Increased Mass-Rearing of Queens in High Royal-Jelly-Producing Honey Bee Colonies (Apis mellifera ligustica) Generates Smaller Queens with Comparable Fecundity

The mass rearing of high-quality queen bees is an essential beekeeping practice for producing new queens to maintain colony productivity. A strain of high royal-jelly-producing bees (RJBs; Apis mellifera ligustica) in China exhibits high potential for the rapid mass rearing of queens. To explore the potential changes in the quality of mass-reared queens, a set of morphometric traits and the sealed brood area were compared between the queens reared from 64 and 320 queen cells in RJB colonies. The increase in the queen cell number was found to induce a slightly but significantly reduced body weight and smaller wing length and thorax width in the reared queens at emergence. However, the ovariole number and sealed brood area, an indicator of the queen fecundity, were not observed to be significantly influenced. With respect to body weight and ovariole number, all the reared queens satisfied the current criteria for high-quality queens. Our findings provide evidence for the efficient mass production of high-quality queens using RJB colonies.