Jeff Ott: Howdy, this is uh Caleb Jacobson from Fort Worth, Texas.
Jeff Ott: Welcome to the Beekeeping Today Podcast.
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Jeff Ott: Your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment.
Jeff Ott: I'm Jeff Ott.
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Jeff Ott: Thank you, Caleb Jacobson from F
Jeff Ott: Fort Worth for that wonderful opening from the floor of the North American Honey Bee Expo last January in Tennessee.
Becky Masterman: What a great opener.
Becky Masterman: Thank you.
Jeff Ott: Yeah, I can't believe that was already so long ago in January.
Becky Masterman: Time's flying and we're gonna be talking about getting our colonies ready for winter pretty soon.
Jeff Ott: Oh hush, hush.
Jeff Ott: We're just barely getting into spring.
Jeff Ott: Today is an exciting day, or this episode is an exciting one because we are launching our series of
Jeff Ott: episodes focused on queens, queen behavior, and honey bee queens in general.
Becky Masterman: I think that it is going to be so valuable for our listeners and and us to
Becky Masterman: gather experts from queen health to queen breeding and put it all into one place.
Becky Masterman: So I'm really looking forward to this series
Becky Masterman: Queens are so essential to our colony health.
Jeff Ott: It's fun because so much of what's taught to beginning beekeepers is, well, queen is
Jeff Ott: egg-laying machine, or you know, she rules the roost.
Jeff Ott: I'm mixing metaphors there.
Jeff Ott: She rules the hive.
Jeff Ott: She rules the colony.
Jeff Ott: And the research indicates that
Jeff Ott: that's not really quite all that she does and that's just an oversimplification.
Jeff Ott: So this series really should highlight
Jeff Ott: the value of queens and all the nuances of the Queen Bee's life.
Becky Masterman: And we're gonna hear, I think, a lot about what can go wrong from the people who are looking at the science.
Becky Masterman: and the people who are actually raising those queens.
Becky Masterman: So it'll it'll be very informative.
Jeff Ott: I have never in all my years of beekeeping, I've never focused on raising queens.
Jeff Ott: And th I know that's a weakness in my roundedness of a beekeeper as being a beekeeper, I've never gone out and raised my own queens or anything
Jeff Ott: And that's okay.
Jeff Ott: And maybe one of these days there's still time left.
Jeff Ott: But I've always understood the importance of the queen to the health and the viability of my hives that I'm working with in my year's honey production
Jeff Ott: And so having a a better understanding of the Queen is gonna be really fun to look into.
Jeff Ott: You're giving me a squinty eyed look.
Becky Masterman: Have you ever done a walkaway Queen Jeff?
Becky Masterman: You have to have.
Jeff Ott: Not intentionally.
Becky Masterman: Are you serious?
Jeff Ott: Yeah, really honest.
Becky Masterman: Okay, I'm sorry.
Becky Masterman: I don't there's no judgment here.
Becky Masterman: I just something it's baby.
Jeff Ott: You'd be the first person.
Becky Masterman: You would be the first person.
Becky Masterman: But oh that's that's interesting.
Becky Masterman: Okay, well that has to be a twenty
Becky Masterman: twenty-six goal.
Becky Masterman: One walk away.
Jeff Ott: One walk away.
Jeff Ott: All right.
Becky Masterman: Although I will say if I lived in Washington, I would not walk away a queen.
Becky Masterman: because of your weather.
Becky Masterman: They need to fly and meet and you just don't have that predictability, I think.
Jeff Ott: Well, yeah, we do in June, July, August.
Jeff Ott: you know, in September, but at that point y it's you know, June and July maybe.
Jeff Ott: September, of course, no, I don't really want to do that to a colony.
Jeff Ott: You're right.
Becky Masterman: I mean I judge a little, but I'm not judging.
Jeff Ott: And I know none of our listeners are judging.
Jeff Ott: That's great, because we have great listeners.
Becky Masterman: We do have great listeners.
Becky Masterman: And they're not gonna remember that you also did raise bees in Ohio and Colorado.
Becky Masterman: And so three states have had that opportunity.
Jeff Ott: I've neglected my many opportunities.
Jeff Ott: Today's episode will be really fun and a great way to kick off our understanding and study of queens through this series because if you go into any of the research, any of the popular literature
Jeff Ott: One name stands out, and that's Dr.
Jeff Ott: Dave Tarpey of North Carolina University.
Jeff Ott: And he's our first guest to help kick this off
Becky Masterman: I'm so looking forward to talking with David and learning everything he knows.
Becky Masterman: Okay, not everything.
Becky Masterman: We don't have that much time.
Becky Masterman: But I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Jeff Ott: Okay, let's listen to David right after these words from our sponsors.
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Jeff Ott: Hey everybody, welcome back.
Jeff Ott: Sitting around this great big virtual beekeeping today podcast table, stretching coast to coast on the East Coast in North Carolina.
Jeff Ott: We have Dr.
Jeff Ott: Dave Tarpe.
Jeff Ott: And in St.
Jeff Ott: Paul, Becky, and I'm in Olympia.
Jeff Ott: David, welcome to the show.
Jeff Ott: We appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to join us on Beekeeping Today podcast.
Jeff Ott: Yeah, of course.
Jeff Ott: Thanks so much for having me.
Becky Masterman: You are all over the place as far as Queen Health and Bee Health.
Becky Masterman: So you're doing some pretty amazing things.
Becky Masterman: Are you collaborating with everybody or just most of those the researchers out there?
Dr. David Tarpy: Or subset.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's a pretty small field.
Dr. David Tarpy: So yeah.
Dr. David Tarpy: Um
Dr. David Tarpy: The the nice things that we have a really great community of scientists and so it's really easy to find areas of overlap.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, I think one of the
Dr. David Tarpy: things looking looking back on my career is that a lot of, you know, smarter, more qualified people have been doing some things in workers.
