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

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

Caleb Jacobson

Howdy, this is uh Caleb Jacobson from Fort Worth, Texas. Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Jeff Ott

Welcome to 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

Hey, a quick shout out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors who support us. 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, 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, Caleb Jacobson from Fort Worth for that wonderful opening from the floor of the North American Honey Bee Expo last January in Tennessee.

Becky Masterman

What a great opener. Thank you.

Jeff Ott

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

Becky Masterman

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

Jeff Ott

Oh hush, hush. We're just barely getting into spring. Today is an exciting day, or this episode is an exciting one because we are launching our series of episodes focused on queens, queen behavior, and honey bee queens in general.

Becky Masterman

I think that it is going to be so valuable for our listeners and and us to gather experts from queen health to queen breeding and put it all into one place. So I'm really looking forward to this series Queens are so essential to our colony health.

Jeff Ott

It's fun because so much of what's taught to beginning beekeepers is, well, queen is egg-laying machine, or you know, she rules the roost. I'm mixing metaphors there. She rules the hive. She rules the colony. And the research indicates that that's not really quite all that she does and that's just an oversimplification. So this series really should highlight the value of queens and all the nuances of the Queen Bee's life.

Becky Masterman

And we're gonna hear, I think, a lot about what can go wrong from the people who are looking at the science. and the people who are actually raising those queens. So it'll it'll be very informative.

Jeff Ott

I have never in all my years of beekeeping, I've never focused on raising queens. 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 And that's okay. And maybe one of these days there's still time left. 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 And so having a a better understanding of the Queen is gonna be really fun to look into. You're giving me a squinty eyed look.

Becky Masterman

Have you ever done a walkaway Queen Jeff? You have to have.

Jeff Ott

Not intentionally.

Becky Masterman

Are you serious?

Jeff Ott

Yeah, really honest.

Becky Masterman

Okay, I'm sorry. I don't there's no judgment here. I just something it's baby.

Jeff Ott

You'd be the first person.

Becky Masterman

You would be the first person. But oh that's that's interesting. Okay, well that has to be a twenty twenty-six goal. One walk away.

Jeff Ott

One walk away. All right.

Becky Masterman

Although I will say if I lived in Washington, I would not walk away a queen. because of your weather. They need to fly and meet and you just don't have that predictability, I think.

Jeff Ott

Well, yeah, we do in June, July, August. you know, in September, but at that point y it's you know, June and July maybe. September, of course, no, I don't really want to do that to a colony. You're right.

Becky Masterman

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

Jeff Ott

And I know none of our listeners are judging. That's great, because we have great listeners.

Becky Masterman

We do have great listeners. And they're not gonna remember that you also did raise bees in Ohio and Colorado. And so three states have had that opportunity.

Jeff Ott

I've neglected my many opportunities. 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 One name stands out, and that's Dr. Dave Tarpey of North Carolina University. And he's our first guest to help kick this off

Becky Masterman

I'm so looking forward to talking with David and learning everything he knows. Okay, not everything. We don't have that much time. But I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

Jeff Ott

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

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Jeff Ott

Hey everybody, welcome back. Sitting around this great big virtual beekeeping today podcast table, stretching coast to coast on the East Coast in North Carolina. We have Dr. Dave Tarpe. And in St. Paul, Becky, and I'm in Olympia. David, welcome to the show. We appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to join us on Beekeeping Today podcast. Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me.

Becky Masterman

You are all over the place as far as Queen Health and Bee Health. So you're doing some pretty amazing things. Are you collaborating with everybody or just most of those the researchers out there?

Dr. David Tarpy

Or subset. It's a pretty small field. So yeah. Um The the nice things that we have a really great community of scientists and so it's really easy to find areas of overlap. You know, I think one of the 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. And then I often go up and ask them, well, what about queens and drones? And then you can do the exact same thing in in the queens and drones, which are often neglected. 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.

Jeff Ott

Before we get going too far, David, can you tell us A little bit about yourself, your background, and how you get started in in the whole area of bees. Sure, my origin story.

