The Queen Mother

It is quite fun to have people interested in my bees, and honey bees in general.  My dark queen inspired questions about her color.  Her mother was a fair Italian queen.  Here are pictures I took yesterday in the hive that the observation hive came from.  This golden queen is bright and easy to spot as she moves along the frame.

Honey bees have been cultivated for thousands of years.  European bees were dark, then a strain developed in Italy that was golden.  People liked the bright golden queen because she was easy to spot.  They also tended to produce lots of honey.  So some people started using Italian queens, and when combined with European drones, the resultant bees were striped.  I'll bet you've see striped honey bees haven't you?  

  The drones are the males, and can be either yellow or dark.  They are distinctively larger, and their head looks very black because their larger eyes meet at the top of the head.  They also have a squared off butt.  Call them wide load, fat boy, or "pet me bees", they have no stinger, so you can pick them up & play with them.

 

Bees have been bred to select for mild temperament, productivity, hygienic behavior (if they find diseased larvae & dispose of them, the hive avoids the illness or pest), over-wintering, swarming behavior (or lack of it) and more.  There are several popular strains.  Italian bees were the predominant ones brought to this country with the europeans and spread across the country both with the settlers and on their own.  

I was told that whatever queen I get, my bees will most likely be Italian, because that's the largest population of drones, and the queen doesn't breed at home, but flies off to a drone congregation area somewhere high up in the air that really only the bees know about.  She generally only makes one flight, but gets genetic contributions from several drones.  My yellow Italian queen obviously got assorted contributions, in order to have produced a dark daughter, the one in my observation hive.  

Since many people in the area have bees, and buy special queens for one reason or several reasons, I can only speculate about my bee heritage.  Even bee breeders are faced with the difficulty, except those in very isolated places like islands (Buckfast Abbey, on a British island developed a special strain of Buckfast bees).  Very recently there have been some breeders who have more controlled breeding, but usually the approach is to make sure there are a LOT of the right kind of drones around when your queen makes her flight, so a breeder makes certain he has loads of the right drones (and all of his neighbors benefit, assuming they agree on what is "right".)