Dr. David Tarpy: And then I often go up and ask them, well, what about queens and drones?
Dr. David Tarpy: And then you can do the exact same thing in in the queens and drones, which are often neglected.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so you can learn a a lot more, you know, of about the the whole colony biology by by studying all of the castes.
Jeff Ott: Before we get going too far, David, can you tell us
Jeff Ott: A little bit about yourself, your background, and how you get started in in the whole area of bees.
Jeff Ott: Sure, my origin story.
Dr. David Tarpy: Your origin story.
Dr. David Tarpy: As an undergrad, my junior year abroad at Oxford, and I was in the zoology department there, and I was studying birds, bird behavior, and things like that.
Dr. David Tarpy: And I got really turned on to
Dr. David Tarpy: this confluence of behavior, evolution, and ecology.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so when I did my senior year project, it it dealt with with that and insects and then
Dr. David Tarpy: I didn't I knew I wanted to go into grad school, but I didn't really know what or or where.
Dr. David Tarpy: And a faculty friend of mine, who turned out to be my my mentor and master's advisor.
Dr. David Tarpy: He handed me uh a couple textbooks.
Dr. David Tarpy: One was by Mark Winston, nineteen eighty seven, the other was by Tom Seeley, nineteen eighty-four.
Dr. David Tarpy: And he said, I think, you know, with your interests, I think you might kind of like this.
Dr. David Tarpy: And
Dr. David Tarpy: And both of those I read from cover to cover without putting them down and knew that's exactly what I wanted to do.
Dr. David Tarpy: Which we don't all have that kind of aha moment, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So I f consider myself very, very lucky.
Dr. David Tarpy: to be bitten by the b bug from the biology side, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So at this point I'd never, you know, been into a hive or anything like that.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, I kind of pursued a a master's degree with David Fletcher, my my mentor, and then a PhD out in California, and then uh postdoc at Cornell.
Dr. David Tarpy: And I like to tell beekeepers that
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, by by getting into honey bee science, I was keeping bees and doing beekeeping for five or six years before I realized, hey, you know what?
Dr. David Tarpy: I might want to read a beekeeping book.
Dr. David Tarpy: Because all it was one if you if you understand enough about the biology of of the super organism, the rest of it's just kind of putting boxes on top of each other, you know?
Dr. David Tarpy: Like it's
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, I think a lot of our extension work and everything that we do really focuses on the biology because that gives you the why you're doing the beekeeping, not the how and when.
Dr. David Tarpy: And that to me is is really what distinguishes you know a good beekeeper from a great beekeeper.
Dr. David Tarpy: So I kind of tell that origin story to to a lot of folks here in North Carolina and and beyond to
Dr. David Tarpy: to really underscore why we as scientists are so interested in doing the biology because it does manifest in beekeeping eventually because
Dr. David Tarpy: They're so complex and and there's so much more that we still have to learn that eventually does percolate into our management.
Jeff Ott: That's really good.
Jeff Ott: And that's one of the key points that Becky and I always try to bring back around is that you have to understand the biology and the behavior.
Jeff Ott: to effectively manage the honey bee.
Jeff Ott: So that's great.
Jeff Ott: Well, we invited you here because we have launched this spring our series on queens and queen management and
Jeff Ott: Queen biology.
Jeff Ott: And when you start looking at the research in Queens and honey bee health and everything, your name comes up consistently.
Jeff Ott: You've authored and co-authored so many different papers that are instrumental to our understanding of honey bees.
Jeff Ott: For our listeners who are new to honey bees this year, or or maybe into their second year, can you give us a high-level overview of the queen and her role and her position in the colony?
Dr. David Tarpy: That's a great question because I think the answer to that can can often come down to a matter of perspective, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: I think there's kind of a duality there.
Dr. David Tarpy: I think a lot of textbooks and a lot of beekeepers just think of the queen as
Dr. David Tarpy: An egg-laying machine, and you know, that's her only purpose and her only role.
Dr. David Tarpy: She's very boring.
Dr. David Tarpy: There's only one of her, you know
Dr. David Tarpy: And that now they everybody agrees and knows that she's very important, but you know, they kind of just look at her as as an egg cow, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: To just
Dr. David Tarpy: provide the eggs and then everything else goes from there.
Dr. David Tarpy: Another way to look at it is that, you know, the queen is
Dr. David Tarpy: repressing all of her daughters within the colony with these pheromones, and so she's this dictator and you know, controlling, you know, everything within the colony.
Dr. David Tarpy: Both are true, but neither is at the same time, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: I think it it really shows that there's this collaboration between the queen and and her worker offspring and they both are are important and needed for proper colony function, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And so
Dr. David Tarpy: The Queen's life cycle is, you know, for the most part pretty boring where she is just kind of laying
Dr. David Tarpy: Eggs and being tended to by the workers, but it does go beyond more than that.
Dr. David Tarpy: When when colonies make new queens
Dr. David Tarpy: They raise, you know, one or two dozen naturally, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Not in beekeeping where you graft them and you know raise them on purpose, but naturally when when colonies make new queens
Dr. David Tarpy: The mother queen represses the workers from raising new queens, and so either when she gets old um and she can no longer repress them, or when she swarms away.
Dr. David Tarpy: the colony left behind they're they're making new new daughter queen cells.
Dr. David Tarpy: When the colony makes, you know, a couple dozen queen cells, what ends up happening is
Dr. David Tarpy: you know those those queens only can be one successor.
Dr. David Tarpy: So what they end up doing, which this is really what got me into queen biology and and my ma it was the basis of my master's degree
Dr. David Tarpy: Which is, well, how do these virgin queens then fight to the death to claim the colony, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: How do they become the heir?
