Abstract

Abstract Scientists who use honey bees for their experiments sometimes need to obtain known ages of honey bees, mature or immature, for use in their research. We updated a technique commonly-used to obtain known-age brood cohorts (worker or drone) using a frame cage made of queen excluder. We repeatedly confined the queen bee overnight using 4-day intervals to obtain easily-distinguishable brood cohorts on the same brood frame. This helped us to efficiently organize our time and saved brood, equipment and sampling time in the laboratory. It was also less disruptive than placing several cages into the broodnest. We found it imperative to begin feeding colonies 1 week prior to caging the queen, and to maintain the supplemental food throughout the brood sampling. Larger colonies contained in 2 deep Langstroth hive bodies were less hindered by the frame cage and were able to more consistently produce and support large brood cohorts to maturity. But mid-sized colonies with 8 to 10 deep frames of bees produced approximately 50% more eggs than either larger or smaller colonies. This technique was easy to use, and could be used in many kinds of operations or for many aspects of bee research or breeding.