Bumblebee Color Variation Questions - Updated!

[bochr]

While your waiting for the eggs to hatch, you can enjoy this little shrimp. He/she is now 7-8 mm. long.


The red female I wrote about has been invisible for over a week, so I'm afraid that she is dead.

Today there's also a lot of activity in my Bumblebee tank. The males are svimming round and round. Hopefully there will be some egg-carrying females soon.

GB: I hope your eggs will hatch.

Regards
Bo

[GunmetalBlue]

Thanks Bo for the inspiration, I really needed it . Sorry for the loss of that "red" female though.

Hi everyone - the shrimplets finally hatched a week ago and boy was it a long ordeal! We had about 3 heat waves here in the interim and I really had to keep an eye on the temp.

The female with the 4 eggs lost her last remaining egg on about the 18th day. Here's a backlit pic of her showing 3 eggs on the 3rd day of her pregnancy.


The female with the 14 or so eggs managed to keep most of them to term. It took 27 days at temp between 75 - 78 degrees; average temp 77. It went up to 79 at most, but brought back under 78 with fan. Here's a backlit pic with her eggs on the 23rd day of her pregnancy.


When the BB's were first pregnant, the eggs were brown and opaque like little cocoa puff balls. The closer it got to hatching, they took on a more transparent, caramel coloring. You could see the darker and lighter parts.


Day of birth:




Day 1 and day 2 respectively; to the naked eye, they just look like a little sliver of flesh-colored material on the sand. Up close they look like cartoonish spoinks.


Day 3: I was really worried for the first 1 - 3 days. They just sat there like they were stunned at being born. Finally on about the 2nd - 3rd day, I could see them starting to do the picking thing. I then breathed a sigh of relief.


On Day 6: I'm more confident they'll make it, though they're still a royal pain to try and get a better pic, so what I have will have to do.


Here's a bit of perpective in terms of size. This is day 3 after birth and what really surprised me was that the mom still had one egg left! Most were hatched the first 12 - 24 hours, but one remained. I have no idea if that remaining egg hatched successfully or if it was just a dud.


This is the male I now have in the breeding tank with my 3 females (the other 2 males live in another tank). Just having one male *might reduce chance at pregnancy, but I'm going to give this a try for now.


I've seen a total of 6 shrimplets so far, though usually only 4 - 5 are visible at most, at a time. So these have been a low-yielding and difficult shrimp to work with for me, but love the challenge.

-GB

[Kenshin]

Bochr and GB, I am very glad to see that your bumblebee shrimplets are doing well. I wish that my would at least be carrying eggs or be pregnant. Instead, my bumblebee shrimps are dying slowly. So here is my question: What is the kH and GH requirement for bumblebee shrimps exactly? I housed them together with RCS and green shrimps and they both are doing wonderful (RCS giving me shrimplets and green shrimp carrying eggs, or developing nice dark green ovaries). I know that bumblebee shrimps do not like high temperature. I have heard mixed reports though of them living in very hard water (franksaquarium.com) or very soft water (imsky) as stated in this forum. Mustafa stated to me yesterday that green shrimps thrive in hard water. My kH is around 3 to 4. My GH is around 4 to 5. My pH is around 7.2. So if anyone has any information or Bochr or GB can help me out, I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

[Mustafa]

Those are some awesome pictures GB! Congrats! Your yield of bumblebee shrimp will be higher if your PH is in the acidic range (under 7). At higher PH levels many of the offspring die right after hatching (or maybe even before hatching). The same applies to bee shrimp and crystal reds. I'll have to update my information on the shrimp varieties pages regarding this.

@kenshin
so, here you go. You need very clean acidic water to be successful. Plus, you need a good stock of animals to start out with. If you received stressed out animals to begin with, then acidic water won't help either, they will die. As for Frank, he does not breed any shrimp but buys and resells imported shrimp, so his information about breeding requirements might be a little off. Maybe he just meant to say that he keeps them in hard water. Yes, you can keep these shrimp for a while in moderately hard water in the alkaline range of the ph scala, but they just won't breed or won't breed as prolifically at that range. Also, they won't do as well in the long run. This is similar to how you can keep neon tetras or other blackwater fish in alkaline water but you won't ever be able to breed most of them. I hope this clarifies it. As for the green shrimp. I have first hand information that the PH in their natural habitats is incredibly high (mid 8 to low 9). You do not need to replicate such high PH values, but if you keep the green shrimp in the mid to high 7 ph range they will do great and be quite productive.

As I said, I will update all the information on my shrimp varieties page with PH information soon.

[Kenshin]

Mustafa,

Thank you so much for your patience and information. I really appreciate this. I guess I will have to move all of my shrimps from my Nano cube to another tank and set that tank up to be acidic with lots of plants and CO2. Or I should wait until I have enough space (when I buy a new house in the near future) since I have a new baby coming. Or just give up bumblebee shrimps in general for now (or any shrimp related to bee, tiger, CRS, and Sri Lanka shrimp).

[GunmetalBlue]

Kenshin, I know where you're coming from, it's too bad all the different shrimp varieties can't live happily together without one or the other sacrificing a bit of their heritage/health. I was hoping your younger Bumblebees would be all right though - from a strictly pH point of view, you are much closer to what's preferred than I.

Gee, the Green shrimp sounds perfect for my kind of tap water pH! I haven't seen any locally though, at least not yet.

As always Mustafa, thanks for all your great info. I'm glad we're gettng closer to clarifying the various needs of keeping Bumblebees successfully. It's always sad for us when we lose shrimp because we are still poking around in the dark wondering what's wrong. The more info, the closer we get to reducing the negative part of the learning curve.

