Premium Queen Breeding
Country of origin: Romania
Contact person: Tófalvi Melinda
E-mail: opzme@yahoo.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilyes.szasz
“Power of the earth,
The warmth of the sun
The healing power of flowers,
Matured in hive music,
There in the golden honey.”
Örösi Pál Zoltán
Melinda Tófalvi read the first book on beekeeping in 1987, before applying to university, which sparked her interest in mother/queen rearing. Although beekeepers were aware of the importance of mother rearing, controlled mother rearing was not yet widespread.
Melinda started large-scale queen rearing in 2003, but she had been rearing her own queens before then. Theliterature available at the time was very scarce on queen rearing, so she had to experiment. She was interested in the idea behind the implementation, what the right workflow was, what useful advice could be given to beekeepers.
So the bigger challenge was not the financial investment, but the specificity of the tools needed and the particular work involved in the particularities of rearing a queen bee. Obtaining the necessary information was almost impossible. Zoltán Faluba’s book, Raising the Bee Mother, was like a recipe book, with her in the bee’s womb at all times. She re-read it many times, as she had no one to turn to for advice. Slowly, she figured out how things worked, and it was a great experience to find out the small steps. Zoltán Örösi Pál: Beekeeping book was also a great help.
At that time, women didn’t do much beekeeping. She was alone among the many beekeepers. Beekeeping is a man’s job, because it takes a lot of carrying.
Now she is happy to say that her son, Mátyás Szász, took over queen rearing 3 years ago. The boy has grown up in the bee from a very young age, he doesn’t do it by heart, it’s in his blood. As soon as he takes hold of the frame, it’s obvious he’s doing it well.
Melinda calls her work controlled mother rearing (she doesn’t like the term artificial mother rearing). Her fellow beekeepers were very happy with her work as there was a great demand for controlled mothers but unfortunately she couldn’t always meet the demand and so disappointed her fellow beekeepers.
Mother rearing takes 1 month from ovum to ovum. It is only possible to work effectively in harmony with nature. When it is the natural season, it is possible to rear the mother.. Spring, early summer, summer, is the time for rearing the mother. The lack of natural nectar sources (drought, cattle and sheep grazing around the bees, mowing at the same time) make it increasingly difficult or impossible to raise the queen bee. The mother needs plenty of good quality food, warmth and adequate moisture.
Her lifelong dream came true when she managed to set up a mating station. She even managed to apply for a fertilisation microscope. There are 5 breeding stations in Romania. One of them, one of the approved breeding stations, is theirs.
The elite and productive mothers they breed are well marketed. But all this work has been passed on to his son. It takes a very good eye for camouflage and a lot of stamina to keep bees.
In today’s world, plants are no longer bred by the methods they used to be. Nowadays, only the genes and chromosomes are cut and trimmed in laboratories and then transplanted into the new plant. Breeding animals is still done in a more traditional way. It assumes that we know the father and mother…the ancestors of the animal in question, and we select. All our pets are bred, and mating is controlled. The mother bee, on the other hand, to this day, chooses a mate/pairs for herself according to the laws of natural selection. At a height of 15 m in the air, she can be inseminated by the testicle that catches up with her. Human intervention is very rare, special and only under special circumstances. Shaping the genetic patterns of bees is not easy. Bees are independent and yet Service-to-man creatures. Their education can only be handled with due humility.
