Keeping honeybees and Purple Martins? The answer is YES

[Brad-AL]

It seems as though every year I have read at least one post wanting to know if it's possible to keep honeybees and host Purple Martins at the same location. The answer is a resounding YES.

I've had 100 pairs or so of Martins for several years. We also host 15-20 pairs of Tree Swallows and our 3 barns have over 30 Barn Swallow nests each year.

I started keeping bees last year. I was never concerned that Martins would eat many bees. Their flight paths don't cross very often. I was concerned whether my bees could raise a new queen and that the queen could survive her mating flights to the drone congregation areas without being swallowed by a Swallow. With last year being my first year to keep bees, I never found out if queen bees could successfully be raised, mate and make it back to the hive to lay eggs. A hive being able to raise a new queen is an essential part of keeping bees. Sometimes if the queen is failing, she will be superceded by the bees, so they need to raise a new one. In the event that the bees swarm, which is the natural way that bees propagate, the hive must raise a new queen. If you "make" your own bees, you must be able to raise new queens to put into the split up hives, so new hives can be added. It would really not be plausible to keep bees if they couldn't raise a new queen for themselves.

This year I have had ample opportunities to find out for sure if the queen bees could make it. They can. I have made 7 splits to which I added capped queen cells. Also, three of my 4 honey production hives swarmed, so I lost the fertile queens in each of those hives. All 10 hives successfully raised queens that are now laying and doing very well. From what I have gathered an 85% queen success rate is considered good, so the 100% success that I have had, is great. It's small scale numbers, but this should still be considered a valid "test" as it's happened in real world conditions with 100 pairs of Martins in residence at the time the queens mated.

Within the next week or two I plan to try my hand at grafting larvae to make my own queen cells. I will be interested to see if the Martins now having many nestlings to feed puts a dent in the success of the queens returning from their mating flights. If I can remember to do so, I will update this post with those results.

It's been a good Martin year and a strange bee year. Even taking precautions to prevent swarming, I lost many swarms. I put out swarm traps around our farm and only caught one swarm which contained a virgin queen, not the prime breeder queen that was originally in that hive.

One interesting thing that I have read, is the notion that dragonflies may be one of the larger predators of queen bees when they are on their mating flights. If that is true, then hosting Martins along with honeybees should actually improve queen mating success and my be reflected in my findings.

My hives are not in the immediate vicinity of my gourd racks, but most of the hives are no more than a couple hundred feet away from them. The furthest hives are about 300 yards from my gourd racks. I don't know if my results would be the same trying to raise both on a city lot like many of you would have to do, but I don't see why it would be much different.

[Winger]

Please keep us posted....We are "country" Martin people. My son is an "in town" Houston area backyard bee keeper. Your study is wonderful! Hope to hear from your again!

Best regards,
Tammy Winger