Instrumental insemination: A nontraditional technique to produce superior quality honey bee (Apis mellifera) queens

Abstract

Honey bee queen serves as a colony's centre hub, producing eggs and releasing pheromones to keep a colony together. Artificial insemination in Apis mellifera, trending research these days, is a consistent method for controlling mating in honey bees. Quality queen production is essential to maintaining a healthy bee colony. A review of comparative studies on superior quality honey bee (A. mellifera) queens production through nontraditional techniques and various factors affecting the instrumental insemination process has been compiled in this article. Several factors like; rearing conditions, stress, inseminator’s skills, food availability, mating age of queen, queen banking, temperature, sperms stored in the spermatheca, sperms quality and quantity, semen handling and storage, CO2 and nitrogen treatments, pheromones affect the performance of instrumentally inseminated queens. Moreover, different data collection showed that different methods used for queen treatment which have a significant effect on the performance of the queen. This review suggested that artificially inseminated queens could be more productive if experiments were done with proper attention and precision.

Keywords

• Apis mellifera
• Queen
• Artificial insemination
• Superior quality
• Drone
• Various factors