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The National Centre for Research and Development

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Assessing the quality of bees based on wing asymmetry and size

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square with tentacles  Project title

Assessing the quality of bees based on wing asymmetry and size

outline of the upper man silhouette  Name of Beneficiary/Beneficiaries

University of Agriculture in Krakow

briefcase icon  Name of programme

Domestic programmes

newspaper icon  Competition

TANGO-V A

two heaps of coins icon  Project value

PLN 248,380.00

hand icon with two circles above it  Funding value

PLN 248,380.00

clock icon  Project delivery period

from 1 May 2022 to 30 November 2023

What problem does our project solve?

In the course of the research project, bee queens were reared from one-day-old, two-day-old and three-day-old larvae. In these queens, the right and left wings were measured and body weight measurements were taken. The weight of the bee queens was found to correlate statistically significantly with wing size and shape. The relationships between these variables were described with mathematical equations, allowing the body weight of bee queens to be predicted from measurements of their wings. Such measurements make it possible to assess the quality of a bee queen regardless of its age. Bee queens raised from larvae of different ages, and therefore differing in quality, differed more in wing size than in body weight.

In addition, more than two thousand queen bees were collected from beekeepers, allowing wing size distribution to be accurately described. With this distribution, it is possible to assess the quality of a bee queen. The further to the right in the distribution the examined bee queen is, the better its quality. On this basis, wing size limits were proposed for low, medium and high-quality queens. If only a wing is available for examination and it is not known whether it is from a bee queen, there is a risk of misjudging a worker or drone as a high-quality queen. To avoid such an error, a method has been developed to verify without error whether a wing is from a bee queen, based on the shape of its wing.

Who will benefit from the project's results?

The information collected during the project allows beekeepers to assess the quality of queen bees by measuring their wings. The size and shape of the wing, unlike body weight, do not change throughout the life of the bee queen. Therefore, the assessment of a bee queen does not have to be limited to a short period after the queen is hatched and can be verified throughout its life.