Effect of different feeding diets on queen bee quality parameters

Beekeeping is an agricultural activity for honey bee colonies to collect nectar and pollen from various sources in nature during their flowering period and transform them into different beekeeping products such as honey pollen, royal jelly, bee venom, propolis or queen bee, or use it for pollination in plant production. The most important member of this beekeeping activity is the queen bee. A good and quality queen comes with a higher yield and better beekeeping activities. In this study aimed at raising higher quality and productive queen bees, some quality parameters such as queen cell acceptance ratios, queen cell length and width, queen emerging weight and queen weight after mating, spermatheca diameter, spermatheca volume and the number of spermatozoa in spermatheca were examined. As a result of the study, the average queen cell acceptance rates, queen cell length, queen cell width, queen emerging weight and post-mating weight, spermatheca diameter, spermatheca volume, and the number of spermatozoa in spermatheca were found as 91.66 %, 25.45 ± 0.18 mm, 11.49 ± 0.08 mm, 174.90 ± 2.10 mg, 186.76± 2.87 mg, 1.18±1.09 mm, 0.87±0.02 mm3 and 4.655.369.93±428.171,13 number, respectively. As a result of the statistical analysis, it was seen that the average data of queen cell lengths were insignificant (P> 0.05), but the difference between the data of queen cell diameters was statistically significant (P <0.05). Similarly, it was determined that the difference between the means of the queen hatching weight data was statistically significant (P <0.05), but the difference between the body weights after mating was statistically insignificant (P> 0.05). The differences between the spermatheca diameters, spermatheca volume and the number of spermatozoa in spermatheca were statistically insignificant (P> 0.05). When analyzed in terms of Pearson correlation coefficient between parameters a high correlation was found between queen emerging weight and post-mating weight 0.481 (P <0.01), between the number of spermatozoa and the diameter of the spermatheca 0.427 (P <0.05), between the number of spermatozoa and spermatheca volume 0.411 (P <0.05), and between spermatheca volume and spermatheca diameter 0.997 (P <0.01).