Evaluation of commercial honey bee queens quality in Egypt
Keywords:
Apis mellifera, virgin queen, morphological characters, successful acceptance and mating process.Abstract
To evaluate numbers of morphological characteristics of virgin honey bee queens, a total of 720 queens were obtained from five queen rearing stations were used. Queen samples were collected in March and August during seasons of 2015 and 2016. General characters as wet weight, thorax width and length, sum of third and fourth tergites length, abdomen length, number of ovarioles and volume of spermatheca were measured. The present result indicated that the queen weight was ranged from 134.33 to 156.34 mg in all tested samples. Insignificant difference of queen weights between the two trials in March or August was recorded. The averages of ovariole numbers were ranged from 118.93 to 130.11 in March, whereas they ranged from 125.32 and 131.26 in August. Both queen characters, weight and ovariole numbers were under the international standard for queen quality. The general mean of queen's acceptance percentage in August (83.33%) was differed significantly from the acceptance percentage in March (69.35%). The percentage of successful natural queen mating was ranged from 81.33 to 88.8 % in March and August, respectively. The present results Manifest  a lack of queen quality and queen rearing practices in queen rearing stations in Egypt.       Â
Metrics
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with Journal of Phytopathology and Disease Management agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License (CC BY-NC). This allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Archives of Agricultural Sciences Journal is an Open Access Journal, and articles published are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License (CC BY-NC). Readers may copy, distribute, and display the work for non commercial purposes with the proper citation of the original work. However, the journal retains the right to exploit subsidiary rights on behalf of the authors.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractural arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g. post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process with full disclosure to the journal, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Following publication in Archives of Agricultural Sciences Journal, the author should update the repository, and include a citation and link to the published work.
Click here for more information on Licensing policy