Dr. David Tarpy: And I and I like to make the analogy that
Dr. David Tarpy: That kind of episode is like watching the last episode of the Kardashians where they all kill each other off until one takes over the empire, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: It's just kind of how it how how it goes.
Dr. David Tarpy: And s and then only after she's vanquished all of her rival sisters does that successful mother queen or uh daughter queen
Dr. David Tarpy: Fly from the hive and then mate with dozens of drones from all the surrounding colonies, and then comes back to the hive.
Dr. David Tarpy: She stores a proportion
Dr. David Tarpy: of the sperm from all of her mates.
Dr. David Tarpy: So she actually mates with this, you know, very large number of males.
Dr. David Tarpy: So all the workers kind of form this genetic
Dr. David Tarpy: cosmopolitan population within the colony when she's laying eggs.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so that was actually the basis of my PhD work of saying, well why do queens mate so many times when only one male is enough, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So I think there's a lot of that
Dr. David Tarpy: fundamental biology of queen life history that goes on within just the first two weeks of her lifetime.
Dr. David Tarpy: But then once she starts laying eggs, she, you know, never leaves the hive again.
Dr. David Tarpy: She doesn't, you know, really do much other than fertilize and lay the eggs, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: But understanding that brief period early in her life can have profound ramifications for the rest of the of her life and her colony's life
Dr. David Tarpy: It's key to the success of the colony at that point.
Dr. David Tarpy: It is.
Dr. David Tarpy: How well mated she is, how well reared she was, all of these things, the quality of the queen goes into her performance.
Dr. David Tarpy: within the colony and you know and our work and others have has shown that queen quality varies.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, there are some really good queens and there's some not so great queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: And the the quality of the queen kind of forms the ceiling of how good the colony is going to be.
Dr. David Tarpy: So if the if the if you have a subpar
Dr. David Tarpy: queen, she's smaller, she doesn't mate as many times, so on and so forth.
Dr. David Tarpy: They kind of have a lower ceiling of how big the colony's gonna get and how productive it's going to be.
Dr. David Tarpy: But if you have a a better queen
Dr. David Tarpy: the ceiling is a lot higher and and the colonies can be uh much better off.
Jeff Ott: Well that's an interesting question because we often talk about queen quality and and you hear r references to the queens are not as good as they used to be and
Jeff Ott: When you, as a researcher, talk about queen quality, what specific traits are you actually measuring?
Jeff Ott: How do those traits translate into colony performance?
Dr. David Tarpy: Well that's a very important question, Jeff, because I think again there's different ways that beekeepers look and assess
Dr. David Tarpy: what they mean by queen quality.
Dr. David Tarpy: What I'm referring to in that context is kind of her physical prowess
Dr. David Tarpy: That is her body size and other metrics of just how large she is, bigger is better.
Dr. David Tarpy: But then also her mating success.
Dr. David Tarpy: So how many drones did she mate with?
Dr. David Tarpy: How mu how that sperm storage organ that she gets filled up and and stores the sperm from all of those mates, the spermithica.
Dr. David Tarpy: you know how how much sperm gets in there and and how viable it is because you know sperm can die and so sperm viability is very important.
Dr. David Tarpy: So I'm talking about the queen specifically.
Dr. David Tarpy: right of her quality.
Dr. David Tarpy: And again that translates to kind of the colony.
Dr. David Tarpy: But I think a lot of beekeepers
Dr. David Tarpy: assess the queen by looking at the brood pattern.
Dr. David Tarpy: So if you have this kind of solid wall of contiguous brood, they're like, ah, that's a great queen, you know, oh, I love that.
Dr. David Tarpy: And everybody loves those pictures, right?
Jeff Ott: They show up good on Facebook.
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, and then and then the converse of that is if you have the shot brood where it's good there's a lot of holes in the in the brood and everything, uh, it's a bad brood pattern, it's a bad queen, you know.
Dr. David Tarpy: And
Dr. David Tarpy: Again, I think there are circumstances and and reasons of why the queen, as an individual, can be blamed for the brute pattern.
Dr. David Tarpy: But
Dr. David Tarpy: Our research has really shown in the narrative that that that we're really trying to put out there is that, well, the brood is actually a collective trait, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Because the queen laid the eggs, but it's the
Dr. David Tarpy: bees that raised them.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so there's lots of different reasons why a colony can have a a bad brood pattern, not just because of the queen.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, you can take a queen that has a bad brood pattern, put her in a new colony, and her brood pattern is just fine, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Or, you know, you put a a a good queen in that same colony and the brood pattern doesn't improve because whatever is behind that bad brood pattern is still there.
Dr. David Tarpy: Right.
Dr. David Tarpy: So there's
Dr. David Tarpy: There's many, many reasons why you can have a bad brood pattern.
Dr. David Tarpy: And what I like to say is that you need to rule all of the alternatives out before you blame the queen.
Dr. David Tarpy: But there's just something built into our beekeeper mentality
Dr. David Tarpy: That we just blame the queen when we see a bad brood pattern.
Dr. David Tarpy: And we need to be careful about that because we can overlook
Dr. David Tarpy: Mites, you know, colony being overrun by mites or AFB for God's sakes, or you know, like you know, like there's lots of different reasons why you can have a bad brood pattern.
Dr. David Tarpy: So you need to be very, very introspective and really think about that before you just blame the Queen.
Becky Masterman: Dave, I know a lot of commercial beekeeping operations
Becky Masterman: who are just every year requeening everybody.
Becky Masterman: And so they're they're to the point where
Becky Masterman: their access to queens is is affordable because they're they're doing their queen rearing and for them it it makes more sense
Becky Masterman: to go ahead and just re queen the operation.
Becky Masterman: And that might have been true for summer operations in the past, but not necessarily.
