Researchers at Washington State University studied indoor queen banking as a possible way to help bee populations survive. The practice uses refrigeration to store excess queen bees indoors. The bees can be used later to supplement hives. Many queen producers are based in California and, as the state experiences more severe weather events and wildfires, storing bees outdoors has become more challenging. We hear more about the study from Brandon Hopkins, an author of the research and an assistant research professor at WSU.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to queen banking. “Queen” as in queen bees. It is a way for the beekeeping industry to make sure that they have enough queens to sell to people who need them. But climate change is making conventional queen banking more challenging, so researchers at Washington State University have been studying new ways to help queens survive. Brandon Hopkins is an assistant research professor at WSU and the lead researcher of a new paper about this. He joins us now. Welcome to the show.
Brandon Hopkins: Thanks very much. I’m glad to be here.
Miller: How does queen banking normally work right now?
Hopkins: I think it’s always been tough to bank queens for one thing. How it works is that, normally, a hive has a single queen that goes around laying all the eggs and producing all the new bees. In a banking situation, you put a bunch of individual queens in cages. Then you make that hive not have its sole queen going around laying, and you provide the colony with lots of young bees to care for – could be hundreds of queens in a single hive body.
Miller: And how effective is that?
Hopkins: It’s fairly effective, and it’s a valuable tool for beekeepers in order to keep queens for a period of time to give them a chance to prepare new colonies for those queens to go in or prepare a large number of queens, say, to be shipped to some other beekeeper throughout the country.
Miller: I guess I’m wondering why this is necessary? What happens if you don’t go through this rigmarole?
Hopkins: Yeah, and it’s a little bit of a niche market. Producing queens is sort of a highly specialized area of beekeeping in the beekeeping industry. We depend on over two million colonies in the United States for pollination of these crops. Most beekeepers don’t have the time or the skill to produce their own queens to either make new colonies or fix colonies that have lost their queen. So you have queen producers who make a majority of the more than a million queens that are produced and needed every year for beekeepers.
Miller: A million are produced every single year?
Hopkins: Yeah. Because you have the colonies that are lost every winter, they need to split and make new colonies to make up for those losses. Those all need queens, and the general management of beekeeping kind of dictates now that you requeen – you put a new queen in – almost every year in the colonies. We have close to three million colonies in this country. If you figure each of those need to be requeened each year, somebody’s got to make those one to two million queens every year.
Miller: And how much might a queen cost?
Hopkins: They’re $25 to $30 - is a good average.
Miller: Wow. So we’re talking about a $25 to $30 million industry.
Hopkins: Yeah. Yeah, at least, for sure.
Miller: Why did you want to look into novel ways to do queen banking? What’s the challenge with the current method?
Hopkins: Like I was saying before, I think queen banking in general has always been a little bit difficult, and it’s somewhat stressful on the queens and the bees and requires a lot of care and labor and attention to those banks in order to keep from losing those valuable queens that are in there. I think recently, it’s become a little more difficult or more stressful for banking, in part because of the areas where these queens are produced. Northern California is where a very large majority of queens are produced in this country on a commercial scale. There’s sort of hot spots in the U.S. where these large commercial queen producers have found to be most successful. Northern California is probably the top region. Hawaii produces a lot, and there’s some places in the Southeast that produce queens. But in Northern California, for example, the summertime is generally when a lot of this queen banking occurs, so from June to August is the time when they really have to bank a lot of queens. And that’s a time of year when that region in particular, like other places, is under threat of wildfires recently, extreme summer temperatures… So those banks are under threat from these wildfires, but also just under threat of the loss of the forage when these wildfires occur and these hot dry summers. It can be difficult to keep these large productive queen banking colonies going when it’s 120 degrees for weeks on end in Northern California.
Miller: So you looked into an indoor refrigerated version instead. How effective was it?
Hopkins: It was, surprisingly, very effective. It was a bit of a long shot and the first time that we had tried this. This is based on the fact that commercial beekeepers are starting to use indoor storage during the winter to keep colony numbers up, and this is a rapidly increasing management decision by some beekeepers. We used an indoor refrigerated sort of climate controlled, cargo container style, facility in this case. We did find that we had significantly more queens survive in the indoor banking conditions than the control group which sat outdoors in the traditional banking style in Northern California.
Miller: So more of them survived. Was it more or less work to have more of them survive?
Hopkins: Yeah, that’s the other reason we were kind of surprised that we had greater survival indoors because once we put them in that cold dark cargo container, we didn’t do anything to help them out. We set up the banks, the queens go in with the food reserves that we provided initially, and that’s it. The traditional method requires that every few days you go and you add new frames of brood, the developing bees, so that they emerge and take care of the queens. You feed them sugar syrup, oftentimes pollen patties, and so it requires work. Every few days, someone’s got to go and take care of them, make sure that they have enough bees and food. So we had far, far less labor involved in the care of our banks over the course of those eight weeks.
Miller: So, a better yield and less work. Does that mean that you think that large-scale producers are likely to make this switch in the coming years? And we have about a minute left for your answer.
Hopkins: That sounds good. Yeah, I would encourage folks to hold off. I mean, this is the first time we have done this. Science ought to be repeated a few times and make sure that this trend that we had holds true. But there are a lot of people interested in this strategy, and it’s something that we want to continue to research and make sure that we’ve got it right before we have people adopt this in a large way.
Miller: And just briefly, does this have implications for backyard beekeepers who might be buying queens as well?
Hopkins: That’s a great question. It does, because most of the backyard beekeepers rely on some stream of production from the commercial scale. It could be that they buy packages or nucleus colonies from a commercial beekeeper, and those are headed by commercially produced queen producers.
Miller: Brandon Hopkins, thanks very much for your time.
Hopkins: Yeah, thank you. It was great to be here.
Miller: Brandon Hopkins is an author of the new study about an indoor way to do queen banking for requeening. He is an assistant research professor in WSU’s Department of Entomology.
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