Dr. David Tarpy

Your origin story. 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. And I got really turned on to this confluence of behavior, evolution, and ecology. And so when I did my senior year project, it it dealt with with that and insects and then I didn't I knew I wanted to go into grad school, but I didn't really know what or or where. And a faculty friend of mine, who turned out to be my my mentor and master's advisor. He handed me uh a couple textbooks. One was by Mark Winston, nineteen eighty seven, the other was by Tom Seeley, nineteen eighty-four. And he said, I think, you know, with your interests, I think you might kind of like this. And And both of those I read from cover to cover without putting them down and knew that's exactly what I wanted to do. Which we don't all have that kind of aha moment, right? So I f consider myself very, very lucky. to be bitten by the b bug from the biology side, right? So at this point I'd never, you know, been into a hive or anything like that. 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. And I like to tell beekeepers that 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? I might want to read a beekeeping book. 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? Like it's 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. And that to me is is really what distinguishes you know a good beekeeper from a great beekeeper. So I kind of tell that origin story to to a lot of folks here in North Carolina and and beyond to to really underscore why we as scientists are so interested in doing the biology because it does manifest in beekeeping eventually because They're so complex and and there's so much more that we still have to learn that eventually does percolate into our management.

Jeff Ott

That's really good. 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. to effectively manage the honey bee. So that's great. Well, we invited you here because we have launched this spring our series on queens and queen management and Queen biology. And when you start looking at the research in Queens and honey bee health and everything, your name comes up consistently. You've authored and co-authored so many different papers that are instrumental to our understanding of honey bees. 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?

Dr. David Tarpy

That's a great question because I think the answer to that can can often come down to a matter of perspective, right? I think there's kind of a duality there. I think a lot of textbooks and a lot of beekeepers just think of the queen as An egg-laying machine, and you know, that's her only purpose and her only role. She's very boring. There's only one of her, you know 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? To just provide the eggs and then everything else goes from there. Another way to look at it is that, you know, the queen is 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. Both are true, but neither is at the same time, right? 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? And so The Queen's life cycle is, you know, for the most part pretty boring where she is just kind of laying Eggs and being tended to by the workers, but it does go beyond more than that. When when colonies make new queens They raise, you know, one or two dozen naturally, right? Not in beekeeping where you graft them and you know raise them on purpose, but naturally when when colonies make new queens 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. the colony left behind they're they're making new new daughter queen cells. When the colony makes, you know, a couple dozen queen cells, what ends up happening is you know those those queens only can be one successor. 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 Which is, well, how do these virgin queens then fight to the death to claim the colony, right? How do they become the heir? And I and I like to make the analogy that 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? It's just kind of how it how how it goes. And s and then only after she's vanquished all of her rival sisters does that successful mother queen or uh daughter queen Fly from the hive and then mate with dozens of drones from all the surrounding colonies, and then comes back to the hive. She stores a proportion of the sperm from all of her mates. So she actually mates with this, you know, very large number of males. So all the workers kind of form this genetic cosmopolitan population within the colony when she's laying eggs. 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? So I think there's a lot of that fundamental biology of queen life history that goes on within just the first two weeks of her lifetime. But then once she starts laying eggs, she, you know, never leaves the hive again. She doesn't, you know, really do much other than fertilize and lay the eggs, right? 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 It's key to the success of the colony at that point. It is. How well mated she is, how well reared she was, all of these things, the quality of the queen goes into her performance. within the colony and you know and our work and others have has shown that queen quality varies. You know, there are some really good queens and there's some not so great queens. And the the quality of the queen kind of forms the ceiling of how good the colony is going to be. So if the if the if you have a subpar queen, she's smaller, she doesn't mate as many times, so on and so forth. They kind of have a lower ceiling of how big the colony's gonna get and how productive it's going to be. But if you have a a better queen the ceiling is a lot higher and and the colonies can be uh much better off.

Jeff Ott

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 When you, as a researcher, talk about queen quality, what specific traits are you actually measuring? How do those traits translate into colony performance?