Becky Masterman: Do you see that as a sign of
Becky Masterman: this is where we are in Queen Health is that that we're safer in in bigger bigger operations to just go ahead and not take that time to say, is it the Queen, is it the colony, but just to go ahead and put a new one in there
Dr. David Tarpy: I'll kind of break that down into two parts because there's a lot to unpack unpack there.
Dr. David Tarpy: One of the issues is that we don't really have good baseline data of how long Queens used to live.
Dr. David Tarpy: You go to the textbooks and it's all, you know, three, four, five years, you know, like and we and we have we have this color coding system, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Where you go through these five different colors.
Dr. David Tarpy: Because queens are, you know, expected to live about five years, so you make sure you have five colors to make sure that you know, you know
Dr. David Tarpy: And when I first started in in beekeeping, only some of the operations would requeen some of their colonies every other year.
Dr. David Tarpy: And then it went to every colony every other year.
Dr. David Tarpy: And then it went to every colony every year.
Dr. David Tarpy: And some of them are doing it multiple times a year.
Dr. David Tarpy: So I think there's anecdotal evidence to suggest that queens are not living as long.
Dr. David Tarpy: But we don't have good firm empirical evidence, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And and so some people have accused me of tilting at wind windmills and that it's always been this way, and you know it's but
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, on on the other hand, you know, there there's definitely things within the colony environment that influence the colony's decision about whether or not to keep her around.
Dr. David Tarpy: And premature supersedure is, I think, definitely a management problem and concern that is, you know, manifests at the colony level of large and small operations.
Dr. David Tarpy: Large operations, that's the the the point of them doing that is that it makes economic sense to just raise a whole bunch of queens and just to go through and re-queen all the colonies, whether or not they have good or bad queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: And it's just, you know, simpler.
Dr. David Tarpy: But they have queens at the ready.
Dr. David Tarpy: They can do that, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: But but as a biologist, I'm more interested in this collective decision-making process.
Dr. David Tarpy: Of how a colony decides one day the queen is good and worth keeping around.
Dr. David Tarpy: Then the next day, off with her head.
Dr. David Tarpy: What is it that's going through the kind of social physiology of the colony in in in making that determination?
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, I spent the first 20 years of my career
Dr. David Tarpy: Looking for the silver bullet of, oh, here's this one thing that's wrong with a queen.
Dr. David Tarpy: They don't mate enough, or they're too runty, or they're diseased, or you know, here's a pesticide that
Dr. David Tarpy: And we haven't ever been able to find a smoking gun and we've been checking off all of these things that it's not, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And then so now I'm kind of flipping the switch and saying, okay, well it's not something with the queen that the
Dr. David Tarpy: workers are queuing in on, it's there's something in the environment, or multiple things in the environment, that change the worker's perception of her.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, the queen can be good and bad.
Dr. David Tarpy: I've seen really crappy queens not get superseded, and I've seen awesome queens get superseded.
Dr. David Tarpy: So clearly that decision, whatever they're making, is not always perfect.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so what is it that's going into, you know, that gestalt perception of the queen by the workers?
Dr. David Tarpy: And and, you know, others and and we have have done a bunch of studies that I think we're starting to kind of understand.
Dr. David Tarpy: Some of the moving m of the many moving parts that's going on.
Dr. David Tarpy: One that's really seems to be important is Queens getting infected with virus.
Dr. David Tarpy: And what that what tends to happen is that uh shrinks their ovaries, which means they lay less
Dr. David Tarpy: Which then decreases brood pheromones.
Dr. David Tarpy: So brood larvae produce pheromones that are important signals within the colony about how good the queen is.
Dr. David Tarpy: So even if nothing's really changing uh uh of the queen directly, there can be indirect ways that that the colony can figure out
Dr. David Tarpy: There are other things too that that there have been some really great papers of uh toxicologists and you know people studying effects of pesticides and and these kind of things, non-lethal effects of pesticides
Dr. David Tarpy: And one of the things that certain pesticides do is change the brain chemistry of the workers, which deadens their ability to smell, particularly things like queen and brood pheromone.
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, there's multiple things going on within the colony that can affect not the queen directly, but the workers' perception of the queen that can change their opinion pole.
Dr. David Tarpy: of her and then all of a sudden off with her head, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So it's a very, very complex thing that I think we're on the right track.
Dr. David Tarpy: We certainly don't have, you know, solid answers, but
Dr. David Tarpy: I I definitely think we've uh kind of crossed a threshold where where we're we're no longer barking up the wrong tree
Jeff Ott: That's really interesting because so often or for so long we've heard the implication is the decreasing availability of queen pheromone is the key indicator.
Jeff Ott: You're saying that the abundance or the
Jeff Ott: the availability of the brood pheromone also contributes as a combined factor or a secondary, if not an additional
Jeff Ott: factor in like whether the colony accepts the queen or in fact it's more important.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, people long time ago, once they found queen pheromone, they start throwing queen pheromone into colonies to see if it decreases suit procedure and it doesn't
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, queen pheromone is kind of is one signal, but I think those secondary fecundity signals of of the brood are probably a lot more important.
Dr. David Tarpy: But even more so, it's the worker's perception of it, not just the amount of it, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So I think there's there's that interplay of the signaling from the brood, but then also the receiving of the signal that can change as well
Dr. David Tarpy: We can't forget the the receiver end as much as the you know the the sender end, right?
Jeff Ott: How much does the drone brood pheromone factor into that as well?
Dr. David Tarpy: Good question.
Dr. David Tarpy: Don't know that yet.
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, because drones aren't important.
Dr. David Tarpy: They're useless, remember.
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, nobody nobody studies them.
