Choosing your breeder queen

[mbc]

I like the approach taken by Ian Jobson here

I try to do what he does (divide colonies into 3 categories) because it seems like a way to make headway for somebody like me with a relatively small number of hives. Breed from the queens in the best third & re-queen those in the bottom third, and remove their drone cells.

Additionally I try to re-queen colonies where they swarmed this season with a 1 year old queen (or would have swarmed without my intervention). I don't know if I'm being too harsh on the swarmy ones - what do others think?

When viewed as populations rather than individual colonies this is a strong method of pushing desirable characteristics forwards without losing diversity and vigour.
If you picture a population's characteristics as a bell curve with poor on the left and good on the right of the bell, then obviously the aim is to shift the meat of the bell right. The easiest way to do this is to cull the unproductive tail and propagate from the best third.
I try not to use the same breeder queen for more than two grafts a season( a total of about 80 daughters with my system) to avoid inbreeding suppression. It's the following seasons drones that's the issue, if all the drone mothers originate from the same mother then I can envisage losing sex alleles from a population even with open mating.

 

[B+.]

When viewed as populations rather than individual colonies this is a strong method of pushing desirable characteristics forwards without losing diversity and vigour.
If you picture a population's characteristics as a bell curve with poor on the left and good on the right of the bell, then obviously the aim is to shift the meat of the bell right. The easiest way to do this is to cull the unproductive tail and propagate from the best third.
I try not to use the same breeder queen for more than two grafts a season( a total of about 80 daughters with my system) to avoid inbreeding suppression. It's the following seasons drones that's the issue, if all the drone mothers originate from the same mother then I can envisage losing sex alleles from a population even with open mating.

I see lots of "common ground" in this post. However, there are a couple of problems:
1. There is a normal distribution for each trait (characteristic). How do you measure progress? You have to have an objective measure to avoid subjectivity. In BeeBreed, we use breeding values that are calculated and published each year, but these are based on very high volumes of data from breeders all over Europe. It would be impossible for a single breeder to produce the volume of data necessary to do the variation analysis.
2. You talk about selecting different 2a dams but don't address the sire issue. You can't assume this is a constant even within a season, let alone between consecutive seasons. Without sire selection, you are missing half of the genes but more than half of the picture because of multiple mating. You could avoid this by using instrumental insemination to control the paternal component.
3. You focus on the issue of inbreeding in a 4a breeding scenario (with a common paternal grandmother). This is exactly the scenario where you are able to produce large numbers of related drones so it is worth looking at closely. The important thing is that the sire is unrelated to the dam(s). I can illustrate this using the ancestry of a queen I tested last year. This queen was bred by Johan de Vries and mated on the Dutch island of Vlieland to drones produced by a German 4a sire. The 1a queen inbreeding coefficient is 0.72% and that of her workers is 2.12%. This is far below the 15% widely regarded as the point where inbreeding becomes an issue.

 

[jeff33]

It's a shame as there was some talk of a native breeding project on the Gower peninsula, I know Ade and Rob Jones did some preparatory work towards one.

Yes they did but nothing ever came out of it unfortunately. I tried to push for it as I was interested to get involved but I haven't heard anything for a couple of years now. Rob is still active doing his bit in Pembs, it is perhaps the lack of enthusiasm from the Swansea side that's the stumbling block....and a few unreliable beeks on Gower who poorly manage their stock!!