Effect of requeening on colony development in the bumble bee, Bombus terrestris

Abstract

To test the effects of requeening in Bombus terrestris, at colony foundation phase, a total of 60 colonies were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups. The first group (S) involved colonies that were requeened with newly hibernated queens after all the workers in the first brood had emerged. In the second group (P), we requeened the colonies with newly hibernated queens when they reached some 40 workers and in the third group (C), original queens of colonies were retained and considered as a control group. Queen acceptance rate was far lower in the P group (40%) than in the S group (90%). Colony lifespan was significantly longer in the P group (83.57 ± 3.55 days) than in the C group (76.70 ± 2.76 days). We found no significant difference in the number and timing of sexual production between groups. The results suggest that the requeening method is not suitable for bumble bee mass rearing. But, during the early phase of colony growth if the founder queen dies, introducing a new queen to the colony can be useful to reduce colony loss.

Keywords:

• acceptance rate
• Bombus terrestris
• colony traits
• rearing
• requeening

Acknowledgments

We would especially like to thank Dr. Ayhan Gosterit for rearing the bumble bee queens used in this study and Dr. Emre Karaman for helping in the statistical analysis of the data.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Scientific Research Projects Coordination Unit of Akdeniz University. Project Number: FYL-2016-1554