Dr. David Tarpy: No, I th I think you know drones are clearly important for for mating and these other things and how much that
Dr. David Tarpy: helps to modulate or regulate those collective decisions is is still unknown, but it's an interesting question.
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah.
Jeff Ott: Hey, let's take this opportunity to take a quick break.
Jeff Ott: We'll come right back and continue our conversation with Dr.
Jeff Ott: Dave Tarpey.
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Becky Masterman: Welcome back, everybody.
Becky Masterman: David, you mentioned queen quality and you talked about that it it was based upon maybe the nutrition they received when they were being reared.
Becky Masterman: or the quality of mating.
Becky Masterman: Can you tell us what you think about how the actual handling of queens by people, beekeepers?
Becky Masterman: or sending them in the mail or raising them in mass, how does that impact the quality of queens
Dr. David Tarpy: Another great question that has a huge impact, you know, as as we transport queens and ship them through the mail, you know, and everything.
Dr. David Tarpy: That that does have an impact.
Dr. David Tarpy: Now a lot of the carriers and everything take great care
Dr. David Tarpy: A lot of the beekeepers that are selling queens make sure that they're well incubated with, you know, attendant bees and everything like that.
Dr. David Tarpy: But
Dr. David Tarpy: all that makes it all the more important of handling after they're received and before they go into the colony that's really important.
Dr. David Tarpy: And and we all know that, you know, if you overheat
Dr. David Tarpy: queens and bees, they'll die.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, if they don't get enough water, if they can't, you know, cool off and everything, that can be, you know, detrimental.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so as we're shipping packages, we're shipping queens and everything
Dr. David Tarpy: we tend to overcompensate and make sure that we ship them cold because they can generate heat, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And so they they're they're m
Dr. David Tarpy: they're less susceptible to to dying if they're cool because they can warm themselves up, rather than overheating, which can be harder, you know, to get back to normal.
Dr. David Tarpy: The problem is is that yes, if you overheat Queens, non-lethally, right, where
Dr. David Tarpy: They they get overheated for a period of time.
Dr. David Tarpy: They they might not die, but the sperm in their spermatheca can become sterilized, so they have zero vo or low sperm viability.
Dr. David Tarpy: And only live sperm can fertilize eggs.
Dr. David Tarpy: So you can have these queens that become premature drone layers or that are superseded early because they're they're not
Dr. David Tarpy: doing their function, right, of of laying the eggs.
Dr. David Tarpy: The problem is that our research, Jeff Pettis, uh Allie McAfee, who who's in our lab, but she's in Vancouver, Canada, there's a lot of people that are doing some great work and have shown that
Dr. David Tarpy: When you chill queens, again, it doesn't kill them, but it can also sterilize the sperm.
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, if you are
Dr. David Tarpy: you know, getting a a batch of queens and you throw them in the refrigerator or something like that to make sure that, you know, they're okay, or if you throw them in the
Dr. David Tarpy: you know, the dash of your truck in the direct sunlight or, you know, you're re queening your colonies while you have your winter coat on.
Dr. David Tarpy: you know, 'cause you want to get a head start on making your spring splits or something like that.
Dr. David Tarpy: These are not good temperatures for prolonged periods of time to, you know, have these queens exposed to, which again, it might not kill them outright, but it can
Dr. David Tarpy: decrease their sperm viability.
Dr. David Tarpy: So we need to be a lot more careful in the handling of queens as, you know, in between receiving them or making them.
Dr. David Tarpy: and then putting them uh in the colonies.
Dr. David Tarpy: We need to keep them between room temperature and and hive temperature and just make sure that we don't deviate too far and too long.
Dr. David Tarpy: because of those invisible ramifications, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: You can't look at a queen and realize that all the sperm in her spermatheca are dead.
Becky Masterman: I think it's one of those one of those recommendations for newer beekeepers that's so important because
Becky Masterman: it's hard to s learn about just how that colony can thermoregulate and
Becky Masterman: they're surprised by how quickly they can overheat.
Becky Masterman: So if they're buying a nuke of bees, if they're buying packages of bees, it's so important to keep them
Becky Masterman: cooler rather than warmer because the bees are able to generate heat, but but if you put them too close together, they're just not gonna be able to cool off.
Becky Masterman: One more thing that makes beekeeping difficult, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: That's right.
Becky Masterman: I I just have a research question for you because when you are interested in looking at queen viruses and and you're looking at queen mating and everything, all of that sampling is destructive, right?
Becky Masterman: So so when you're asking questions, can you just share with the listeners how you're doing that?
Becky Masterman: Because in order to get your answers, you need to basically take the queen out.
Becky Masterman: and sample.
Becky Masterman: So it does make a difference because you can't learn about what the viruses she had were and then keep following that colony necessarily.
Becky Masterman: Or maybe you can.
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, correct.
Dr. David Tarpy: That's a real major limitation of of both our research where we're looking at queen quality, but also our queen and disease clinic, where we offer the same analytical tools through an extension initiative where
Dr. David Tarpy: where beekeepers can send us their queens and we can analyze them in the same way and then give them a report back and we give letter grades, you know, A, B, C
Dr. David Tarpy: and so on.
Dr. David Tarpy: And the downside is that, hey, these are really great queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: Sorry they're dead.
Dr. David Tarpy: Right?
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, so um but you so you can only know kind of after the fact.
Dr. David Tarpy: But you know the the clinic is is really helpful
Dr. David Tarpy: Especially for large scale queen producers, like if they're making a thousand queens, they're all kind of reared at the same time, mating at the same time and location and everything.
Dr. David Tarpy: They send us ten.
Dr. David Tarpy: And we can analyze them and give that report back and you know just within a day or two, you know, to turnaround.
Dr. David Tarpy: That informs them of what the other 990
Dr. David Tarpy: might look like so that as they're selling to their customers they have a lot of r reassurance of the quality of the product that they're making.