Dr. David Tarpy

Well that's a very important question, Jeff, because I think again there's different ways that beekeepers look and assess what they mean by queen quality. What I'm referring to in that context is kind of her physical prowess That is her body size and other metrics of just how large she is, bigger is better. But then also her mating success. So how many drones did she mate with? How mu how that sperm storage organ that she gets filled up and and stores the sperm from all of those mates, the spermithica. 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. So I'm talking about the queen specifically. right of her quality. And again that translates to kind of the colony. But I think a lot of beekeepers assess the queen by looking at the brood pattern. 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. And everybody loves those pictures, right?

Jeff Ott

They show up good on Facebook.

Dr. David Tarpy

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. And Again, I think there are circumstances and and reasons of why the queen, as an individual, can be blamed for the brute pattern. But 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? Because the queen laid the eggs, but it's the bees that raised them. And so there's lots of different reasons why a colony can have a a bad brood pattern, not just because of the queen. 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? 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. Right. So there's There's many, many reasons why you can have a bad brood pattern. And what I like to say is that you need to rule all of the alternatives out before you blame the queen. But there's just something built into our beekeeper mentality That we just blame the queen when we see a bad brood pattern. And we need to be careful about that because we can overlook 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. So you need to be very, very introspective and really think about that before you just blame the Queen.

Becky Masterman

Dave, I know a lot of commercial beekeeping operations who are just every year requeening everybody. And so they're they're to the point where their access to queens is is affordable because they're they're doing their queen rearing and for them it it makes more sense to go ahead and just re queen the operation. And that might have been true for summer operations in the past, but not necessarily. Do you see that as a sign of 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

Dr. David Tarpy

I'll kind of break that down into two parts because there's a lot to unpack unpack there. One of the issues is that we don't really have good baseline data of how long Queens used to live. 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? Where you go through these five different colors. 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 And when I first started in in beekeeping, only some of the operations would requeen some of their colonies every other year. And then it went to every colony every other year. And then it went to every colony every year. And some of them are doing it multiple times a year. So I think there's anecdotal evidence to suggest that queens are not living as long. But we don't have good firm empirical evidence, right? 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 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. 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. 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. And it's just, you know, simpler. But they have queens at the ready. They can do that, right? But but as a biologist, I'm more interested in this collective decision-making process. Of how a colony decides one day the queen is good and worth keeping around. Then the next day, off with her head. What is it that's going through the kind of social physiology of the colony in in in making that determination? And so, you know, I spent the first 20 years of my career Looking for the silver bullet of, oh, here's this one thing that's wrong with a queen. They don't mate enough, or they're too runty, or they're diseased, or you know, here's a pesticide that 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? And then so now I'm kind of flipping the switch and saying, okay, well it's not something with the queen that the 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. You know, the queen can be good and bad. I've seen really crappy queens not get superseded, and I've seen awesome queens get superseded. So clearly that decision, whatever they're making, is not always perfect. And so what is it that's going into, you know, that gestalt perception of the queen by the workers? 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. Some of the moving m of the many moving parts that's going on. One that's really seems to be important is Queens getting infected with virus. And what that what tends to happen is that uh shrinks their ovaries, which means they lay less Which then decreases brood pheromones. So brood larvae produce pheromones that are important signals within the colony about how good the queen is. 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 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 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. 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. of her and then all of a sudden off with her head, right? So it's a very, very complex thing that I think we're on the right track. We certainly don't have, you know, solid answers, but 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

Jeff Ott

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. You're saying that the abundance or the the availability of the brood pheromone also contributes as a combined factor or a secondary, if not an additional factor in like whether the colony accepts the queen or in fact it's more important.

Dr. David Tarpy

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 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. But even more so, it's the worker's perception of it, not just the amount of it, right? 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 We can't forget the the receiver end as much as the you know the the sender end, right?

Jeff Ott

How much does the drone brood pheromone factor into that as well?

Dr. David Tarpy

Good question. Don't know that yet. Yeah, because drones aren't important. They're useless, remember. So, you know, nobody nobody studies them. No, I th I think you know drones are clearly important for for mating and these other things and how much that helps to modulate or regulate those collective decisions is is still unknown, but it's an interesting question. Yeah.

Jeff Ott

Hey, let's take this opportunity to take a quick break. We'll come right back and continue our conversation with Dr. Dave Tarpey.

