Bibba

[oxnatbees]

1) The book "Honeybees of the British Isles" was out of print when I tried to get it, though I got a 2nd hand copy through Northern Bee Books. The OP might want to check that.

2) The book is full of observational data. Bees, even amm, vary across the British Isles - that's one of its main points. Supersedure srtains are found in poor forage areas.

3) As an engineer, I have much more faith in an experienced mechanic who says "it may be this or that, let's check them" than a semi trained technician who plugs a piece of software in to a car and swears blind the problem is the engine management unit while ignoring the loose wire. In beekeeper terms, if Finman tells me something about his bees which conflicts with a DNA tesr, I would believe the guy with 50 years' experience with those bees.

4) BIBBA isn't all about pure amm, I gather there are many members who are intetested in optimising whatwver works best in their area. Round my way, open nated bees converge on a common type, mainly dark with one orange band in about 3 years as unfit genes are rapidly selected out. The population is gentle and hardy unless someone buys Buckfasts nearby, Which livens things up gor a year or so until those hives are normalised!

5) I tried morphometry once. Two of the casts I collected, from near a nature reserve were extremely pure amm by that standard. I suspect the reserve had bought some amm... They were good natured but completely unfit, ate all they gathered and bred to the max then starved. Despite constant feeding they died out showing more and more bizarre behaviour (eventually not queen right by end of the season). I suspect amm has 2 problems: firstly these pure breeders are producing overly inbred bees. Secondly, these ones presumably came from a breeder station in Cornwall, and were unsuited to the forage and weather in the Midlands. Not all of the original black bees were the same, which was Beowulf Cooper's main point.

 

[Quis Custodiet]

Well, with respect, you think wrongly.........

Never mind those infernal bees...............always a mistake for a chap to drop out of university, mind you if one did not make it to Queens or Trinity....perhaps why not? But it does cause such feelings of inadequacy and such an awful constant need to prove one's self.

 

[TooBee...]

Finman "...Irish dark bee... IT does everything better than other bee races...who believes those stories."

I did, and still want to, but I think I'm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg

*

SDM "The idea would be to retain what they consider to be beneficial adaptations to climate whilst improving other traits. If bred from within the same group of bees they would of course be the same bees..."

Well, ok, that's one valid way of looking at it (not sure still if I agree though), it's just that I thought in doing this selection, wouldn't DNA be lost eventually, I thought the whole point of preservation was to preserve (the DNA)? But I take on board what you are saying, and I understand a bit more of why they're unwilling to inject non-AMM DNA to achieve this.
PS: I've thought about what you said a bit more, and I think your claim "If bred from within the same group of bees they would of course be the same bees" may be right after all, just thought I'd add that, still not 100% sure though.

*

Bakerbee "...So how does the 1 or 2 % difference in amm account for anything?"

I don't know, that's what we couldn't understand, what's the difference if our little black bees (I have a queen that's really shiny and almost pure black ) are only around the low 90's when their's are in the upper 90's percentages? When they admit themselves that above 90% is recognized as being pure?

 

[foghornleghorn]

Chimps 99% dna vs human
Gorillas 98% dna vs human

Theres a huge amount of differences in 1 or 2%
So how does the 1 or 2 % difference in amm account for anything?

The percentage of a breed isn't based off total dna. It would be using a smaller set of markers

 

[foghornleghorn]

The idea would be to retain what they consider to be beneficial adaptations to climate whilst improving other traits. If bred from within the same group of bees they would of course be the same bees.
One positive I suppose from the link uncle betty provided is that the Galtee group clearly recognise the overly aggressive and unproductive nature of Amm. The simple fact that it's taken them nearly 30 yrs to stop a handful of queens from swarming backs up my own personal opinion that a unanimous shift to Amm would be a backwards step of near 100 yrs .

If only controlled breeding was used they would make more progress in 5 years than the last 30 and any gaps to other breeds would be closed fairly rapidly.