It'll be great to see additional Bumblebee info in the Varieties page. Just a suggestion is to also clarify the "starting with the dark stripe" thing, since there is an exception? It might help eliminate some confusion.

-GB

[Mustafa]

As always Mustafa, thanks for all your great info. I'm glad we're gettng closer to clarifying the various needs of keeping Bumblebees successfully. It's always sad for us when we lose shrimp because we are still poking around in the dark wondering what's wrong. The more info, the closer we get to reducing the negative part of the learning curve.

It'll be great to see additional Bumblebee info in the Varieties page. Just a suggestion is to also clarify the "starting with the dark stripe" thing, since there is an exception? It might help eliminate some confusion.

-GB

You're welcome GB. You're right, I have to update that information about the "dark head/stripe." There is so much information to update still but little time. It's not all that easy to be your own webmaster, forum administrator, accountant, scientific advisor, photographer, article writer, breeder, packager, shipper etc. all in one. But I am trying my best to keep things updated.

The main reason I have not updated the bumblebee page is because I want to put up a separate species description for the bumbebees with the white heads. I just have not been able to shoot any acceptable pictures yet. I am not certain at this point if they are just a different color variety or a closely related species/subspecies, but either way it's better to put a separate description and encourage people to keep both variations apart to prevent interbreeding.

[bochr]

GB: Very nice pictures
Congrats on the shrimplets.

Kenshin: I don't know what the ideal setup for breeding bumblebees is. I'm still hoping mine will breed again . I've had 2 bumblebee females carrying eggs. The first dropped all the eggs. The second dropped all except 2 eggs. That resulted in 1 surviving shrimplet.

My water parameters are:
GH: 14
KH: 8
PH: 6,8
NO2: <0,3
Temperature 21-26°C
The tank is 8 gallons and contains fine gravel, wood (root), Javamoss, Javaferns, Pellia, peat and some withered Oak- and European beech-leaves. I change 1/4 water every 8-9 days.
Airdriven filter with peat and gravel.
Light 12 hours daily.

[bochr]

Finally they decided to breed again



Water parameters:
GH: 12°dH
KH: 8°dH
PH: 6,8
NO2: < 0,3 mg/l
Temperature 21-26°C

I'll keep you updated

[Mustafa]

Congrats! Just wondering, how do you keep PH at 6.8 with a KH of 8? With that KH your PH should be way over 7 in my experience.

[bochr]

When i change water in the tank i use half RO water and half tap water filtrated over peat for 24 hours.
The tank contains oakleaves, peat and wood.

Or maybe the testkits is not precise.
KH, GH and NO2 is measured with Tetra droptests.
PH is measured with a noname strip.

[Mustafa]

Hmm...maybe the peat, oak leaves and wood are affecting the ph but that affect must be HUGE at a KH of 8. You might want to buy a drop test for PH too, since those strips tend to be very inaccurate.

[bochr]

I'll do that and post the result here.

[GunmetalBlue]

It's not all that easy to be your own webmaster, forum administrator, accountant, scientific advisor, photographer, article writer, breeder, packager, shipper etc. all in one. But I am trying my best to keep things updated.

Hats - where to put them all - sounds like you need an ultra-huge hat rack, Mustafa! I noticed the useful updates though.

Bo - woohoo, congrats! I've got some good news too - I too have a pregnant female; she should give birth in about 1.5 weeks. What's really got me smiling is that the one male I was hoping would do the job got it done.

Mustafa, I'm beginnning to seriously think the aforementioned male is a selectively bred cull (as mentioned by Ed) that got thrown in with a shipment of wild caughts. He is the only one that consistently shows the opaque stripes (more yellow than white, which happens to work for me and my preferences) and looks so much brighter than my other adult Bumblebees.

A quick update on the last batch - I only see 4X shrimplets now Hopefully they will make it to adulthood.

Bumblebee shrimplets at 2 weeks old - not a very clear pic but for once, got more than one shrimplet in the shot - usually they move around too much:


Bumblebee at 6 weeks old:


Got some peat granules in hopes my shrimp will do better. Haven't implemented it just yet - was wondering what approach to take - start out slow with a very small scoop in a media bag in the filter or as peat-treated change water? Any pros or cons one way or the other? I'm fanatic about trying to keep things stable and change things only slowly. The challenge is that either way, the water changes will present some differences from the tank - but since I only change 10 - 15%, I'm thinking it shouldn't be too extreme?

I use the same method as Bo in terms of diluting tap water, except using 10% distilled to my change water (I don't have access to RO). My tap comes out at 8.0 pH; the BB tank seems to be around the 7.4 - 7.6 mark nowadays. I'm afraid to increase the distilled water percentage because I don't want my KH to go too low. I know very little about water chemistry but know too low makes water lose its buffering capacity - or am I still not understanding what I'm doing? Is that only pertinent with a lower pH? Do I have more room for leverage ie., can I increase the pure water percentage somewhat?

Currently:
7.4 - 7.6 pH <<<Test done with both strips and drops. As per Mustafa, I don't recommend pH being so high; rather, it's what I got to work with, my tap being so high.

75ppm GH <<<Test done with strips.

80ppm KH <<<Test done with strips.

Mustafa, how are the egg production on yours? Is your colony getting off the ground more smoothly since implementing more of what we know about Bumblebees? For myself, it's been understandably slow going; this round, I only see about 9 - 10 eggs on mine.

-GB

[bochr]

She has dropped all the eggs
Then the waiting starts again.