Effect of thermal insulation and feeding treatments on early spring honey bee queen rearing

Abstract EN

These experiments were conducted at the apiary of Faculty of Agriculture, Moshtohor, Benha Univ., during early spring of two successive years 2013 and 2014 to estimate the effect of wintering and feeding treatments on honey bee queen rearing.

Twenty-four colonies (12 F1 Carniolan bees and 12 F1 Italian bees) were used, each group was divided in to 2 groups one of them 6 hives coated with thermal insulator, 3 colonies were covered with thermal insulator and the other were in normal Langstroth hive.

Results indicated that F1 Italian bees are more better than F1 Carniolan bees in all tested queen rearing parameters (number of queen cells; length of queen cells; number of emerging new queens and queens fresh weight) during the two years of study.

Data also indicated that feeding honey bee colonies with pollen substitute and sugar syrup affected positively on all queen rearing parameters and gave a good morphological virgin queens.