 

[Murox]

book is full of observational data. Bees, even amm, vary across the British Isles - that's one of its main points. Supersedure srtains are found in poor forage areas.
BIBBA isn't all about pure amm----intetested in optimising whatever works best in their area. Round my way, open mated bees converge on a common type, mainly dark with one orange band in about 3 years as unfit genes are rapidly selected out. The population is gentle and hardy unless someone buys Buckfasts nearby, Which livens things up gor a year or so until those hives are normalised!

I tried morphometry once. Two of the casts I collected, from near a nature reserve were extremely pure amm by that standard. I suspect the reserve had bought some amm... They were good natured but completely unfit, ate all they gathered and bred to the max then starved. Despite constant feeding they died out showing more and more bizarre behaviour (eventually not queen right by end of the season). I suspect amm has 2 problems: firstly these pure breeders are producing overly inbred bees. Secondly, these ones presumably came from a breeder station in Cornwall, and were unsuited to the forage and weather in the Midlands. Not all of the original black bees were the same, which was Beowulf Cooper's main point.

Some very important points by oxnatbees. Some may say common sense. Thank you for the fresh air.

 

[Finman]

1)

3) As an engineer, I have much more faith in an experienced mechanic who says "it may be this or that, let's check them" than a semi trained technician who plugs a piece of software in to a car and swears blind the problem is the engine management unit while ignoring the loose wire. In beekeeper terms, if Finman tells me something about his bees which conflicts with a DNA tesr, I would believe the guy with 50 years' experience with those bees.



5) I tried morphometry once. Two of the casts I collected, from near a nature reserve were extremely pure amm by that standard. .

I have nursed
- black mongrel bees
- Caucasians
- Carniolans
- Elgons
- now I have buckfasts and
Italians..

I have had Italians 45 years. 90% out of Finnish hives are Italians, and numerous strains.

Two days ago I bought 10 gueens which are hybrids of South Finland Italians and 500 km to North Italians. Those Northern bees live on environment where -30C is usual. Those are breeds of two professional beekeepers.

When I started to buy Buckfasts 4 years ago, I wonder how fast original genes vanish from my apiary.

If my queens mate in outer apiaries, 80% will mate with Carniola mongrels, which live in empty rural houses of rural villages. What Carniolans bring to me is unhappy swarming.

Biggest danger in 20-30 hive apiary is inbreeding.

 

[TooBee...]

I have nursed
- black mongrel bees
- Caucasians
- Carniolans
- Elgons
- now I have buckfasts and
Italians..
....

Elgons? What are they?

 

[Finman]

.
I may have broad genepool in my apiary, but when I draft from best hive new virgins, next summer half of colonies have sister queens. Then I need a bad luck and half of my hives have some bad problem.

What I want to say. Strickt selecting to keep "pure" local bee race will drive into inbreeding problems,and to narrow genepool. I am sure about that.

 

[TooBee...]

1) The book "Honeybees of the British Isles" was out of print when I tried to get it, though I got a 2nd hand copy through Northern Bee Books. The OP might want to check that....

Sounds an interesting book, here's the Amazon link for those interested, but it's £40,
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Honeybees-...8-1&keywords="Honeybees+of+the+British+Isles"

here it is on Northern Bee Books (great selection of books) at £17.50 BUT it's out of stock,
http://www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/newbooks/cooper-the-honey-bees-of-the-british-isles-1986/

Anyone else know of a source for it, at a reasonable price - £40 seems a bit pricey!

 

[TooBee...]

.
I may have broad genepool in my apiary, but when I draft from best hive new virgins, next summer half of colonies have sister queens. Then I need a bad luck and half of my hives have some bad problem.

What I want to say. Strickt selecting to keep "pure" local bee race will drive into inbreeding problems,and to narrow genepool. I am sure about that.

AH, now I understand what you mean!

