BeeBreed News announced 15/02/2017

[B+.]

As a consequence of three significant papers either published, or in preparation, there have been some retrospective changes made to relationships and breeding value estimates.
The following announcement appeared today on the www.beebreed.eu:-

The new breeding value estimation is completed. The breeding values are now available in BeeBreed..

"In this season, extensive improvements in the method of breeding value estimation have been realized. Coancestry and inbreeding, an important basis, are estimated with an improved approach [1] and a new implementation for large datasets [2]. The accurate recording of mating stations allowed the use of additional information as e.g. the number of drone colonies. The inbreeding is generally higher than estimated earlier, and the influence of relatives for the breeding values increases. Also the addition and correction of historical data lead to more accurate inbreeding estimation, more precise breeding values. The calculation of the reliability strongly depends on the relationships and will be considerably higher than previously reported.

The genetic parameters have been newly estimated [3]. Mainly the increased share of colonies measured for Varroa tolerance have a big impact. Because of all these modifications, the breeding values will be more or less different from the preceding years.

In the breeding planning in BeeBreed, the proposed inbreeding values will be precomputed and not calculated online. They will be immediately available but will be restricted to the more recent bee generation. The function will be fully available in some days.



1. Evert W Brascamp, Piter Bijma. Methods to estimate breeding values in honey bees. Genetics Selection Evolution 20 (2014) 1446:53.
2. Richard Bernstein, Manuel Plate, Andreas Hoppe, Kaspar Bienefeld. Efficient implementetion of the numerator relationship matrix for the honeybee. In preparation.
3. Andreas Hoppe, Klaus Ehrhardt, Richard Bernstein, Manuel Plate, Kaspar Bienefeld: Genetic parameters for honey bee breeding. In preparation."


The figures for the Netherland line (which I will be testing during 2017 along with other members of the BeeBreed Nederland Working Group) is
2a Queen http://beebreed.nl/NL-55-3-44-2014.jpg
4a Queen http://beebreed.nl/NL-18-26-7268-2013.jpg
10 daughters of the 4a queen were selected to provide the drones on Vlieland

These will change though

 

[For want of a better word]

Just wondering if this has any relevance for UK beekeepers, who seem to have traditionally bred from their best?

Yeghes da

 

[B+.]

Just wondering if this has any relevance for UK beekeepers, who seem to have traditionally bred from their best?

Yeghes da

I think so. These papers are bleeding edge population genetics papers being implemented in a timely manner in, possibly, the largest queen breeding project in the world.
I get very frustrated when I see the UK falling behind the rest of the world. I can't be the only person who is proud to be British and passionately believe we should be playing our part.

 

[Fusion_power]

They are still deficient in using statistical treatment for inbreeding. The only way this can be completely taken off the table is by mapping the sex alleles present in each breeding queen. Would you care to speculate on how many years it will take for them to do this?

 

[For want of a better word]

I think so. These papers are bleeding edge population genetics papers being implemented in a timely manner in, possibly, the largest queen breeding project in the world.
I get very frustrated when I see the UK falling behind the rest of the world. I can't be the only person who is proud to be British and passionately believe we should be playing our part.

I see that the BBKA are instigating a module / exam for beebreeders in the UK... they seem to need some input!

Nos da

 

[Icing Sugar]

Just wondering if this has any relevance for UK beekeepers, who seem to have traditionally bred from their best?

I think so. These papers are bleeding edge population genetics papers being implemented in a timely manner in, possibly, the largest queen breeding project in the world.
I get very frustrated when I see the UK falling behind the rest of the world. I can't be the only person who is proud to be British and passionately believe we should be playing our part.

They are still deficient in using statistical treatment for inbreeding. The only way this can be completely taken off the table is by mapping the sex alleles present in each breeding queen. Would you care to speculate on how many years it will take for them to do this?

Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that this conversation is fundamentally at cross-purposes:

B+ is talking about bee breeding.
I understand this to involve various specialist instrumental insemination techniques using carefully chosen queens and carefully chosen drones, one example of which is the self-fertilisation of queen bees with semen from their own drones! Another is the insemination of several virgin queens from the same mother with the same mixture of semen derived from multiple carefully-selected drones. In the latter case, bee breeders can go to great lengths to culture drones from several preferred colonies under optimal conditions in ways that prevent drones from any other sources drifting in and they might instrumentally inseminate a batch of 200 such virgin queens with the intention of culling 190 of them and keeping the best-performing 10 (based upon whatever parameter they decide reflects “best performing”). These highly specialist processes typically involve considerable inbreeding over multiple cycles and the number of CSDs in the ensuing strains very rapidly falls to two. The perceived advantage of these techniques is that they “fix” the genes responsible for specific desired traits in the genome of future generations of that strain. In other words, they make the bees homozygous for certain genes so that all future within-strain matings will always breed true for these traits. (This might be considered particularly valuable in the context of desirable traits that are expressed on recessive genes). Unfortunately, as strains of bees are progressively bred in the pursuit of individual traits, they typically become a great deal weaker as all-rounders and this significantly compromises colony performance and increases susceptibility to disease. Furthermore, having only two CSD genes in the strain, there is 50% shot brood pattern, very poor colony build-up and considerable wastage of energy on brood that fails to develop beyond the earliest stages. However, there is a solution to all of this: beekeepers actually want bees that are strong in several traits all at the same time. Therefore, having developed a number of inbred strains that are predictably strong for one trait but weak as all-rounders, four of these strains are carefully cross-bred over two generations. At this stage, the entire progeny of these cross-breedings will be predictably strong in all of four traits if each trait is dictated by dominant genes. Performance will be further boosted by the phenomenon of heterosis. This is the generation of queen bees that will be mass produced and widely offered for sale. However, none of the queens are likely to be homozygous for all the genes responsible for the desirable traits anymore. In fact, they are highly likely to be heterozygous at all these genes by virtue of the crossings. (They are also likely to have no more than 8 CSD genes in the whole generation). Therefore it is utterly inevitable that the chance of any of this generation of queens breeding true for all four traits is negligible. The law of averages might suggest that queens in the next generation are likely to inherit just two of the four strong traits from their mother... if they are controlled by single genes which they generally aren't (although some of them might get mated by drones that have genes for some of the other strong traits, thereby ensuring that some of the workers in the colony will express the desired qualities). Nonetheless, there will be progressive erosion of the original performance with each subsequent generation. The person who buys such initially high-performing queen bees (and they can be spectacularly high-performing to start with… 150kg per colony per year perhaps – does that ring any bells???) will find that performance drops off over subsequent generations and they will need to re-queen their entire apiary quite regularly to avoid angry colonies with disappointing yields when the original queens are naturally replaced over time. Such beekeepers are likely to become dependent upon queen bee breeders and that is expensive. The breeders themselves will need to record each reproductive round in detail and concern themselves with factors such as breeding values.

Icanhopit is talking about queen rearing
I understand this to involve the production of the next generation of queen bees from the most desirable colonies in the apiary or in the local group of like-minded beekeepers. Again, “desirable” is defined by the person rearing the queens. Some look at morphometric characteristics in an attempt to recreate a subspecies that many people consider lost (namely Apis mellifera mellifera) whereas others might look at disease resistance or average annual honey yields. (Within a few miles of me is one of those mythical beekeepers who has used queen rearing to develop a strain of honey bees that are never treated for varroa but still bring in a sizeable annual cut comb honey yield – he has about 50 such colonies which I have seen for myself. He suffered near-collapse of his enterprise for a few years but the survivors bounced back and these are responsible for the bees he has now). Queen rearing relies on open mating with available drones in the area. For those who consider local-suitedness to be the most important trait in their bees, the drones that prove most successful at mating in the drone congregation areas on their doorstep are the very drones that they want to use! Queen rearers who are trying to recreate Apis mellifera mellifera might adopt a number of tricks such as going to relatively isolated mating stations where attempts are made to flood the area with their preferred drones. Furthermore they might try rearing their queens at the very start or very finish of the queen rearing season when temperatures are less suited to other strains of bee. Lastly they might only release their queens for mating flights in the early evening when it is believed that the relative numbers of AMM-like drones will be higher at the drone congregation areas. With queen rearing there is negligible (if any) inbreeding and there should be a wide representation of CSD genes within each generation. Yields from such colonies are unlikely to ever be prodigious but they should be good and they should be consistent year on year. Furthermore, over time the performance of reared queens can steadily improve with successive generations and the queen rearer has no need to buy queens or concern themselves with breeding values. These bees will be characterised by much wider genetic diversity which is increasingly understood to be very important for the sharing of specific tasks within the colony, heightened sensitivity to the need to perform those same tasks and improved general disease resistance, to name just a few things.



