The History of the Award

Dr Crane OBE, founder of the International Bee Research Association, creator and first editor of Journal of Apicultural Research, died in September 2007. To celebrate her life and to mark her huge contribution to apicultural science over more than half a century Eva Crane Memorial Prize has been created. This will be awarded to the best, most innovative and scientifically exciting, article published in the journal each year as judged by the current international panel of Editors.

Announcing the Winner of the 2009 Award

The editors of the Journal of Apicultural Research are pleased to announce that the winning paper for the 2009 Eva Crane Award is the original research article:

Sustainable multiple queen colonies of thoney bees, Apis mellifera ligustica

By Huo-Qing Zheng¹, Shui-Hua Jin², Fu-Ling Hu¹ and Christian W W Pirk³

1.  College of Animal Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310029, China.
2.  Pinghu Breeding Apiary, Zhejiang 314200, China. 
3.  Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa.

IBRA has allocated Open Access to this paper which was published in Vol. 48 (4), 2009. 
Click here to view full text
DOI: 10.3896/IBRA.1.48.4.09

Abstract: 
Honey bee multiple queen colonies composed of several mated queens able to move around freely were produced by modulating biological factors that evoke fighting and queen elimination within the colony, mainly by ablating mandibles of queens to avoid inter-queen rivalry. Following this method, 128 colonies in eighteen apiaries were set up with multiple queens, all of which were mated and 6-12 months old. One hundred of the colonies (78.1%) retained all introduced queens. In total, 658 out of 733 queens (89.8%) were accepted after their introduction. The majority of these colonies experienced no queen loss for two months and most were still stable after six months. Of 80 colonies, 55 (68.8%) experienced no queen loss over the winter. These results show that our method is viable to produce sustainable multiple queen honey bee colonies for commercial use. In addition this technique will help to increase our understanding of basic questions of the evolution of sociality, such as division of reproduction and the evolution of polygyny. 

Further information about the authors and their project coming soon.

Previous winners
For further information and access to the winning paper of 2008, please click here