You are breeding what's called Robustness into your apiary by having a broad genetic mix, if you narrowed down the genetic / DNA variance you could get a big honey yield, BUT with a bit of bad luck (a mistake in selection, poor weather, new strain of a bee disease arriving in the area, etc.) you could have a very poor harvest.

By going for Robustness in your apiary you're averaging out your Risks, that's very clever: The other side of that coin, is (I think you're saying) that if we here in Ireland try and narrow our gene pool down further we will decrease our Robustness, meaning bad luck (unforeseen events, ie: bad weather, new disease like IWD, etc.) will have a greater detrimental effect on our bees / honey yields, etc.

PS: You still haven't told me what the "Elgon" type of bee is?

 

[Finman]

.
Elgon bee has developed like Buckfast, but main goal has been to resist varroa.

Read from internet.


How I woke up to inbreeding problems. When I bought new queens and I compared them to my main apiary, sometimes I saw that new queens were clearly better. It told that my basic apiary had collapsed genetically. That happened too often if I continued "my own breed".

 

[SDM]

If only controlled breeding was used they would make more progress in 5 years than the last 30 and any gaps to other breeds would be closed fairly rapidly.

More progress for sure, but there are far to many areas where the pure blacks I've seen need to be brought up to standard, simply to many traits for it to happen quickly. Also adding incentive to further narrow the gene pool, which again in my opinion wouldn't be a smart place to start when breeding an improved bee for a nation.
That still leaves the question of how far breeding could change any trait without impacting negatively on others.
For example how far could honey gathering potential be improved without increasing prolificy and therefore impacting on colony winter stores requirements?

 

[foghornleghorn]

More progress for sure, but there are far to many areas where the pure blacks I've seen need to be brought up to standard, simply to many traits for it to happen quickly. Also adding incentive to further narrow the gene pool, which again in my opinion wouldn't be a smart place to start when breeding an improved bee for a nation.

20 years of controlled mating with the backup of something like beebreed that links all the different lines together to provide much more reliable information would lead to huge improvement without necessarily narrowing the genepool. The good genes are there just the crap has to be filtered out which cant be done fast under open mating

 

[SDM]

20 years of controlled mating with the backup of something like beebreed that links all the different lines together to provide much more reliable information would lead to huge improvement without necessarily narrowing the genepool. The good genes are there just the crap has to be filtered out which cant be done fast under open mating

That's fine when working to improve single traits , even complex ones. But try removing chalk brood, aggression, low productivity , swarming and varroa resistance together and you'll have very few stock that will pass assessment for breeding. With other races as I understand it, such work started with a broad gene pool of stock already excelling in the traditional selection criteria and then it was still a decade or so of international cooperation to make significant progress in complex traits like varroa resistance.
In an entirely controlled mating programme they're still the best part of 50yrs behind. I seem to remember reading that assessment of Amm potential in vsh is only just being started, with a view to creating a programme IF suitable potential is found within the race.

 

[oxnatbees]

I have nursed
- black mongrel bees
- Caucasians
- Carniolans
- Elgons
- now I have buckfasts and
Italians..

I have had Italians 45 years. 90% out of Finnish hives are Italians, and numerous strains.

Two days ago I bought 10 gueens which are hybrids of South Finland Italians and 500 km to North Italians. Those Northern bees live on environment where -30C is usual. Those are breeds of two professional beekeepers.

When I started to buy Buckfasts 4 years ago, I wonder how fast original genes vanish from my apiary.

If my queens mate in outer apiaries, 80% will mate with Carniola mongrels, which live in empty rural houses of rural villages. What Carniolans bring to me is unhappy swarming.

Biggest danger in 20-30 hive apiary is inbreeding.

Which is why I occasionally get swarms from 20 - 30 miles away instead of the nearest ones.

Finman, I've seen a series of diagrams showing the distribution of Amm across Europe across time, showing how Amm got separated from other races by the ice sheets of the main Ice Ages. I think it may have been one of Prof Ruttner's books. They make the interesting point that it only got as far north as Norway around 1600AD. (I'm probably a bit out on the dates but you get the idea.) The point is that due to climate change, particularly the Little Ice Age, there were no native bees as far north as Finland until relatively recently. In fact I'm not sure Finland ever had any that didn't start out imported, though I'm sure you'll know more of this than I do.

