B+ apologies if I've missed this in amongst the white noise but whose bees are you starting the breeding with? As the breeding progresses will you bring in genetic material from abroad/other groups? Open mating/II/both?
Thanks and best of luck.
Good questions maddydog..
Obviously, it's very early days and we will have to see who, if anyone, believes they have bees worth testing.
Several members have expressed an interest in my stock, so, if no other stock is put forward, we will procede with daughters of my tested queens. My intention is that everything we do should be based on evidence so nobody can point the finger later and say that I've simply pushed my stock on everyone else. That is not my intention.
Initially, there will be a need to ensure those who wish to test the stock understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. I have no wish to "step on the toes" of our training officer, who is well qualified and knows a lot about beekeeping, so I would hope we could work together on developing training material for use in future years. In the mean time, I expect, I'll have to do a lot of the training myself.
Again, I stress, a lot will depend on what stock other members want to test.
As far as my own work is concerned, there is an agreement that members of BeeBreed populate up to one-third of their test hives with queens produced by other breeders. I think this is a wonderful idea, because, it allows me to judge the performance of my own stock against that produced by other breeders. In the past, my test queens have come from both Germany and The Netherlands, although this may change if other people in the UK choose to participate in the programme. I hope they do. I will do everything I can to help. As I have said before: if one of us gets good results, we share and everyone benefits.
My stock is control mated (both island mated and instrumentally inseminated) and I believe this is the right way to go. I don't believe you can make any progress at all with open mating in an uncontrolled environment. However, you can only make informed breeding decisions if you have first completed the testing phase. That comes first.
I had good results with 55-2-70-2016 and intend to raise daughters from her this year. At the moment, I am looking into the best potential mates for her daughters. There is a kind of "What if" facility in BeeBreed that allows me to specify a queens number and the system will tell me what breeding values to expect from the progeny of all potential pairings. I had hoped to send them to Vlieland, but, it looks like they are already fully booked for 2018. I will get NL-line mated queens from Vlieland this summer, so, I could use that combination in two years time as long as the queen is still alive. You can see the report from BeeBreed in the attachment. Of course, I would only choose mating type 1 (Instrumental Insemination) or 2 (island mated) although, as a member of AGT, type 6 (tolerance mating) is also available to me.
