The Relevance of Virgin Queen Tooting and Quacking
A report of the talk delivered by Martin Bencsik on February 17th 2021
Continuous monitoring of undisturbed honey bee colonies has allowed the secrets of virgin queen piping to be understood. In our February webinar, Dr Martin Bencsik described 24/7/365 monitoring of the complex vibrational signals within a hive using ultra-sensitive accelerometers embedded within a comb and, in particular, the unique sequence of signals that occur during natural swarming.
There is a dramatic increase in vibrations as the prime swarm departs, followed by a lower amplitude background signal due to a reduced hive population.
In the colony monitored, 4 days after the departure of the swarm, a new signal appears, the high frequency “tooting” of a newly emerged virgin queen and, after short delays, slightly lower frequency “quacking” from other virgin queens still confined to their cells. This tooting and quacking continues for two days until the issue of a secondary swarm (cast). The tooting stops briefly (the virgin queen left with the cast) but then resumes as another virgin queen is released by the workers from her cell. Tooting and quacking resumes for two days until another cast leaves the colony but then all goes quiet, there are no further queens in cells and the last emerging is retained to head the colony.
So, to correct a beekeeping myth, queen piping is NOT a mechanism for an emerged queen to find and kill her siblings, it is a dialogue between emerged and captive queens with the workers as the audience – to indicate whether or not “spare” queens are available, whether they can dispatch a secondary swarm and still retain a queen for the parent colony.
Martin concluded his talk with some new results which had come from measuring the vibrations arising from varroa – who would have thought one could detect the vibrations arising from a single 0.4mg varroa mite simply walking? Amazing!!
[1] Ramsey, MT., Bencsik, M., Newton, M.I. et al. The prediction of swarming in honeybee colonies using vibrational spectra. Sci Rep 10, 9798 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66115-5
Hi, I’ve only recently heard about the Central. I’m more interested in the webinars/video lectures than in the written ones. I’m aware that there are only a handful of them on the Central YouTube channel. So I was wondering if I could have access to past webinars and recorded lectures? I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Regards.
Hello Maria,
Thank you for your question, and your interest.
Until very recently, we’ve only produced booklets. These are based on a selection of talks, and are usually prepared after the event, to give time for additional material and corrections to be added and, in many cases, for the research on which they are based to be published in a journal first. Because our speakers are practicing scientists, they’ll often be talking about findings that haven’t yet been peer-reviewed, and what they can publish is often constrained by academic conventions, and courtesy to their colleagues.
During the pandemic, we’ve been having virtual lectures and recording some of them. But we haven’t done many of those yet, and the same constraints apply to recordings as to the booklets, so we haven’t been able to record them all, or establish anything like a library yet. Some of the talks, in addition, have been hosted in collaboration with other organisations, such as the National Honey Show and BeeCraft, who may record and publish them separately (e.g. see https://www.bee-craft.com/videos)
However, where we can, we will publish recordings on our YouTube channel (we’ve added another today), and if you subscribe to that, you can opt to receive notifications of when we do.
In future, we will continue to publish booklets, and hope to resume our ‘live’ events as soon as we can. We have experimented with recording live events in the past, but the results have been mixed, so I can’t promise we’ll continue with that, but we’ll try to do what we can.