Onset of oviposition by honey bee queens, mated either naturally or by various instrumental insemination methods, fits a lognormal distribution

It is commonly believed that instrumentally inseminated honey bee queens initiate oviposition much later than naturally mated queens. A large scale investigation was therefore conducted on 1675 queens. Naturally mated queens initiated oviposition 2 to 23 (mean 6.8) days after the start of mating flights and the mode occurred 2.8 days earlier. Queens inseminated instrumentally with 8mm(3) of semen initiated oviposition 3 to 21 (mean 9.1) days after insemination and the mode occurred 3.1 days earlier. Thus, the mean and the mode of the onset of oviposition occurred only 2.3 or 2 days later in instrumentally inseminated queens than in naturally mated queens. Different treatments of instrumentally inseminated queens accelerated or delayed the onset of oviposition by only one day in relation to instrumentally inseminated queens not additionally treated. The distribution of the onset of oviposition was skewed positively in both naturally mated queens and instrumentally inseminated queens and fitted a lognormal distribution. W therefore recommend presentation of the mode value in all future papers concerning the onset of oviposition by both naturally mated queens and instrumentally inseminated queens.