Dr. David Tarpy: So I think that that works, you know, really well.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's better than just, you know, being blind to all of that, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So so yeah, in our in our research it's very it would be really, really nice to have some sort of temporal way of assessing this, you know, non-destructively.
Dr. David Tarpy: very very limited ways of doing that but you know until technology improves or you know we have some scanner you know that's able to to detect that that's really unfortunately the only way we can do it
Jeff Ott: What traits are you looking at when you do those assessments?
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, so well, a lot of the body size measurements can be done non-destructively, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So we can we weigh them, we take pictures of them, and then we digitally measure like
Dr. David Tarpy: thorax width, head width, you know, like wing lengths, you know, those kind of things.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so if we do a kind of a temporal study or something like that, we can do that.
Dr. David Tarpy: We can non-destructively sample the physical
Dr. David Tarpy: size and quality of the queen and then follow her over time.
Dr. David Tarpy: Those traits, those measurements all tend to be very highly correlated, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, heavier queens tend to be wider, you know.
Dr. David Tarpy: But
Dr. David Tarpy: They also correlate, but not quite as strongly with their mating measures.
Dr. David Tarpy: So larger queens had larger spermaticas, so they have larger sperm stores, you know, those kind of things.
Dr. David Tarpy: But there's a lot more noise there.
Dr. David Tarpy: So it's not a direct
Dr. David Tarpy: relationship but but a correlative one, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: You can have big queens that have low sperm counts and you know smaller queens that are stock full, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So again, you can measure their body size
Dr. David Tarpy: non-destructively.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's those reproductive measures that you unfortunately you have to sacrifice some.
Dr. David Tarpy: So we euthanize them, right, and then dissect them, but we need to do that while they're still alive so that the sperm are still alive
Dr. David Tarpy: So we can measure the viability of the sperm because a queen can have, you know, five, seven million sperm in the spermatheca.
Dr. David Tarpy: But if she only has ten percent viability, right, only live sperm can fertilize eggs, and so effectively she really doesn't have a lot of sperm, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So like
Dr. David Tarpy: I think that's where we have to, you know, dissect them open and and remove the organ and and do all of the cellular staining and all of that to to see how many of the sperm in there are still alive or how many of them are dead.
Becky Masterman: Are beekeepers from across the country able to send you queens and pay for a sample?
Dr. David Tarpy: Absolutely, yes.
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, so it's a n nationwide service, yeah.
Becky Masterman: How long have you been doing that service, David?
Dr. David Tarpy: Oh, well over ten years now, yeah.
Becky Masterman: Are you seeing increasing numbers every year of samples?
Dr. David Tarpy: Well, we we've held pretty steady.
Dr. David Tarpy: I mean it's not it's not that we're working twenty-four-seven, you know, on on getting samples.
Dr. David Tarpy: I think it's it's more of a of a niche service
Dr. David Tarpy: The techniques that we do are not unique.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's kind of how we we we've been able to package them together, the workflow that makes it a very, very rapid turnaround.
Dr. David Tarpy: But most importantly, based on our research, again, this is why research is important.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, we can experimentally manipulate queen quality where we can intentionally make, you know, the best queens possible, but then we can also make the crappiest queens possible.
Dr. David Tarpy: So we have this standard yardstick
Dr. David Tarpy: based on our research of saying, well, we know what a good queen is and we know how bad queens can get.
Dr. David Tarpy: Where do yours lie?
Dr. David Tarpy: on that on that spectrum.
Dr. David Tarpy: And that's how we're able to make these letter grades.
Dr. David Tarpy: So that's kind of a unique thing that that we can do is put it into perspective.
Dr. David Tarpy: Right?
Dr. David Tarpy: We you know, anybody can m weigh a queen and say, well, she's, you know, 205 milligrams.
Dr. David Tarpy: But is that good or bad?
Dr. David Tarpy: I don't know, but we can empirically and statistically say, okay, well this is where they are, then the 81st percentile, you know, like that kind of thing.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so that helps give some information that again
Dr. David Tarpy: Beekeep is just completely invisible to beekeepers.
Dr. David Tarpy: You can't look at a queen and know what her sperm viability is, right?
Becky Masterman: I've known you've been doing this, but I knew you did this for researchers.
Becky Masterman: And that it is so cool that you're doing this for beekeepers
Dr. David Tarpy: Yeah, no, I mean it's again, it's the same techniques that we use with our research or well in our research.
Dr. David Tarpy: We
Dr. David Tarpy: There are other techniques that we do like counting the number of varioles in the in each ovary, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Which is onerous
Dr. David Tarpy: And so we d that's not part of the clinic because it just takes too long and it's probably you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze, you know.
Dr. David Tarpy: But like so to have that fast turnaround
Dr. David Tarpy: is is really really helpful so beekeepers can make informed decisions in in near real time.
Dr. David Tarpy: And again, I think it's really, really helpful for those larger scale
Dr. David Tarpy: commercial queen producers to have some reassurance of their product.
Dr. David Tarpy: They don't want to sell people bad queens, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And and and kind of going back to what we were saying before
Dr. David Tarpy: A lot of queen producers are are blamed for having these bad queens, but again, after they ship them out, they don't know what happens to them, they don't know the handling and
Dr. David Tarpy: And because the environment of the colony is so important to the fate of the queen, you can take a perfectly good queen
Dr. David Tarpy: throw her into a toxic environment and they get rid of her.
Dr. David Tarpy: But if the beekeeper then turns around blames the queen, right, they're missing the actual reason.
Dr. David Tarpy: In fact, I've prevented murders where a beekeeper wanted to kill another beekeeper, quite literally, um because he thought they sent them a whole bunch of junk queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: And I said, Well, before you go and kill somebody, why don't you send us some fro of yours that were fine and then some that were not being accepted from the others and we can
Dr. David Tarpy: empirically tell you whether or not they really are worse and we couldn't find a single difference.