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Becky Masterman

Welcome back, everybody. 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. or the quality of mating. Can you tell us what you think about how the actual handling of queens by people, beekeepers? or sending them in the mail or raising them in mass, how does that impact the quality of queens

Dr. David Tarpy

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. That that does have an impact. Now a lot of the carriers and everything take great care 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. But 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. And and we all know that, you know, if you overheat queens and bees, they'll die. 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. And so as we're shipping packages, we're shipping queens and everything we tend to overcompensate and make sure that we ship them cold because they can generate heat, right? And so they they're they're m 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. The problem is is that yes, if you overheat Queens, non-lethally, right, where They they get overheated for a period of time. They they might not die, but the sperm in their spermatheca can become sterilized, so they have zero vo or low sperm viability. And only live sperm can fertilize eggs. So you can have these queens that become premature drone layers or that are superseded early because they're they're not doing their function, right, of of laying the eggs. 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 When you chill queens, again, it doesn't kill them, but it can also sterilize the sperm. So, you know, if you are you know, getting a a batch of queens and you throw them in the refrigerator or something like that to make sure that, you know, they're okay, or if you throw them in the you know, the dash of your truck in the direct sunlight or, you know, you're re queening your colonies while you have your winter coat on. you know, 'cause you want to get a head start on making your spring splits or something like that. These are not good temperatures for prolonged periods of time to, you know, have these queens exposed to, which again, it might not kill them outright, but it can decrease their sperm viability. So we need to be a lot more careful in the handling of queens as, you know, in between receiving them or making them. and then putting them uh in the colonies. We need to keep them between room temperature and and hive temperature and just make sure that we don't deviate too far and too long. because of those invisible ramifications, right? You can't look at a queen and realize that all the sperm in her spermatheca are dead.

Becky Masterman

I think it's one of those one of those recommendations for newer beekeepers that's so important because it's hard to s learn about just how that colony can thermoregulate and they're surprised by how quickly they can overheat. So if they're buying a nuke of bees, if they're buying packages of bees, it's so important to keep them cooler rather than warmer because the bees are able to generate heat, but but if you put them too close together, they're just not gonna be able to cool off. One more thing that makes beekeeping difficult, right?

Dr. David Tarpy

That's right.

Becky Masterman

I I just have a research question for you because when you are interested in looking at queen viruses and and you're looking at queen mating and everything, all of that sampling is destructive, right? So so when you're asking questions, can you just share with the listeners how you're doing that? Because in order to get your answers, you need to basically take the queen out. and sample. So it does make a difference because you can't learn about what the viruses she had were and then keep following that colony necessarily. Or maybe you can.

Dr. David Tarpy

Yeah, correct. That's a real major limitation of of both our research where we're looking at queen quality, but also our queen and disease clinic, where we offer the same analytical tools through an extension initiative where where beekeepers can send us their queens and we can analyze them in the same way and then give them a report back and we give letter grades, you know, A, B, C and so on. And the downside is that, hey, these are really great queens. Sorry they're dead. Right? You know, so um but you so you can only know kind of after the fact. But you know the the clinic is is really helpful Especially for large scale queen producers, like if they're making a thousand queens, they're all kind of reared at the same time, mating at the same time and location and everything. They send us ten. And we can analyze them and give that report back and you know just within a day or two, you know, to turnaround. That informs them of what the other 990 might look like so that as they're selling to their customers they have a lot of r reassurance of the quality of the product that they're making. So I think that that works, you know, really well. It's better than just, you know, being blind to all of that, right? So so yeah, in our in our research it's very it would be really, really nice to have some sort of temporal way of assessing this, you know, non-destructively. very very limited ways of doing that but you know until technology improves or you know we have some scanner you know that's able to to detect that that's really unfortunately the only way we can do it

Jeff Ott

What traits are you looking at when you do those assessments?

