Pursuit of AMM Black Bees

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What is the repeated false claim about "keeping local bees"?
Wilco said:
You're pointing out they turn to a locally adapted type when the selection influence of man is removed (although potentially different to what would be there had man not been involved at all), which is rather the point I'm making with bees. Whilst man is still selecting, you end up with a strain which differs from what would be there and which influences the local population, irregardless of what happens when man stops selecting.

Your last point also suggests that there is no harm from introducing genetics from elsewhere as, in your words, 'the AMM genetics come out on top', so those seeking to keep AMM type bees have nothing to fear from those keeping other strains thus have no justification for denigrating them.

1. They're all the same species. Introduction of a new species (such as introducing honey bees to North America...) is usually deleterious for the native population, increasing the gene pool/genetic diversity of a species is generally considered to be advantageous in terms of ability to adapt and survive.

2. I labour the point because there is a repeated false claim about 'keeping local bees' plus there seems to be some shocking mantra that those keeping 'local' bees are somehow more worthy/superior because those bees are supposedly more natural. The problem is that as soon as people are selecting, they're no longer the bees which would naturally be there, man is changing the genetics, so whilst they may be descendents of a hypothetical local population, the argument that they are still part of the locally adapted population s delusional. By all means say you like having descendents of local bees, just don't claim they are still the natural population of the area or that the bees in the area magically stay unchanged when there are artificial selection pressures influencing them.

I would also add that people are free to keeping whatever bees they like. People should not go around denigrating others for preferring a different type and certainly not saying that a certain type is superior because it looks like an idea they have in their head. In humans we call that racism.
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mbc said:
What is the repeated false claim about "keeping local bees"?
Click to expand...
If you're keeping them and doing any selection for certain behaviours or traits, they are no longer local bees but a selected variant descended from locally acquired stock... So claiming they're local bees or naturally adapted to the area is incorrect... Then there's also the highly spurious 'the queen is dark therefore they're AMM', as alluded to, I think by @Dodge recently.

Conserving local stock would consist of creating appropriate habitat to support them thriving, such as hollowed out logs etc. and forage, or perhaps having relatively unmanaged colonies in a moveable frame hive, but not keeping them whilst pretty arbitrarily selecting for certain traits. I'm sure this latter method can result in decent bees but they're beekeeper adapted colonies not locally adapted ones.
 
This all gets very blurred in my mind, the moment 'local bees' are mentioned. If we're talking of a specific area where Amm remains clearly dominant in type and behaviour then I agree it's narrow sighted to. Introduce any other subspecies however, often, when people refer to their 'local bees' they're actually talking about a hotchpotch of all sorts of imports that have blended over the last century with no particular merit as an independent entity along the lines of a subspecies.
 
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rolande said:
This all gets very blurred in my mind, the moment 'local bees' are mentioned. If we're talking of a specific area where Amm remains clearly dominant in type and behaviour then I agree it's narrow sighted to. Introduce any other subspecies however, often, when people refer to their 'local bees' they're actually talking about a hotchpotch of all sorts of imports that have blended over the last century with no particular merit as an independent entity along the lines of a subspecies.
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That’s like saying ‘we’ve been polluting the river for so long, that really it’s so polluted we might as well keep polluting it’

Turn off the imports, stop the pollution. Then start working to repopulate your area with Amm. Hopefully Chainbridge will get a queen rearing programme for reselling up and running. That will help the beekeepers that actually care about their local ecology some support in maintaining or re-establishing the native honeybee population.

Victoria Buswell’s study of honeybee genetics showed that even in the worst areas of the UK for hybridisation 40% of the background population were still Amm. That’s not going away.
 
The problem of maintaining a certain characteristic (phenotype-genotype) in honey bees lies in the fact that they show a much higher degree of genetic recombination than any other species of livestock interest. While in mammals the average number of recombinations per chromosome is 3, in honey bees it does not go below 10, and the average on chromosome 1 is more than 25.
This means that given 2 extreme heterozygous versions to cause hybrid vigor in the offspring, the average possible combinations are 2**10 (1/1024) and on chromosome 1 they would be 2**25 (1/33 million). This of course for each drone with which the queen has copulated and without taking into account that vitellogenin during the queen/worker process has shown that it is capable of turning off or turning on certain genes.
So I would take a practical approach:
A. Manage the genetic material you have each season.
B. Let it evolve "freely" to establish local characteristics.
C. Introducing new genetics every x years in order to avoid inbreeding.
 
Lislarybees said:
That’s like saying ‘we’ve been polluting the river for so long, that really it’s so polluted we might as well keep polluting it’

Turn off the imports, stop the pollution. Then start working to repopulate your area with Amm. Hopefully Chainbridge will get a queen rearing programme for reselling up and running. That will help the beekeepers that actually care about their local ecology some support in maintaining or re-establishing the native honeybee population.

Victoria Buswell’s study of honeybee genetics showed that even in the worst areas of the UK for hybridisation 40% of the background population were still Amm. That’s not going away.
Click to expand...
That's a really poor analogy- describing other races as polluting a gene pool is not ok.

On the one hand you claim that AMM bees are threatened by genetics of other, imported strains. On the other you claim that despite decades of imports, AMM is still pretty significant even in the 'worst areas' and 'not going away'- in which case they're obviously not that affected by the imports. Pick an argument but you can't have it both ways.
 
Lislarybees said:
Turn off the imports, stop the pollution. Then start working to repopulate your area with Amm
Click to expand...
You can lecture some people and tell them what to do, but I'm not one of those so you'd best leave your instructions there.
 
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