Choosing your breeder queen

[SDM]

Why else would colonies narurally produce hundreds and hundreds of drones, the vast majority never likely to mate?

Simple propagation of genetic material. The unproductive stingy swarmy bees are equally prolific at drone production for this purpose, so it's hardly a tool for improvement.

 

[mbc]

This is becoming ridiculous.
1. The queens I import are part of an international breeding programme focussed on improving the honeybee, generation after generation. Members of the group exchange breeding material so a certain amount of movement is inevitable.
2. Each queen is the progeny of licenced breeding material which is allowed to establish a colony before being tested according to internationally agreed standards.
3. Only the best performing queens are selected for propagation using instrumental insemination before the cycle begins again with 1a progeny being introduced to nucs to establish their own colony. Isolated mating stations are also used where available.
4. The quality of my queens has been independently verified.Many of the qualities remaining after successive generations.
5. Perhaps the biggest benefit of participating in a large breeding programme is that inbreeding is never an issue. I typically work with inbreeding coefficients that are a fraction of 1%.


I completely understand that you have a moral objection to instrumental insemination even though this limits your ability to improve your bees. However, I don't agree with you - and, judging from the responses posted here, others feel the same way.
I use instrumental insemination to control both sides of the ancestry and I urge people to do the same. I'm not saying it is right for everyone though. You very quickly see that II, without the genetic knowledge of how to use it, is pointless. However, for those who have made a study of honeybee genetics, it offers the means to improve the bees in a way that is difficult to find in this country.

I did write that II was clever and useful for breeding purposes, and I have no moral objection, just a personal antipathy, I may even think about using the technique in the future if time constraints allow.
That doesn't change the fact that it's a unnatural and intrusive procedure.

 

[B+.]

I did write that II was clever and useful for breeding purposes, and I have no moral objection, just a personal antipathy, I may even think about using the technique in the future if time constraints allow.
That doesn't change the fact that it's a unnatural and intrusive procedure.

Many things that we do are unnatural and intrusive to the colony, but, it is done in order to manage them according to our wishes. Instrumental insemination is the same. I suppose it's a case of the end justifying the means: in order to improve the colony and any future queens she may produce, we select the drones she will "mate" with. In nature, it is random. In II, is is deliberate.

 

[SDM]

The entire process of selection and queen rearing is unnatural and intrusive. Get over it or get.off the section.
Oh yea , I forgot. Admin say it's ok for their mates to spam up other people's posts.

 

[B+.]

The entire process of selection and queen rearing is unnatural and intrusive. Get over it or get.off the section.
Oh yea , I forgot. Admin say it's ok for their mates to spam up other people's posts.

This is a pretty extreme comment.
Lots of beekeepers practice queen rearing. Some may even practice selection. At isolated mating stations, this simply means the selection of drone-producing colonies. It doesn't have to include II, but you seem to have a problem with the whole concept of improvement. Why?

 

[jaybee76]

The entire process of selection and queen rearing is unnatural and intrusive. Get over it or get.off the section.
Oh yea , I forgot. Admin say it's ok for their mates to spam up other people's posts.

I don't really wish to inflame this any further. You are entitled to your opinion and you make keep your bees in a very different manner to many others, however.....

swarm management i.e. preventing the bee colony from its natural means of reproduction is unnatural. Hive inspection is intrusive.

harvesting honey which the bees have stored to sustain themselves is intrusive.

Management of varroa, for those that practice it, is highly unnatural and often intrusive.

So whatever your point of view on II, your logic is flawed.

(And, by the way, i am not anyone's mate, I'm just an interested party on a wide variety of aspects of a subsection of the forum devoted to breeding).

 

[SDM]

This is a pretty extreme comment.
Lots of beekeepers practice queen rearing. Some may even practice selection. At isolated mating stations, this simply means the selection of drone-producing colonies. It doesn't have to include II, but you seem to have a problem with the whole concept of improvement. Why?

You've misunderstood me Paul. The very act of putting bees in a box and place if our choosing is "unnatural' and I am most certainly not against it, nor any of the selection and mating control options typically discussed here.
I was trying to highlight the lack of an argument presented by those who dismiss ii as unnatural , whilst ignoring the fact that so is the reason for the existence of this forum.
Perhaps it would have been clearer if I'd quoted MBC but we wrote out posts about the same time , me thinking mine would appear directly below his , not yours.

 

[B+.]

You've misunderstood me Paul. The very act of putting bees in a box and place if our choosing is "unnatural' and I am most certainly not against it, nor any of the selection and mating control options typically discussed here.
I was trying to highlight the lack of an argument presented by those who dismiss ii as unnatural , whilst ignoring the fact that so is the reason for the existence of this forum.
Perhaps it would have been clearer if I'd quoted MBC but we wrote out posts about the same time , me thinking mine would appear directly below his , not yours.

OK.
Yes. That can be annoying when that happens.
I have some sympathy for people who want to improve bees through open mating. However, I just don't believe it is possible in this country. There are too many people with different types of bees with everyone trying to do something different for that to work. Also, areas that you believe are isolated may not always be so as people can move bees around with no real co-ordination. I came to the conclusion long ago that instrumental insemination was the only way I would be able to be sure what partners I was using. It's not the end of the story though. Some people buy the kit but don't understand the genetics necessary to use it properly - I see that a lot!