Please correct my descriptions above as you see fit because I would love to have a clearer understanding of the differences. Come what may, I am of the distinct impression that bee breeders and queen rearers follow completely different, incompatible and irreconcilable schools of thought. For very many reasons, I plant my flag firmly in the school of queen rearing.

 

[B+.]

Please correct me if I am wrong but it seems to me that this conversation is fundamentally at cross-purposes:

B+ is talking about bee breeding.

Icanhopit is talking about queen rearing

I am talking about breeding but not in the way that you describe it. Techniques such as "selfing" are not really appropriate to the honeybee for the very reason you describe. It is destructive in a short space of time and I am not aware of anyone actually doing this. In fact, it would be discouraged and other breeders would not want to use the product in their own lines. There is, therefore, no motivation to do it.
The vast majority of selective breeding uses island mating sites rather than instrumental insemination, although this is a valuable technique which is applied on a much smaller scale. The simple reason for this is that it is much easier to produce a line of sister queens which are all mated to drones from the same grandmother (4a) queen than incur the time and cost of instrumental insemination. These queens are then distribute to members of the working group for evaluation in different geographic locations.
There is nothing sinister about the processes we use and each regional coordinator reports on the activities of his group on a regular basis. This oversight is an important assurance that things are done correctly.
I must correct one thing that you said which I believe is wrong. The 150Kg yields that Finman achieves are the product of certain "tricks" (i.e. combining brood from a number of colonies to achieve a large foraging force in anticipation of a nectar flow). I was quite shocked when I first learned that he was misleading the forum in this way. The yield of a colony must be the amount it produces from its own means - not through the addition of brood from other colonies. That would be an unfair comparison and open to abuse. In any case, it is unnecessary since I have achieved quite satisfactory yields (just over 130Kg from my highest producing colonies in each of the last two years I have been on this forum).
Returning to your description, it is obvious that there will be a loss of benefit from using selected stock over the generations. There is no such thing as a "free-lunch" (as the saying goes). However, if you raise queens from selected stock, you can benefit economically from superior bees while improving the chances of virgin queens in your area mating with drones produced by these queens. This benefits other beekeepers too (e.g. reducing the inbreeding of a stagnant local population).
Of course, there are advantages to selectively breeding in different areas as weather patterns can vary quite considerably even in an island such as ours, and I would encourage people to do that. Few people assess the performance of their queen rearing though. This leads to anecdotes about how "good" their bees are. It may be true but, without some objective measure, it is simply an amusing anecdote. It is not bee breeding.

 

[Finman]

The 150Kg yields that Finman achieves are the product of certain "tricks" (i.e. combining brood from a number of colonies to achieve a large foraging force in anticipation of a nectar flow).

I was quite shocked when I first learned that he was misleading the forum in this way. The yield of a colony must be the amount it produces from its own means - not through the addition of brood from other colonies.

That would be an unfair comparison and open to abuse. In any case, it is unnecessary since I have achieved quite satisfactory yields (just over 130Kg from my highest producing colonies in each of the last two years I have been on this form).

.

Hi B+. You call my beekeeping skills "tricks"? My tricks are knowledge and experience and ability to hunt facts.

I can tell to you, that you do not understand much about honey production.


Biggest reason to good yields is evalualtion of pastures. Then second step is carry the hives to those pastures.

I have understood that you do not move your hives to anywhere even if you do not have flow around you hives.


I got 50 years go average yields 40 kg/hive when I joined mongrel swarms to 4 kg colonies. Was that correct ?

And you know what! Joined colonies do not bring 150 kg/hive. They must be best hives and with best queens.

