Overwintering Queen Banks in Oregon
Reports on management practices suggest that the rate of queen replacement by U.S. beekeepers has drastically increased in recent years. This heavy increase in demand for new queens warrants exploring solutions to increase queen supply including the technique of overwintering queens in bank colonies. For this technique, beekeepers purchase late-season queens and suspend them inside a single “bank” colony during the winter. After winter, beekeepers can use these queens to replace failing queens in colonies prepared for almond pollination or introduce them into newly divided colonies after the almond bloom to offset winter colony losses. Ellen will discuss the results from the first year of OSU’s project on overwintering queen banks.
Ellen Topitzhofer became interested in honey bees while studying plant genetics and breeding at the University of Minnesota. She then studied honey bee nutrition as part of her MS at Oregon State University. After graduating, she worked with commercial beekeepers in the Northwest as part of the Bee Informed Partnership’s Tech Transfer Team mastering on-the-ground testing, secret-keeping, and applicable research. She currently works as a research assistant in the OSU Honey Bee Lab.