 

[Swarm]

The point is being missed
B+ you can at least understand someone wanting to follow a different way, regardless of whether you agree, I appreciate that.
The point the other one can't grasp is nothing to do with whether or not it's unnatural to keep bees. It's about husbandry, without the need for artificial intervention. Unnecessary as much as unnatural, to say otherwise would be denying thousands of years of husbandry.
To make out that someone who takes this approach is not interested is a bit twp.

 

[SDM]

The point is being missed
B+ you can at least understand someone wanting to follow a different way, regardless of whether you agree, I appreciate that.
The point the other one can't grasp is nothing to do with whether or not it's unnatural to keep bees. It's about husbandry, without the need for artificial intervention. Unnecessary as much as unnatural, to say otherwise would be denying thousands of years of husbandry.
To make out that someone who takes this approach is not interested is a bit twp.

But that is not even remotely what you said is it ?

I find the whole process a bit sick to be quite honest, it's an intrusion, probing some knocked out insect, it removes the creature's right to breed naturally and is far too too much like date rape.

What method of breeding ,queen rearing method is not intrusive and deny the bees "right" to breed naturally.

Do you leave your hives to swarm ? That is the one and only natural method.
Controlled mating either through isolation or ii has advanced husbandry more in 50 years than in the previous 1000
You can't expect to make a point when you don't have one.

 

[B+.]

Controlled mating either through isolation or ii has advanced husbandry more in 50 years than in the previous 1000
You can't expect to make a point when you don't have one.

Except that knowledge is incremental. Where would Watsons work on II be without the genetics work of Mendel or Quantitative genetics be without the statistical work of Robertson? As I said earlier, II is a tool. A very important one but, without genetics it's a tool without direction.

 

[Walrus]

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?

 

[Swarm]

I don't see how I've said anything different.
It's intrusive, it's unnatural and unnecessary. It's you who tried to make out that I'm not interested because I think we can yield results without II.

 

[B+.]

I don't see how I've said anything different.
It's intrusive, it's unnatural and unnecessary. It's you who tried to make out that I'm not interested because I think we can yield results without II.

I don't believe I said you were disinterested.
Time will tell what you can achieve. I wonder how you will measure progress towards your goals though?

 

[SDM]

Except that knowledge is incremental. Where would Watsons work on II be without the genetics work of Mendel or Quantitative genetics be without the statistical work of Robertson? As I said earlier, II is a tool. A very important one but, without genetics it's a tool without direction.

Surely farmers have been breading from their best stock without that depth of knowledge for thousands of years? Since for many ii represents the only method by which the drone side of the equation can be controlled, I expect it would be still almost as useful . Certainly better than just leaving the paternal line to chance.

 

[SDM]

I don't see how I've said anything different.
It's intrusive, it's unnatural and unnecessary. It's you who tried to make out that I'm not interested because I think we can yield results without II.

Ahh well I expect we'll never again have to listen to the likes of you and their incessant whining about non native drones ruining people's breeding projects ever again.
That'll be a blessed relief at least.

 

[jeff33]

For about 4 years I left it 'naturally' to my locally adapted mongrel population to give me a good stock and ended up with propolis layered hives full of hellish bees. I ended up bringing in carefully bred queens from the outside being very careful where I got them from and guess what, for the last few years beekeeping has become enjoyable with a massive improvement to my stock.

 

[mbc]

Ahh well I expect we'll never again have to listen to the likes of you and their incessant whining about non native drones ruining people's breeding projects ever again.
That'll be a blessed relief at least.

Do you ever read back your own posts and think they're just unpleasant rubbish?

 

[B+.]

Surely farmers have been breading from their best stock without that depth of knowledge for thousands of years? Since for many ii represents the only method by which the drone side of the equation can be controlled, I expect it would be still almost as useful . Certainly better than just leaving the paternal line to chance.

Yes...but beware of comparing diploid farmyard animals with haplo-diploid honeybees. The problem with honeybees is that you can't just put them in a fenced-off area of a field and expect them to breed true. You have to use isolated areas far from other bees...and therein lies the problem. We don't have many sites like this in the UK.
In maternal-selection, the queen contributes a random cross-section of 16 from her 32 chromosomes in her egg. The other 16 for a fertilised egg comes from whichever drone(s) she mated with. In II, you have complete control over which 1b paternal queens the drone comes from or 4a paternal grandmothers - you have to refer to the ancestry chart I posted here). With isolated mating, you can do the same but, if you want to mate a large number of virgin queens, you are really limited to 4a mating as a single 1b colony would be able to support a limited number of drones. In other sites, which aren't isolated, you have no control over the 1b/4a paternal queens so you have no control over the 16 chromosomes contributed by each drone. Worse than that, the queen may mate with 15-20 different drones (all potentially from different queens) so there may be a huge variation in the male component of each fertilised egg. Now, if you imagine this being scaled up to the colony level, you have many sub-families, each with their own characteristics.

 

[mbc]

For about 4 years I left it 'naturally' to my locally adapted mongrel population to give me a good stock and ended up with propolis layered hives full of hellish bees. I ended up bringing in carefully bred queens from the outside being very careful where I got them from and guess what, for the last few years beekeeping has become enjoyable with a massive improvement to my stock.

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.