You know why? Because 1,5 month before yield they must have 2 boxes brood. And those brood rippen to foragers 6 weeks later. And to get that much brood early, they must be big hives in autumn.

I join weak hives before main yield that they have capacity to store nectar in a flow. Exactly same what I did with swarms 1967. I bought tens of swarms.

It is a mistake to believe that you get honey just when you pile bee boxes together. Half summer is gone and half yield is gone.

You can get with same hives 50 kg or 150 kg honey. But why should I take 50 kg/hive if I got that allready 50 years ago.

I have 150 kg hives every year. Not only once in 10 years.

I buy my mother queens from professional breeders and I use hybrids in production.
.
.

 

[Finman]

.
One question more B+ ?

Do you know why I use 3 langstroth boxes for brood?

.

 

[Icing Sugar]

I am talking about breeding but not in the way that you describe it. Techniques such as "selfing" are not really appropriate to the honeybee for the very reason you describe. It is destructive in a short space of time and I am not aware of anyone actually doing this. In fact, it would be discouraged and other breeders would not want to use the product in their own lines. There is, therefore, no motivation to do it.

Dear B+,

Thank you very much for taking the time to reply so clearly, and thank you for doing so with such courtesy to what, from your perspective, might have looked like a highly inflammatory post from me.

I understand that the description I provided of bee breeding is quite a faithful account of the basic process behind the production of the "Starline" hybrid which I don't think is produced anymore. It reassures me to discover that the techniques I described are largely frowned upon now (... or only used sparingly?).

I get the impression from your description that the bee breeders of whom you are a part have drifted into something of a "middle ground" that relies much more heavily upon the widespread sharing of promising progeny and natural mating in areas that are protected from unwanted drones (but, reading between the lines, a certain amount of instrumental insemination must still go on in the early stages of individual strain creation). This softer approach must make it a harder (or a considerably longer or more wasteful process) to "fix" desired genes in a strain but I assume that the benefits of playing a longer game in strain development are definitely worth it in terms of increased diversity in the rest of the genome and the preservation of more CSD genes. In a way, it seems to me that the approach you describe tries to harness some of the benefits that are available in the queen rearing approach.

By the time queens from these promising strains reach you in Bedfordshire, how do you proceed? Do you instrumentally inseminate carefully-chosen crosses; do you use protected mating areas (and how do you achieve this in land-locked Bedfordshire); or do you simply allow them to open mate?

The fact that "it is obvious that there will be a loss of benefit from using selected stock over the generations" probably gets right to the heart of the philosophical difference between breeders and rearers. This simple starting point can take each group down a number of different lines of divergent argument.

I would very much like to read more about state-of-the-art honey bee breeding techniques so that I can understand how things have changed in recent years. Please could you recommend a suitable "primer" that might help me? Next on my reading list is likely to be "Masterminding Nature: The Breeding of Animals, 1750-2010" by Margaret Derry, although I appreciate that the haplodiploid genetics and polyandrous behaviour of queen bees mean that one has to be very careful when translating lessons learnt in mammalian breeding to honey bees. A suggestion from you might provide a useful counterbalance.

I will inevitably go silent for a few days because I am just about to go on holiday so please don't be surprised when I don't respond in a particularly timely way to anything you post in the next week.

Best wishes.

 

[Martin Bee]

This whole discussion takes me back to my early career in 1970 when I was working on a breeding program for maize and sweetcorn. These are essentially out breeders, wind pollinated, but we were able to self pollinate by bagging individual developing cobs. We were working from 500 inbred lines collected from around the world with the aim of producing double cross hybrids ie. from four inbred parents. Character selection for 13 traits given a number value 1-10. Our chief used his 50 years experience and a slide rule for 5 months every winter 8am. to 6pm. to asses the experimental results and plan the next year trials (1500 per year). The program then was to bulk up successful hybrids for commercial trials and sales. This involved doing isolation plots of 2-4 acres where the pollinator line was sown every third row and the rest had to be de-tassled every morning by hand. The final commercial hybrid cross was done on a much bigger scale mostly in South Africa where the labour required was a lot cheaper.
I worked out a computer program to try and replicate what our chief was doing in the winter but our IT section said it was far too big for our firm's computer and would take 3 months to run. Today it could be done on a home PC.
This if applied to bees would be international and extremely expensive.

