Effects of rearing method on some morphological and reproductive organ characteristics of queen honey bees (Apis mellifera L.)

Abstract

In western honey bee colonies, the queen, who is the only individual capable of mating and laying fertilized eggs, is responsible for reproduction. The survival of the colony depends on the queen and her reproductive capability (2, 3, 37). The queen honey bee is the most important individual within the colony for both social and genetic reasons. Evaluation of the reproductive capacity of queens can provide useful information about factors affecting the colony fitness (8, 30). Workers raise new queens in cases of emergency (to replace dead or missing queens), supersedure (to replace old or injured or diseased queens) and swarm situations (4, 31). Numerous studies have been conducted to determine the reproductive capacity and quality of queen honey bees. The quality of the queens is affected by genotype, rearing methods, rearing season, nutrition, age of larvae, and the number of grafting larvae. A queen’s quality can be identified by measuring her morphological features and her reproductive organs (12, 14, 16, 18, 33). There are some physical characteristics that would make a queen superior to reproduction; metabolism, larger ovaries, longer ovarioles, and large spermatheca (32). While the age of grafted larvae increases, the size of the spermatheca, the number of ovarioles in the ovaries, and the bodyweight of the queen decreases. Moreover, queen weight at emergence is correlated with the size of the spermatheca and the number of ovarioles (42, 43). According to morphology and sperm count, queens raised from old larvae are of low quality, and subsequently they also mate with significantly fewer males (33). Queen weight has a significant effect on the onset of oviposition, acceptance ratio of queens, number of spermatozoa in the spermatheca, the diameter of spermatheca, and laying rate (1). In order to express queen-quality, some morphological features such as head width, thorax width, and wing lengths have been examined (7, 14, 16). A significant decrease was found in the number of ovarioles per ovary as the age 1) This study was presented as a poster (abstract) at the 6th International Muğla Beekeeping & Pine Honey Congress, 15-19 Oct 2018, Turkey. Effects of rearing method on some morphological and reproductive organ characteristics of queen honey bees (Apis mellifera L.)1)