Dr. David Tarpy

Yeah, so well, a lot of the body size measurements can be done non-destructively, right? So we can we weigh them, we take pictures of them, and then we digitally measure like thorax width, head width, you know, like wing lengths, you know, those kind of things. And so if we do a kind of a temporal study or something like that, we can do that. We can non-destructively sample the physical size and quality of the queen and then follow her over time. Those traits, those measurements all tend to be very highly correlated, right? So, you know, heavier queens tend to be wider, you know. But They also correlate, but not quite as strongly with their mating measures. So larger queens had larger spermaticas, so they have larger sperm stores, you know, those kind of things. But there's a lot more noise there. So it's not a direct relationship but but a correlative one, right? You can have big queens that have low sperm counts and you know smaller queens that are stock full, right? So again, you can measure their body size non-destructively. It's those reproductive measures that you unfortunately you have to sacrifice some. So we euthanize them, right, and then dissect them, but we need to do that while they're still alive so that the sperm are still alive So we can measure the viability of the sperm because a queen can have, you know, five, seven million sperm in the spermatheca. But if she only has ten percent viability, right, only live sperm can fertilize eggs, and so effectively she really doesn't have a lot of sperm, right? So like I think that's where we have to, you know, dissect them open and and remove the organ and and do all of the cellular staining and all of that to to see how many of the sperm in there are still alive or how many of them are dead.

Becky Masterman

Are beekeepers from across the country able to send you queens and pay for a sample?

Dr. David Tarpy

Absolutely, yes. Yeah, so it's a n nationwide service, yeah.

Becky Masterman

How long have you been doing that service, David?

Dr. David Tarpy

Oh, well over ten years now, yeah.

Becky Masterman

Are you seeing increasing numbers every year of samples?

Dr. David Tarpy

Well, we we've held pretty steady. I mean it's not it's not that we're working twenty-four-seven, you know, on on getting samples. I think it's it's more of a of a niche service The techniques that we do are not unique. It's kind of how we we we've been able to package them together, the workflow that makes it a very, very rapid turnaround. But most importantly, based on our research, again, this is why research is important. You know, we can experimentally manipulate queen quality where we can intentionally make, you know, the best queens possible, but then we can also make the crappiest queens possible. So we have this standard yardstick based on our research of saying, well, we know what a good queen is and we know how bad queens can get. Where do yours lie? on that on that spectrum. And that's how we're able to make these letter grades. So that's kind of a unique thing that that we can do is put it into perspective. Right? We you know, anybody can m weigh a queen and say, well, she's, you know, 205 milligrams. But is that good or bad? I don't know, but we can empirically and statistically say, okay, well this is where they are, then the 81st percentile, you know, like that kind of thing. And so that helps give some information that again Beekeep is just completely invisible to beekeepers. You can't look at a queen and know what her sperm viability is, right?

Becky Masterman

I've known you've been doing this, but I knew you did this for researchers. And that it is so cool that you're doing this for beekeepers

Dr. David Tarpy

Yeah, no, I mean it's again, it's the same techniques that we use with our research or well in our research. We There are other techniques that we do like counting the number of varioles in the in each ovary, right? Which is onerous And so we d that's not part of the clinic because it just takes too long and it's probably you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, you know. But like so to have that fast turnaround is is really really helpful so beekeepers can make informed decisions in in near real time. And again, I think it's really, really helpful for those larger scale commercial queen producers to have some reassurance of their product. They don't want to sell people bad queens, right? And and and kind of going back to what we were saying before A lot of queen producers are are blamed for having these bad queens, but again, after they ship them out, they don't know what happens to them, they don't know the handling and And because the environment of the colony is so important to the fate of the queen, you can take a perfectly good queen throw her into a toxic environment and they get rid of her. But if the beekeeper then turns around blames the queen, right, they're missing the actual reason. In fact, I've prevented murders where a beekeeper wanted to kill another beekeeper, quite literally, um because he thought they sent them a whole bunch of junk queens. And I said, Well, before you go and kill somebody, why don't you send us some fro of yours that were fine and then some that were not being accepted from the others and we can empirically tell you whether or not they really are worse and we couldn't find a single difference. Right? And so, you know, sometimes we lead to conclusions that are not that not really based on on certain you know evidence. And so, you know, I think eighty per I would say probably around eighty percent of the time people send us what they consider bad queens because they have a bad brood pattern or they have, you know, they haven't been accepted at the same rates that they're used to, or you know, you name it. And we analyze them and and we can't find anything wrong with the queens themselves. Which suggests again that there's this environmental role. Okay, well, you know, you're placing these queens into these colonies. Tell me a little bit about your management. Tell me about you know where they're located. You know, tell me, you know, so oh well, you know, we we treat you know twice a month with you know off label mitocide well maybe that has something to do with the decision that they're making about getting rid of the queens you know so like It helps provide that conversation rather than just simply knee-jerk reaction blaming the queen and not learning from that.