Dr. David Tarpy: Right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, sometimes we lead to conclusions that are not that
Dr. David Tarpy: not really based on on certain you know evidence.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, I think eighty per I would say probably around eighty percent of the time people send us what they consider bad queens because
Dr. David Tarpy: they have a bad brood pattern or they have, you know, they haven't been accepted at the same rates that they're used to, or you know, you name it.
Dr. David Tarpy: And we analyze them and and we can't find anything wrong with the queens themselves.
Dr. David Tarpy: Which suggests again that there's this environmental role.
Dr. David Tarpy: Okay, well, you know, you're placing these queens into these colonies.
Dr. David Tarpy: Tell me a little bit about your management.
Dr. David Tarpy: Tell me about you know where they're located.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, tell me, you know, so oh well, you know, we we
Dr. David Tarpy: treat you know twice a month with you know off label mitocide well maybe that has something to do with the decision that they're making about getting rid of the queens you know so like
Dr. David Tarpy: It helps provide that conversation rather than just simply knee-jerk reaction blaming the queen and not learning from that.
Jeff Ott: Noticed any correlation between different races of bees and the queen quality?
Jeff Ott: You have to have some sort of number on that.
Dr. David Tarpy: That's a really good question.
Dr. David Tarpy: Our yardstick that we built with our research
Dr. David Tarpy: are Italian Spring mated newly mated queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: Okay?
Dr. David Tarpy: So that's the yardstick
Dr. David Tarpy: Then the question is, well, you know, how do Russian queens or how do Saskatchewans or how do Carniolan queens match up?
Dr. David Tarpy: Don't really see any differences there.
Dr. David Tarpy: I think there's way more
Dr. David Tarpy: uh variation within these different stocks than there is between them or among them.
Dr. David Tarpy: Okay.
Dr. David Tarpy: So so that that said there.
Dr. David Tarpy: But
Dr. David Tarpy: There's there's just so much variation that I think it's it's hard to blame source.
Dr. David Tarpy: And in fact, we we've done some studies where we compared anonymously different queen producers.
Dr. David Tarpy: to see, you know, who's doing a good job and who's doing a bad job.
Dr. David Tarpy: They're all doing the same.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's just that they have a lot of variation, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: All queen producers
Dr. David Tarpy: make mostly really good queens, but every once in a while there's a dog or two in there.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so our clinic and and research, what we're really hoping to do to increase queen quality overall
Dr. David Tarpy: Not just the environment and the handling aspects of it, but rather than taking the bell-shaped curve of Queen Quality and trying to shift it to the right
Dr. David Tarpy: through grafting practices or those kind of things.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's well let's identify that left tail and kind of cull them out of the population, which will immediately increase queen quality for everybody.
Dr. David Tarpy: So you don't get those those real kind of laggards, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So I think I think it's more important not to say, well, buy from here versus there because they're doing it right and they're doing it wrong.
Dr. David Tarpy: It's more
Dr. David Tarpy: There's just natural variation in this messy biological system.
Dr. David Tarpy: So let's try and and identify ways to to call out the the lesser ones.
Becky Masterman: Has anybody looked at the differences between queens that are in the South and might
Becky Masterman: produce more brood over time versus northern queens that have a a pretty good time where they they are not laying eggs
Becky Masterman: I asked this because and you can maybe answer this question too, it might be easier, but I've had commercial queen breeders say to me, I think we're working them too hard.
Becky Masterman: I think the queens are they're we're making them work too hard.
Becky Masterman: And I I was just wondering if
Becky Masterman: Do Northern Queens not have to work as hard as as Queens maybe in the south?
Dr. David Tarpy: That's a great question.
Dr. David Tarpy: I've kind of had that same conversation and and discussion with folks too
Dr. David Tarpy: There's a lot of confounding variables there, so I think it's it's kind of an apples to oranges comparison, but like the idea that that
Dr. David Tarpy: we're burning the candle at both ends in our modern day ape apiculture, especially to accommodate brood buildup for almonds and that kind of stuff in the middle of winter and all this.
Dr. David Tarpy: So
Dr. David Tarpy: People have argued that they we've always done that, and so you know, any changes has to be for a different reason.
Dr. David Tarpy: But I do think that there is a biological benefit and break to
Dr. David Tarpy: Queens and to colonies by having a winter.
Dr. David Tarpy: And I never really appreciated that when I was in upstate New York at Cornell with Tom Seely, you know, because it was nine months of winter and it's like, okay, you know, July is summer and this is great.
Dr. David Tarpy: Great.
Dr. David Tarpy: But when I moving here to North Carolina, every year it gets me how early the season starts here, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: And how late it really lasts.
Dr. David Tarpy: And that we don't really go broodless.
Dr. David Tarpy: But we still have a winter where there's still a dearth and foraging and everything like that.
Dr. David Tarpy: So it's almost like the worst of both worlds where they don't have a true winter, but they don't have perpetual summer either.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so it can be really, really hard for mic control and some of these other things, but it's kind of like, you know, maybe this is a bad analogy, but
Dr. David Tarpy: If you have a laptop and you always just put it to sleep and it never actually shuts down and reboots, that can be bad for the operating system over time, you know, and so the same thing with queens and their ovaries
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, if they're always laying, what does that really do to them physiologically?
Dr. David Tarpy: Uh that because they're supposed to have these periods where they're not laying.
Dr. David Tarpy: Right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So we don't really know what that benefit is, but uh but I I I think there might be some kind of hidden physiological and and other reasons of why
Dr. David Tarpy: that might be a good thing in the north.
Dr. David Tarpy: Of course that's harder on the colony, you know, they need more honey to overwinter and all these other things.
