Confinement to a shipping cage for even "a few hours, and certainly overnight, affects a queen’s egg laying, total body weight and pheromone production. [T]he queen is perceived by the bees, in part, as a function of her pheromone production and that is based on her egg-laying. To the bees, a queen that is not laying eggs is no substitute for an actively laying queen." (Larry Connor, Increase Essentials, 2d ed. 2014, p.139)

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Writing in 1901, G.M. Doolittle, the father of modern commercial queen rearing, estimated that shipping-cage queens require more than twice the care when introducing to a colony than a queen from another colony in the same apiary. (Scientific Queen-Rearing, 3d ed. 1901, p.75)  You might quibble with his estimate of the magnitude of the difference, but it undoubtedly remains true that "getting the bees to accept a new [shipping-cage] queen is sometimes difficult and perplexing.  The bees of the receiving colony may just kill the new queen, resulting in a disappointing and expensive loss, given the high cost of queens." (Mangum 2020)

 

Bees may more frequently reject, or more quickly supersede, shipping-cage queens not only because their laying has been unnaturally interrupted.  Worker bees also may perceive sublethal damage to the queen from shipping or banking stresses.  

 

Shipping stresses

 

Temperature stress during shipping has been studied many times, and its harmful effects are well known.  Mated queens carry inside all the sperm they will ever have to lay – hopefully, hundreds of thousands of fertilized eggs.  Any reduction in a queen’s stored viable sperm is a permanent reduction in her fecundity.  Exposure to extreme high or low temperatures can cause stored sperm to die, even at temperatures that the queen herself can survive.  Pettis et al. 2016, for example, found 60+% reductions in sperm viability after only one or two hours of laboratory exposure of queens to temperatures of 39°F or 104°F.  

 

Researchers have repeatedly observed routine commercial queen shipments exposed to extreme temperatures. (e.g., Rousseau et al. 2020;  McAfee et al. 2020;  Pettis et al. 2016)

 

Queen shippers have one tool available to try to protect against extreme cold.  They can add hundreds of loose nurse bees to the shipment.  250 to 500 attendant bees can thermoregulate a shipping box for two hours at low temperature. (Rousseau et al. 2020)   

 

But adding loose nurse bees to shipping boxes has not proven able to protect queens against overheating.  Rousseau et al. 2020 found that attendant bees could not maintain shipping box temperatures below 95°F after 20 minutes inside an incubator set to 104°F, and they averaged 103°F after 50 minutes.  UPS drivers, for example, have recorded 116+°F temperatures inside their big brown trucks.  

 

Analogously, perhaps heat stress explains why young queens shipped in package colonies are “[f]requently” replaced by their colony within 30 days of installation. (Connor 2015, p.119)  Withrow et al. 2019 observed package colonies experiencing "typically high rates of queen failure (~25%)" within the first 8 weeks, with the failed queens having been subject to significantly higher and less variable temperatures. 

 

Importantly, temperature stress is just one of many transport-related stresses.  “The impact of other transport-related stressors such as vibration, exhaust, changes in humidity and barometric pressure, and confinement remain unexplored” (Ahn et al. 2012), or at least underexplored as of today. 

 

Banking stresses

 

Commercial beekeepers routinely store queens in “queen banks,” confining them to individual cages and placing anywhere from several to several hundred cages in holding frames in a single colony. (Woyke 1988)  Some queens cannot tolerate the stress of this unnatural environment and perish in short order.  One prominent California producer, for example, has shared on YouTube that he regularly exposes his queens to banking stress to reveal queens unlikely to survive transport-related stresses.  That way he reduces the number of dead queens delivered to customers. Whatever you think of that approach, it doesn’t address any potential sublethal damage done to banking survivors.

 

Banked queens can suffer injuries inflicted by aggressive worker bees from those colonies. (Woyke 1988;  Zajdel et al. 2020)  “The workers bite claws, tarsi, antennae and even wings.” (Id.)  “Missing leg segments or whole legs make it difficult for queens to walk, injured wings preclude them from flying, and missing antennae or antenna fragments restrict the queens’ sensory abilities.” (Zajdel et al. 2014)  

 

In addition, “banked queens shut down their individual pheromone production” (Connor 2014, p.139) and “shrivel up inside and must be carefully fed to be brought back to full vigor.” (Connor 2015, p.77) Unless and until properly nursed to recovery, even a physically intact banked queen “cannot compete with a recently removed queen that has been laying hundreds of eggs per day.” (Connor 2014, p.139)

 

High Royalty, the Doolittle Way

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For these reasons, we offer laying queens for sale – local and cage-free, never banked or shipped. A Potomac River Queen has never been confined to a shipping cage, for any reason, for any length of time.  There is zero risk that a beekeeper has unnaturally interrupted her egg-laying, or accidentally damaged her, by caging her.  

 

Instead, a Potomac River Queen comes with “the frame of brood she is on, bees and all, together with another frame from the same hive,” inspired by the simple queen introduction method most favored by Mr. Doolittle. (Scientific Queen-Rearing, 3d ed. 1901, p.76)  Secure the queen to be replaced, if she’s still around, and then take two frames out of the hive, replacing them with the two frames carrying the new queen, and close the hive.  As Mr. Doolittle explained:

 

The object in taking the two frames with the [new] queen, is so that while waiting outside of the hive she and the most of the bees may cluster between them, thus becoming quiet.  When placed in the hive, both are put in together, thus leaving the queen quiet among her own bees.  In this way I do not lose one queen out of fifty, and as the operation is so simple, and the queen so quickly installed, the advantages more than over-balance so small a loss. (Id.)​​​