Jeff Ott

Noticed any correlation between different races of bees and the queen quality? You have to have some sort of number on that.

Dr. David Tarpy

That's a really good question. Our yardstick that we built with our research are Italian Spring mated newly mated queens. Okay? So that's the yardstick Then the question is, well, you know, how do Russian queens or how do Saskatchewans or how do Carniolan queens match up? Don't really see any differences there. I think there's way more uh variation within these different stocks than there is between them or among them. Okay. So so that that said there. But There's there's just so much variation that I think it's it's hard to blame source. And in fact, we we've done some studies where we compared anonymously different queen producers. to see, you know, who's doing a good job and who's doing a bad job. They're all doing the same. It's just that they have a lot of variation, right? All queen producers make mostly really good queens, but every once in a while there's a dog or two in there. And so our clinic and and research, what we're really hoping to do to increase queen quality overall Not just the environment and the handling aspects of it, but rather than taking the bell-shaped curve of Queen Quality and trying to shift it to the right through grafting practices or those kind of things. It's well let's identify that left tail and kind of cull them out of the population, which will immediately increase queen quality for everybody. So you don't get those those real kind of laggards, right? So I think I think it's more important not to say, well, buy from here versus there because they're doing it right and they're doing it wrong. It's more There's just natural variation in this messy biological system. So let's try and and identify ways to to call out the the lesser ones.

Becky Masterman

Has anybody looked at the differences between queens that are in the South and might produce more brood over time versus northern queens that have a a pretty good time where they they are not laying eggs I asked this because and you can maybe answer this question too, it might be easier, but I've had commercial queen breeders say to me, I think we're working them too hard. I think the queens are they're we're making them work too hard. And I I was just wondering if Do Northern Queens not have to work as hard as as Queens maybe in the south?

Dr. David Tarpy

That's a great question. I've kind of had that same conversation and and discussion with folks too There's a lot of confounding variables there, so I think it's it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison, but like the idea that that we're burning the candle at both ends in our modern day ape apiculture, especially to accommodate brood buildup for almonds and that kind of stuff in the middle of winter and all this. So People have argued that they we've always done that, and so you know, any changes has to be for a different reason. But I do think that there is a biological benefit and break to Queens and to colonies by having a winter. And I never really appreciated that when I was in upstate New York at Cornell with Tom Seely, you know, because it was nine months of winter and it's like, okay, you know, July is summer and this is great. Great. But when I moving here to North Carolina, every year it gets me how early the season starts here, right? And how late it really lasts. And that we don't really go broodless. But we still have a winter where there's still a dearth and foraging and everything like that. So it's almost like the worst of both worlds where they don't have a true winter, but they don't have perpetual summer either. And so it can be really, really hard for mic control and some of these other things, but it's kind of like, you know, maybe this is a bad analogy, but If you have a laptop and you always just put it to sleep and it never actually shuts down and reboots, that can be bad for the operating system over time, you know, and so the same thing with queens and their ovaries You know, if they're always laying, what does that really do to them physiologically? Uh that because they're supposed to have these periods where they're not laying. Right? So we don't really know what that benefit is, but uh but I I I think there might be some kind of hidden physiological and and other reasons of why that might be a good thing in the north. Of course that's harder on the colony, you know, they need more honey to overwinter and all these other things. But these are trade-offs to each other, but we might be ignoring the fact that we're we're having them push, you know, out so many eggs so fast um without kind of understanding what that does to them long term.

