Royal jelly production in Africanized colonies with selected queens, use of Chinese model cups and supplementation

Abstract

This research was carried out to evaluate the royal jelly production in two trials. In Trial I, three genotypes of Africanized honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) were submitted to royal jelly production with two types of cups of different size and volume (conventional and Chinese model) and two types of supplements (commercial and formulated). A total of 24 colonies were used, two bars with different cups each, alternating between the upper or lower position of the frame. While in Trial II, 18 colonies, two genotypes, two types of cups and two types of supplement were tested. The evaluated parameters were: percentage of larvae accepted in upper and lower bars, royal jelly per cup (mg), and royal jelly per colony/collection (g). Chinese cups were not well accepted, fact that influenced in a negative way the production of general form, selected colonies were more sensible to the change of cups. Colonies of Africanized honeybees are not prepared to produce in cups of greater volume.

Horizontal and vertical colonies for royal jelly production in Brazil

“…Apis mellifera bees housed in five-frame hives from November to May produced around 1.80 g/colony/ harvest and larval acceptances between 29 and 43% (Garcia and Couto, 2005;Toledo et al, 2010;Pereira et al, 2019). From June to December in the same region, production of 3.6 g/colony/harvest was reported with an average of 136.5 mg per cell cup and 39.5% cell acceptance using five-frame colonies (Santos et al, 2019), values that agree with the results obtained in this experiment.…”

“…Differences in yields can be attributed to the production method used, presence of the queen in the colony (Şahinler and Kaftanoğlu, 2005), number and type of cell cup used (Garcia et al, 2000;Pereira et al, 2019), age of grafted larvae (Büchler et al, 2013), supply of supplements (Muli et al, 2005), feed supply during the experimental period, season of the year, and environmental variables such as humidity and temperature (Garcia and Couto, 2005;Toledo et al, 2010;Büchler et al, 2013).…”