evolved living in trees at some distance from each other. Given that they have this particular sex-determination mechanism, they really have to mate with drones that are unrelated to them to sustain a population continuously, especially in the wild. We need more data on that. We really need a queen tagging system or tracking system, because we don't know where those queens actually mated. Whether they just mated with drones along pathways, or whether they mated in some congregation areas.

In that particular experiment, we didn't know where the congregation areas were, so we don't really know what happened there. That sort of stuff needs to be repeated, and we really need a queen tracking system.

Gard: I'm going to jump in here again. Another thing that's really interesting is that way back in the '50s, [unintelligible 00:38:34] Butler and Ferry did a study where they were working on a really open-- I think you had a question earlier about what drones are doing if there aren't many landmarks around, and how they're navigating through the landscape. They were actually looking for drone congregation areas in an area that was really, really open. They called it a fen, call it a marsh if you will. Just an open, open landscape, with very little topography and almost no vegetation like trees, and stuff.

He was so convinced, this was early on in the discovery of drone congregation areas, but he was vehement in the paper, that drone congregation areas do not exist. They could put queens up anywhere in that landscape and within a couple of minutes have a cloud of drones around them. No evidence whatsoever there were aggregations in particular sites.

Nobody followed that up. It's just been this blip, if you will, in that drones don't always form congregation areas. Well, if they don't form them, then where do queens mate?

Finally, it was followed up by one of Niko Koeniger's students. Niko and his wife Gudrun did large numbers of studies on honeybee drones and mating. They went to a marshland in Northern Germany, repeated the same kind of thing, drones everywhere, no drone congregation areas. Chip and his group went out to a really open dry lake bed in Arizona, open landscape with almost no landscape features, if I remember correctly, Chip, no drone congregation areas. The drones were just flying around wherever.

We've got a system where we know some queens mating congregation areas because some people have seen it. We also know that people have also, occasionally, reported matings outside of drone congregation areas. We've got some landscapes where drone congregation areas don't even form. We have examples where seasonally, early in the season when there aren't lots of drones, there are very discreet drone congregation areas, but by the time mid-summer comes and there's lots and lots of drones, drones are everywhere in the landscape, and the congregation concept disappears. The issue that I have is that there's so many unknowns in this system and so many things we've assumed we know that we really don't.

A final thing on this, I've talked about landscape, but a lot of the early work was done by Friedrich and Hans Ruttner in Austria in the Mountain Valleys. You put these drones in mountain valleys, they don't behave like your drones in Arizona or Kansas do, Chip, because they've got these narrow little valleys surrounded by mountains on either side, and the drones take off and they have very specific pathways. They're not branching all that much. Guess what, they fly a lot further. They get average drone distances further, they get individual drones flying 5 to 7 kilometers. They get an average queen mating distance, they claimed with their research, of about 2 kilometers, whereas you were saying earlier about maybe more like 1 kilometer in the Flint Hills.

The little bit of data we have from these very specific studies doesn't even agree completely. It gives us different stories depending on the landscape. I think there's a lot of research to be done to try to sort a lot of this out. What your beekeepers probably really want to know is, if I'm going to mate a queen, how do I try to influence the mating that that queen is going to do to get her to mate with the drones of choice.

I can tell you that 150 years ago, there were people who came to the conclusion that you couldn't get pure matings because everybody flies too far when they go on these mating flights. It goes back a long, long time, early, early studies with trying to mate Italian queens where it was all black bees. They had an apiary there with all their Italian bees. The queens came back, mated with all black drones from somewhere that were-- They knew the closest apiary was 5 kilometers away or something. The queens were flying way off to get mating.

Jeff: Can we ask you to come back on a future episode? Let's delve into this a little bit deeper on the queen mating behavior, drone congregation areas. There's so much to talk about.

Chip: I think that's a worthy subject. I think the beekeepers need to know about it, the queen breeders needto know about it. There's some ways the system can be manipulated based on what we know. We need to explore that further to get queens mated properly.

Gard: Beekeepers who are listening to this, if you want to try to control your mating at all, just keep in mind that drones are flying pretty long distances. They're coming from all directions, from all over the landscape. Queens are going out a long distance and meeting drones from all over the landscape. Their mating system has evolved to mate with a high diversity of bees and not their own sons. If queens are flying some distance to mate, you're going to have better control on mating probably if you put your drone colonies out at some distance away, a kilometer or two away from your home apiary than if you keep them at your home apiary.

Other than that, you got to go to islands or way up in the far north country where there aren't any honey bees or someplace really remote if you want to get control on mating, or instrumental insemination is always available.

Chip: [laughs]

Jeff: Always that option. Chip Taylor, Gard Otis, we really appreciate you joining us this afternoon and just giving us a peek inside this fascinating world that doesn't get discussed quite often.

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Becky: Thank you so much. I have about 400 follow-up questions that I'm not going to be able to ask. I really do hope you come back and join us.

Gard: It's been fun. Thank you so much.

Chip: Glad to.

Jeff: That was fascinating. I really wish we could continue recording. I look forward to having them back.

Becky: Jeff, that was podcast Christmas for me. That was so much fun. The knowledge and the history in that phone call as far as the great research that's been done, and the stories of just how really fundamental information was figured out by scientists, the scientists we just had on the program. That's just so exciting.

Jeff: It really helped lay the groundwork and help demythologize what we think we know or what's been written about so often.

Becky: I came away going, "Wait, there's so much we don't know," which was their message, is that there's just a lot of research that needs to be done, and so many holes to fill, and the puzzles out there for that those scientists who take on the challenge. They've got a lot of work to do.

Jeff: Future grad students.

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Becky: Listen to this episode and start taking notes. It's so practical because we do need to know more about mating in order to get the best possible mating for the queens. We want to influence the genetics because that's what we're doing to try to improve the stock. That's good information. Hopefully, somebody is going to take up the challenge.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab along the top of any web page.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular, longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books, for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener, for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:47:02] [END OF AUDIO]