 

[B+.]

By the time queens from these promising strains reach you in Bedfordshire, how do you proceed? Do you instrumentally inseminate carefully-chosen crosses; do you use protected mating areas (and how do you achieve this in land-locked Bedfordshire); or do you simply allow them to open mate?

I find that a lot of the background material is either quite old (e.g. Apimondia Bee Biology Standing Commission "Controlled mating and selection of the honeybee" International symposium Lunz an Zee, Austria, August 1972) or assumes so much knowledge that is not available in English (e.g. http://beebreed.nl/literatuur.html). I have been able to plug some of the gaps by going on a paper trail and reading the actual research papers but this is heavy going and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they were in need of a headache. What I can say is that it is a very rational approach which accommodates the peculiarities (to us humans) of honeybee biology.
The island mating stations provide beekeepers with the opportunity to mate their queens with drones from selected (4a) queens for a small fee (~6 euros - https://youtu.be/kyzAS5eZ2xA?t=46m45s). This is substantially cheaper than instrumental insemination.
I have both island mated (from the German island of Neuwerk and the Dutch island of Vlieland) and instrumentally inseminated queens to test in 2017. This is described here (http://coloss.org/beebook/I/queen-rearing/toc?searchterm=queen+breeding) although, personally, I feel this is quite superficial. There is a much better description in "selektion bei der honigbiene" (http://fmraster.de/?product_cat=bienenzucht) but these books are in German.
The performance test is performed during the first year of the queens life (beginning as soon as she has her own workers are available to support her in the autumn after her nucleus was established) and data from many thousands of queens are entered into the BeeBreed database at the end of the first season. I have videos of the process in an easy to watch film on my YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm7RqXJD4_w and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCcbj1Gv9UM ). You may find them a bit superficial though and I would refer you to the German book I mentioned earlier.
As you, quite rightly, point out Bedfordshire is not ideal for controlled breeding through natural means. I do raise some open mated queens for use as drone mothers but these are used in instrumental insemination once the breeding values are announced (mid-February each year). I will certainly be breeding from the VSH line which I received from Arista Bee Research last year (http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/album.php?albumid=751&pictureid=3761 https://aristabeeresearch.org/) and I will be following the same protocol used by Arista, the German AGT (http://www.toleranzzucht.de/) and the USDA in testing for VSH.
This line will have a special code (70) assigned to identify them as varroa tolerant within beebreed so that breeders focusing on the trait can see my results. I would also suggest that you take a look at the public areas of www.beebreed.eu as this may answer some of your questions.

 

[B+.]

This if applied to bees would be international and extremely expensive.

This is one thing that is frequently overlooked by beekeepers: the cost of all this work.
I heard recently that the Länderinstitut für Bienenkunde
Hohen Neuendorf (http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/bienenkunde/) had begun a 3.1 million euro project looking for genetic markers for VSH. In fact there is an announcement on www.beebreed.eu asking for queens of the 2014 vintage (not sure if this is in the public or restricted area though).

 

[oxnatbees]

What we do have, B+, is a huge reservoir of genetics, precisely because we have not been as efficient at improving our bees. This can be viewed as an asset. In effect evolution is slowly doing what Arista, SMARTBEES etc are doing rapidly. No one doubts natural selection will eventually produce "survivor" bees, and it is surely good that there are multiple approaches to problems.

 

[B+.]

What we do have, B+, is a huge reservoir of genetics, precisely because we have not been as efficient at improving our bees. This can be viewed as an asset. In effect evolution is slowly doing what Arista, SMARTBEES etc are doing rapidly. No one doubts natural selection will eventually produce "survivor" bees, and it is surely good that there are multiple approaches to problems.

