News from New Zealand

Dear all

An update on how the queens are doing. Well we have now unfortunately lost half of the queens collected which we did expect would happen. But we do have some good news, most of the remaining queens have now laid eggs, some eggs have died and have been kicked out of the nest but they seem to keep laying to replace the dead ones. In fact Rosemary has even seen 3 queens lay eggs! Some of the nests have larvae which is a good sign and we hope the other's will go the same way. Its taking a bit longer than expected for the eggs to turn into larvae. So we have put some queens into red clover poly tunnels to see if this would move them on, but the weather hasn't been to good here in Christchurch so they haven't developed that fast.

So our next plan is to collect some B. ruderatus colonies from the traps we sent out a couple of months ago. Unfortunately we didn't get any subt in them but we did get a lot of ruderatus. Therefore we can collect these traps and bring them up to Christchurch. From there we can harvest some of the brood and workers to help the subt queens.

So it's a hard task but its the first year and we are pleased with how many have survived to date, and with the egg laying, let's just hope some of them go all the way to laying some males and queens

All the best Nikki