Becky Masterman

Well now I'm worried about my computer operating system. And queens. Can you see the look in my eye saying, please, I have to see it out Oh one more thing to worry about. I do want to ask about about mating numbers. You've seen so much and you've seen so many data on the actual number of times Queens can mate. Can you just give us your the the number that you think is best and then also just kind of the coolest things you've seen as far as is queen mating.

Dr. David Tarpy

For your listeners, they don't know how scientists do this. You can't, you know, just look at a queen. You can't look at the colony and see, you know, how many drone fathers are represented among among the workers And you can't really witness queen mating either because it's done usually a mile from the hive and fifty meters up in the air in rapid succession, and you know, it's just kind of this this crazy sis mating system that they have. So you have to infer it after the fact. And so, you know, what we and anybody really who studies this does is they sample like a hundred workers And they extract their DNA and they do in essence uh paternity tests. You know, like you would for for custody battles or something, right? Where you look at the paternity of all of these workers. And genetically, those that are sired by the same father have the same genetic signal, and you can kind of tease out and and count up how many drone fathers of the workers there are and that's the number of mates by the queen, right? So that's how you do it, kind of after the fact and There's been lots and lots, you know, hundreds of colonies that have been genotyped in this way. And you know, the the average is a big variation, right? So some queens only do mate two or three times. Some queens mate like sixty or more times, right? But the the average is is in the high teens. So, you know, between fifteen and twenty-five I think is is where you know most queen drone numbers lie, right? But the second part of your question there was w well it was kind of when it comes to queen mating was some of the the kind of cooler things that that we found. So there's this phenomenon we we weren't the first to show it, but we've studied it a little bit where there's this thing called these royal patrilines or these royal subfamilies where If you do that paternity test on the workers as I just described, what you can find is is well some of those drone fathers are really well represented among among the workers and some of them they only sire very, very few workers, right? So they're they're not all equally represented, but they're you know, there's kind of variation in that. But if you look at when a colony makes a bunch of queens, sometimes what you find is that the ones that are more highly represented among the workers are not represented in the Queens, and then others that are very low representation among the workers are highly represented in the Queens. So it suggests that, you know, some drone fathers might sire females, right? But when they are workers, they're not as good, and when they're queens, they're better, and vice versa. So there's kind of like these kind of maybe hidden or or or less represented drone fathers among the workers, but they're they're more represented among the queens. Now we don't know what that means and How that can be incorporated into beekeeping, that's something I'd really like to figure out. Because if though if those Jones genetics are somehow making better queens, well, how can we harness that as beekeepers, right? Because we're just grafting queens. Queens randomly when we're when we're making queens, and the bees aren't doing it randomly, so you know, what do they know that we don't know? Still a mystery, but I think that's a really cool aspect to again meeting biology and its potential applications to beekeeping

Jeff Ott

This is so much fun and we're at the end of the time right now. Dave, I'd like to ask you to come back because I know we've only scratched the service of Queens. Not even scratch, it's an itch of the queen subject. We'd like to invite you back at a later date to continue this discussion because this is just totally fascinating. That'd be great, Jeff. Thanks.

Becky Masterman

Thank you so much. That was you're very generous with your information and what I love about the work that you're doing is that you've got this range from what can I do to help beekeepers to these are some really cool questions that we'd like to answer and and it's just so important to our industry. So thank you so much, David.

Jeff Ott

Great. Thanks Beggie. That was a fascinating discussion about Queens that just I wanted to keep going on and on and on.

Becky Masterman

You know, we do get to a point where where we know that Every question we ask, we're gonna get this amazing answer because he has literally devoted his life to studying queens and studying colonies and behavior and health. And so when you have that opportunity to talk to somebody, it's it's really hard to say goodbye.

Jeff Ott

It was. There were so many questions we didn't get to that I have here on my list and I wanted to circle back around and it's just uh just impossible. So I look forward to having him back here in uh relatively near future.

Becky Masterman

I would agree. Thank you, Doctor David Tarpey, for he made our day, didn't we, Jeff?

Jeff Ott

He made our day 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 Podcasts. 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 Better Be our presenting sponsor for their ongoing support of the podcast. We also appreciate our longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their support in bringing you each week's episode. And most importantly, thank you for the next video. 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