Oh, I agree Oxnatbees. Please don't think that because I breed carnica, I am unsympathetic to the state of other races. I simply feel that, for me, I need to work bees that I can feel comfortable around without the need for a suit of armour. Well, perhaps that comment is a little extreme. What I mean to say is that the population I work with has had the benefit of a great deal of research over a sustained period. It is already quite well developed and a lot of work would have to be done with other races just to bring them to the point that the carnica I work with is at now. But, work progresses and it will not stand still.
I don't believe that natural selection would ever produce a bee that is at this level. By shear weight of numbers, any slight advance that occurred naturally would be diluted to the mean for that area. I think this is highlighted very well by ITLDs post in another thread (http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?p=576297#post576297 post #34)
Incidentally, SMARTBEES is essentially the same method I use and is run from The Institute for Bee Research Hohen Neuendorf (http://www.smartbees.eu/Imprint/).

 

[B+.]

I see that the BBKA are instigating a module / exam for beebreeders in the UK... they seem to need some input!

Nos da

I almost missed your post Icanhopit.
I've already looked at this but the syllabus isn't available yet.
The main sticking point for most people seems to be the requirement for a cohesive breeding strategy and assessment strategy, All of which is available in BeeBreed.
Another problem seems to be the requirement for at least 3 generations to be documented (this is also a requirement within the German D.I.B.for those wishing to move from "tester" to "breeder" status).
Incidentally, breeders are encouraged to take at least 1/3 of their test material from other breeders in BeeBreed. I wonder if this requirement will appear in the BBKA certificate too

 

[alldigging]

I almost missed your post Icanhopit.
I've already looked at this but the syllabus isn't available yet.
I wonder if this requirement will appear in the BBKA certificate too

I thought it was supposed to be something to pass the time between basic and general husbandry, because lots of people didn't feel they were ready for the full GH assessment.

The GH prospectus says:
Queen Rearing
The Assessors will examine the Candidates’ method of queen rearing. This does not need to include grafting techniques but will demonstrate that the candidate is selecting the material for breeding and not rely on the use of
naturally occurring swarm cells. Photographs and equipment used should be made available if appropriate

Queen Rearing
The Candidate will be required to:
3.1 Demonstrate marking and clipping a queen, or use a drone as a substitute if appropriate;
3.2 Demonstrate a method of queen rearing. The reasons for selecting a particular queen as breeding material are required.
3.3 Review the age of existing queens and plans for their replacement. Describe how replacement of queens is carried out;
3.4 Describe the procedures used up to the time of the assessment in the queen rearing method demonstrated and explain what has yet to be done. Describe what is intended for the queens that have successfully mated. Describe the procedure that will be adopted to introduce queens into a
colony;
3.5 Describe the advantages of marking and clipping queens;

 

[B+.]

I thought it was supposed to be something to pass the time between basic and general husbandry, because lots of people didn't feel they were ready for the full GH assessment.

I don't know for sure alldiging. From what I gather, it is being discussed at an exams board meeting in March to see what the qualification criteria are.
Someone mentioned in the FB group that the GH criteria only required 1 generation but the new Bee Breeding certificate calls for 3. Who knows. perhaps it will change.
I use a German program called "Zucht-Buch" to record my observations and this feeds into BeeBreed at the end of the year (see attached)

 

[Beefriendly]

Someone mentioned in the FB group that the GH criteria only required 1 generation but the new Bee Breeding certificate calls for 3. Who knows. perhaps it will change.

I got the impression it was focused on three generations of trying to improve local bees. I thought it showed a lack of understanding by the BBKA in thinking anyone would wish to breed any bees apart from local mongrels. It more or less precludes anyone breeding from other strains of mellifera where it is rare to go beyond 2 generations before getting new breeding stock.

 

[B+.]

I got the impression it was focused on three generations of trying to improve local bees. I thought it showed a lack of understanding by the BBKA in thinking anyone would wish to breed any bees apart from local mongrels. It more or less precludes anyone breeding from other strains of mellifera where it is rare to go beyond 2 generations before getting new breeding stock.

That wouldn't surprise me at all Beefriendly. That would exclude me too then. The only thing I have that could remotely be described as local would be when I take a swarm and haven't requeened it yet. That isn't bee breeding to me.
I have often commented that I think the BBKA syllabus is out of date. The breeding section in particular. I thought this might be an attempt to update it so I was prepared to give it a go. We'll wait and see what they say in March....maybe they don't think I qualify!