Poland looks on bees like farm animals

Press, 30 September 1977, Page 17

Poland looks on bees like farm animals

In the opinion of Mr John Smith, apiary instructor with the Ministry of Agriculture in Christchurch, New Zealand’s bee-keeping industry could gain from commercial production of queen bees by artificial insemination.

He has recently returned from two months overseas during which he spent five weeks in Poland studying work being done there with artificial insemination of bees.

The Ministry gave him study leave and the National Beekeepers’ Association helped to make his trip possible. Poland, he said, had moved into the commercial production of queen bees and he believes that New Zealand can take advantage of the Polish work through private enterprise. The spin-off from commercial production of queens through artificial insemination would come as the queen breeders sought to improve their breeding stock. He says that he is in a position to teach people the techniques required. While the breeder of queen bees would need to have an extremely good knowledge of bees, this would not be necessary in the case of technicians. There was really nothing new about artificial insemination of bees, he said. It was something that was now done all over the world.

Under normal breeding practice the queen in the hive needed 2000 bees to

keep it alive and about 4.5 kg (101 b of honey was needed to support these bees and then good weather was needed to enable the queen to fly and mate on the wing. And when she mated there was no control over it and what she mated with, which was rather like having a pedigree milking herd alongside the bush wtli wild bulls jumping the fence every night. To further complicate the issue, the queen had to mate with about eight drones or male bees to fill her sperm sack.

During her lifetime she would lay vast quantities of eggs — in a day she could lay eggs equal approximately to her own weight — and to produce bees each egg had to be fertilised and at the one time she had to get enough sperm to last for three years.

Artificial insemination, he said, meant that there was control over mating, there was no longer a weather factor governing when the queen would fly and there was no longer the need to have 2000 bees looking after the queen. Mr Smith said that the queens were caged and 50 were held in a hive and the

saving in honey would just about equal the cost of the technician doing the artificial breeding work. It appeared that a competent technician could inseminate 50 queens a day and in Poland one technician was able to do 120. If the cost of the production of the queen could be kept under about $3, he said he believed that it would be a viable proposition — this was allowing about $1 for the insemination and $1 for other production costs.

The slower part of the process was the collection of the semen, as for each queen semen had to be collected from eight drones. The drone normally died while mating, he said, and squeezing its thorax and killing it would cause its sexual organs to invert and ejaculation to take place so that the semen could be collected in a micro syringe. This operation took place under a low powered stereo dissecting microscope at about 20 magnifications. The insemination of the queen with eight microlitres of semen taken from eight drones was also done under a mircroscope.

Mr Smith said that the insemination was difficult to do but not beyond the ability of the average intelligent person and did not require a vast knowledge of the anatomy or physiology of drones or queens. Both operations could be taught very easily to part-

time staff and it was a job that might be done by women coming in part-time as needed. Initially it could be that the insemination would be done by a skilled person with the collection of the semen being done for him by two other persons.

From the moment that there was this control of the mating, he said it was possible to move into hybridisation and improvement of stock and the hybrid queens in Poland were producing progeny giving up to 500 per cent more honey than the progeny of run-of-the-mill queens. But before anyone in New Zealand got too excited about this, Mr Smith said that because of the less favourable climatic conditions there New Zealand bee-keepers would go bankrupt if th* level of honey production here was similar to that in Poland. Their hives produce an average of about 10 kg of honey compared to 30 or 40 kg here. “But we could get an advantage from doing what they are doing,” said Mr Smith. For selected breeder queens drones were held in isolation frames in the hive for 15 days prior to mating. They had to be the right age for mating — from 15 to 30 days was the optimum age. Where the big strides were being made in Poland was in their breeding stock, said Mr Smith.

They treated bees as being just as important as other breeding animals. They had the equivalent, in New Zealand terms, of stud bees.

He had been shown a stud book or the equivalent of that with 20.000 queens listed in it complete with the birth weight of each virgin queen and details of the length of 100 preserved tongues of their offspring, with tongue length being important in the ease of getting into food sources and particularly for working red clover. There were also other relevant performance details.

Indicative of the equal importance attached to bees as to other breeding animals, Mr Smith has a souvenir tray from a breeding conference which has depicted on it a queen and a drone bee as well as a Polish Red and White bull. While Mr Smith does not expect that New Zealand can hope to duplicate the Polish system for bees, he says that this country’s interest is in taking advantage of the Polish work in this area and applying it here, and it is here that he believes that there is a place for the private queen breeder and that the industry will benefit from the improvement in breeding stock that will inevitably be associated with this as breeders seek to produce better queens. He sees the Ministry helping in the process at every stage.