Dr. David Tarpy: But these are trade-offs to each other, but we might be ignoring the fact that we're we're having them
Dr. David Tarpy: push, you know, out so many eggs so fast um without kind of understanding what that does to them long term.
Becky Masterman: Well now I'm worried about my computer operating system.
Becky Masterman: And queens.
Becky Masterman: Can you see the look in my eye saying, please, I have to see it out
Becky Masterman: Oh one more thing to worry about.
Becky Masterman: I do want to ask about about mating numbers.
Becky Masterman: You've seen so much and you've seen so many data on the actual number of times Queens
Becky Masterman: can mate.
Becky Masterman: Can you just give us your the the number that you think is best and then also just kind of the coolest things you've seen as far as is queen mating.
Dr. David Tarpy: For your listeners, they don't know how scientists do this.
Dr. David Tarpy: You can't, you know, just look at a queen.
Dr. David Tarpy: You can't look at the colony and see, you know, how many drone fathers are represented among among the workers
Dr. David Tarpy: And you can't really witness queen mating either because it's done usually a mile from the hive and fifty meters up in the air in rapid succession, and you know, it's just kind of this
Dr. David Tarpy: this crazy sis mating system that they have.
Dr. David Tarpy: So you have to infer it after the fact.
Dr. David Tarpy: And so, you know, what we and anybody really who studies this does is they sample like a hundred workers
Dr. David Tarpy: And they extract their DNA and they do in essence uh paternity tests.
Dr. David Tarpy: You know, like you would for for custody battles or something, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Where you look at the paternity of all of these workers.
Dr. David Tarpy: And genetically, those that are sired by the same father have the same genetic signal, and you can kind of tease out and and count up how many
Dr. David Tarpy: drone fathers of the workers there are and that's the number of mates by the queen, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So that's how you do it, kind of after the fact and
Dr. David Tarpy: There's been lots and lots, you know, hundreds of colonies that have been genotyped in this way.
Dr. David Tarpy: And you know, the the average is a big variation, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So some queens only do mate
Dr. David Tarpy: two or three times.
Dr. David Tarpy: Some queens mate like sixty or more times, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: But the the average is is in the high teens.
Dr. David Tarpy: So, you know, between fifteen and twenty-five I think is is where you know most queen drone numbers lie, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: But the second part of your question there was w well it was kind of when it comes to queen mating was some of the the kind of
Dr. David Tarpy: cooler things that that we found.
Dr. David Tarpy: So there's this phenomenon we we weren't the first to show it, but we've studied it a little bit where there's this thing called these royal patrilines or these royal subfamilies where
Dr. David Tarpy: If you do that paternity test on the workers as I just described, what you can find is is well some of those drone fathers are really well represented among
Dr. David Tarpy: among the workers and some of them they only sire very, very few workers, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: So they're they're not all equally represented, but they're you know, there's kind of
Dr. David Tarpy: variation in that.
Dr. David Tarpy: But if you look at when a colony makes a bunch of queens, sometimes what you find is that the ones that are more highly represented among the workers
Dr. David Tarpy: are not represented in the Queens, and then others that are very low representation among the workers are highly represented in the Queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: So it suggests that, you know, some drone fathers might
Dr. David Tarpy: sire females, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: But when they are workers, they're not as good, and when they're queens, they're better, and vice versa.
Dr. David Tarpy: So there's kind of like these kind of maybe hidden or or or less represented drone fathers among the workers, but they're they're more represented among the queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: Now we don't know what that means and
Dr. David Tarpy: How that can be incorporated into beekeeping, that's something I'd really like to figure out.
Dr. David Tarpy: Because if though if those Jones genetics are somehow making better queens, well, how can we harness that as beekeepers, right?
Dr. David Tarpy: Because we're just grafting queens.
Dr. David Tarpy: Queens randomly when we're when we're making queens, and the bees aren't doing it randomly, so you know, what do they know that we don't know?
Dr. David Tarpy: Still a mystery, but I think that's a really cool aspect to again meeting biology and its potential applications to beekeeping
Jeff Ott: This is so much fun and we're at the end of the time right now.
Jeff Ott: Dave, I'd like to ask you to come back because I know we've only scratched the service of Queens.
Jeff Ott: Not even scratch, it's an itch of the queen subject.
Jeff Ott: We'd like to invite you back at a later date to continue this discussion because this is just totally fascinating.
Jeff Ott: That'd be great, Jeff.
Jeff Ott: Thanks.
Becky Masterman: Thank you so much.
Becky Masterman: That was you're very generous with your information and what I love about the work that you're doing is that
Becky Masterman: you've got this range from what can I do to help beekeepers to these are some really cool questions that we'd like to answer and and it's just so important to our industry.
Becky Masterman: So thank you so much, David.
Jeff Ott: Great.
Jeff Ott: Thanks Beggie.
Jeff Ott: That was a fascinating discussion about Queens that just I wanted to keep going on and on and on.
Becky Masterman: You know, we do get to a point where where we know that
Becky Masterman: Every question we ask, we're gonna get this amazing answer because he has literally devoted his life to studying queens and studying colonies and behavior and health.
Becky Masterman: And so when you have that opportunity to talk to somebody, it's it's really hard to say goodbye.
Jeff Ott: It was.
Jeff Ott: There were so many questions we didn't get to that I have here on my list and I wanted to circle back around and it's just
Jeff Ott: uh just impossible.
Jeff Ott: So I look forward to having him back here in uh relatively near future.
Becky Masterman: I would agree.
Becky Masterman: Thank you, Doctor David Tarpey, for he made our day, didn't we, Jeff?
Jeff Ott: He made our day
Jeff Ott: And that about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today.
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Jeff Ott: Thanks again everybody