So maybe you don't have as "locally adapted" strains of bees as we do in the UK. This would give inbreeding problems. Whereas in the UK there are lots of wild colonies in peoples' roofs (I have now finally seen one in an actual tree!) so there is a constant background of locally adapted genes. I have 6 hives but in effect my apiary is within mating range of about... let me think... 100+ colonies within 5 miles.

Research a few years ago concluded there were almost no feral bees left in the UK, but they were looking in bizarre areas like pine forests and only looking for pure Amm. The logic was, they needed to look far from places beekeepers operated to find uncontaminated colonies - overlooking that beekeepers avoid areas with poor forage, and most bees hybridise and use whatever works due to this natural selection thing. There was no obvious reason just to look for pure Amm.

It may be worth saying here that my primary interest is in raising healthy bees. Honey is very much a secondary consideration, but my strategy is long term, and I'm beginning to see better honey yields from a local strain that needs minimal management. Varroa is a non-issue in this area - natural selection again. Of course a commercial operation can't afford to take a few years out to do this, and in particular it wouldn't work for a migratory beekeeper with no "local" strain. Basically the UK is one big genetic lab unlike countries with a more controlled bee race, allowing experimentation and ensuring if one avenue is a dead end, there are others to choose from. But I'm pretty sure my strategy will help gradually improve the resilience of the stock for everyone in the area in the long term.

 

[TooBee...]

That's fine when working to improve single traits...

Some weeks ago I stumbled across a YouTube video in which a group (I think in Germany area) had obtained Varroa resistant bees from the USA, they had been extremely successful in breeding this trait into their bees, like within a year or so, BUT to do so required the mating of only ONE drone, my limited understanding of all of it, was that they were trying to get the bee to have essentially just this one trait, which when they were able to get it stabilized, they were then going to inject into other bee strains, and hopefully lock it in. It is yet to be seen if they can be successful in locking this Varroa resistant trait in or not.

 

[B+.]

That's fine when working to improve single traits , even complex ones. But try removing chalk brood, aggression, low productivity , swarming and varroa resistance together and you'll have very few stock that will pass assessment for breeding. With other races as I understand it, such work started with a broad gene pool of stock already excelling in the traditional selection criteria and then it was still a decade or so of international cooperation to make significant progress in complex traits like varroa resistance.

This is exactly what members of BeeBreed aim to do. It is a continuous improvement process, so, the benchmark (a 5-year moving average of performance in each trait) is continually raised.

 

[Finman]

.
Very strange attitude that healthy bees but no honey yield. How is that possible?

Do you think that sick bees are best foragers!
.

 

[B+.]

Some weeks ago I stumbled across a YouTube video in which a group (I think in Germany area) had obtained Varroa resistant bees from the USA, they had been extremely successful in breeding this trait into their bees, like within a year or so, BUT to do so required the mating of only ONE drone, my limited understanding of all of it, was that they were trying to get the bee to have essentially just this one trait, which when they were able to get it stabilized, they were then going to inject into other bee strains, and hopefully lock it in. It is yet to be seen if they can be successful in locking this Varroa resistant trait in or not.

Single drone insemination (sdi) is the quickest route to developing any trait. Essentially, this is because the drone, the product of an unfertilised egg, inherits all of his genetic material from his mother (i.e he has to express all 16 chromosomes because that is all he has). His sperm are all clones so, the only variability (excluding mutation) can come from the egg laid by the queens mother. Testing a number of these combinations allows the breeder to develop a particular trait. That is not to say that other traits are ignored though (or shouldn't be). In beebreed, the total breeding value is comprised of the breeding values in all traits, so, a strength in one trait can be undermined by a weakness in another.