Queen Rearing Activity and Virgin Queen’s Weight for Enhancing the Beekeeping Performance among the Carniolan, Buckfast, Italian and Cordovan Bees

Beekeepers around the world try their best to find the convenient geographical and economical races for pollinating and highly amount of honeybee products. However, from all known geographical races, Carniolan and Italian and other developed genotypes such as Buckfast and Cordovan bees are widely use by beekeepers in the most of countries. Nicot Cupkit apparatus system for queen rearing used in this study to compare and evaluate the Carniolan, Italian, Buckfast, and Cordovan bees’ activity in the queen cells acceptance. In general, Cordovan genotype recorded the highest level of the percentage of queen cells acceptance followed by Buckfast, Italian, and Carniolan bees under the Egyptian environmental conditions. The highest queen cells acceptance percentage in general was in April, May, and July for all examined races and genotypes. In addition to, Buckfast bees recorded the highest rate of virgin queens’ weight followed by Carniolan bees, whereas Cordovan bees recorded regular rate of the virgin queens’ weight with no significant differences between the different study months. Furthermore, Carniolan and Buckfast bees had the best rate in virgin queens’ weight during the period from February to July with preference of virgin queens emerged in May and June. This study provides a firm basis for future research to better understand the biological and genetic differences between the examined honeybee races and genotypes and their roles in adaptation to the environmental conditions in Egyptian apiaries of bee breeding in Egypt.