- Joined
- Jan 13, 2015
- Messages
- 7,639
- Reaction score
- 669
- Location
- Bedfordshire, England
- Hive Type
- Langstroth
- Number of Hives
- Quite a few
I wrote this for my local association but I'm reposting it here so that others might understand how/why breeders do what they do.
Most people have come across a "family tree" with the maternal and paternal partners along with any progeny being shown.
The honeybee "ancestry" chart is a little different because the queen can have multiple partners and each of those (drones) has no father and all of his genetic material is received from his mother (a queen).
So, in breeding, we are concerned with the genes that may be inherited from queens and passed, via the drone, to the spermatheca of other queens. Consequently, we focus on the queen. This can be a little confusing, especially if you've put so much time and effort into learning the mating process and behaviour of different castes in the colony.
As explained above, we are only concerned with the heritable traits that a queen passes to her progeny and how they may be improved, generation after generation. To do this we have to limit the scope of mating partners a queen might have in a particular generation to drones produced by a single queen. So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen. This is all breeding does: it amplifies characteristics that might otherwise be diluted/confused if the queen mated with drones from lots of different queens. If we like what we see, we propagate it further in the next generation. If we don't, we choose another queen that meets our criteria more closely to propagate. In other words, we are selecting what genes go forward to the next generation.
We can keep track of this using an ancestry chart similar to the one below. For each queen, we record the queens unique reference that links to our stock-book (which contains information on her colonies performance), the breeder, the queens location and any information related to the queens racial features (In Germany, they have a whole licensing process dedicated to ensuring you focus on the best queens within a sub-species but I can go into that more another time). We also need to record where/how the mating/insemination took place.
Now, since we are only looking at queens, we need to know what purpose the queen served in each generation. This is given by either a letter "a" (dam/mother) or "b" (sire/father) as a suffix and a number that denotes the position in the hierarchy as a prefix. However, in most cases, we will only be interested in the 1a, 2a or 4a queens. 1a is the queen we are studying at the moment. 2a is her maternal ancestor(dam) and 4a is her paternal grandmother. The 4a queen can stand a little more explanation as the mother of the drones is really the 1b queen. However, to perform selective breeding on a larger scale, it is necessary to produce more drones than a single colony would normally produce - and to do this in an isolated mating station so that other drones are excluded. Since the 4a queen herself was control-mated, all of her daughter queens carry the desired DNA and these may be used to produce many more colonies that multiply the drone population significantly. They are not clones, in the same way that all of the sperm produced by a single drone are, but the average effect is the same as if the queen mated with multiple drones from the same queen (i.e. the 4a queen is the common ancestor).
Most people have come across a "family tree" with the maternal and paternal partners along with any progeny being shown.
The honeybee "ancestry" chart is a little different because the queen can have multiple partners and each of those (drones) has no father and all of his genetic material is received from his mother (a queen).
So, in breeding, we are concerned with the genes that may be inherited from queens and passed, via the drone, to the spermatheca of other queens. Consequently, we focus on the queen. This can be a little confusing, especially if you've put so much time and effort into learning the mating process and behaviour of different castes in the colony.
As explained above, we are only concerned with the heritable traits that a queen passes to her progeny and how they may be improved, generation after generation. To do this we have to limit the scope of mating partners a queen might have in a particular generation to drones produced by a single queen. So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen. This is all breeding does: it amplifies characteristics that might otherwise be diluted/confused if the queen mated with drones from lots of different queens. If we like what we see, we propagate it further in the next generation. If we don't, we choose another queen that meets our criteria more closely to propagate. In other words, we are selecting what genes go forward to the next generation.
We can keep track of this using an ancestry chart similar to the one below. For each queen, we record the queens unique reference that links to our stock-book (which contains information on her colonies performance), the breeder, the queens location and any information related to the queens racial features (In Germany, they have a whole licensing process dedicated to ensuring you focus on the best queens within a sub-species but I can go into that more another time). We also need to record where/how the mating/insemination took place.
Now, since we are only looking at queens, we need to know what purpose the queen served in each generation. This is given by either a letter "a" (dam/mother) or "b" (sire/father) as a suffix and a number that denotes the position in the hierarchy as a prefix. However, in most cases, we will only be interested in the 1a, 2a or 4a queens. 1a is the queen we are studying at the moment. 2a is her maternal ancestor(dam) and 4a is her paternal grandmother. The 4a queen can stand a little more explanation as the mother of the drones is really the 1b queen. However, to perform selective breeding on a larger scale, it is necessary to produce more drones than a single colony would normally produce - and to do this in an isolated mating station so that other drones are excluded. Since the 4a queen herself was control-mated, all of her daughter queens carry the desired DNA and these may be used to produce many more colonies that multiply the drone population significantly. They are not clones, in the same way that all of the sperm produced by a single drone are, but the average effect is the same as if the queen mated with multiple drones from the same queen (i.e. the 4a queen is the common ancestor).
