Queen Ancestry

[B+.]

I wrote this for my local association but I'm reposting it here so that others might understand how/why breeders do what they do.

Most people have come across a "family tree" with the maternal and paternal partners along with any progeny being shown.
The honeybee "ancestry" chart is a little different because the queen can have multiple partners and each of those (drones) has no father and all of his genetic material is received from his mother (a queen).
So, in breeding, we are concerned with the genes that may be inherited from queens and passed, via the drone, to the spermatheca of other queens. Consequently, we focus on the queen. This can be a little confusing, especially if you've put so much time and effort into learning the mating process and behaviour of different castes in the colony.
As explained above, we are only concerned with the heritable traits that a queen passes to her progeny and how they may be improved, generation after generation. To do this we have to limit the scope of mating partners a queen might have in a particular generation to drones produced by a single queen. So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen. This is all breeding does: it amplifies characteristics that might otherwise be diluted/confused if the queen mated with drones from lots of different queens. If we like what we see, we propagate it further in the next generation. If we don't, we choose another queen that meets our criteria more closely to propagate. In other words, we are selecting what genes go forward to the next generation.
We can keep track of this using an ancestry chart similar to the one below. For each queen, we record the queens unique reference that links to our stock-book (which contains information on her colonies performance), the breeder, the queens location and any information related to the queens racial features (In Germany, they have a whole licensing process dedicated to ensuring you focus on the best queens within a sub-species but I can go into that more another time). We also need to record where/how the mating/insemination took place.
Now, since we are only looking at queens, we need to know what purpose the queen served in each generation. This is given by either a letter "a" (dam/mother) or "b" (sire/father) as a suffix and a number that denotes the position in the hierarchy as a prefix. However, in most cases, we will only be interested in the 1a, 2a or 4a queens. 1a is the queen we are studying at the moment. 2a is her maternal ancestor(dam) and 4a is her paternal grandmother. The 4a queen can stand a little more explanation as the mother of the drones is really the 1b queen. However, to perform selective breeding on a larger scale, it is necessary to produce more drones than a single colony would normally produce - and to do this in an isolated mating station so that other drones are excluded. Since the 4a queen herself was control-mated, all of her daughter queens carry the desired DNA and these may be used to produce many more colonies that multiply the drone population significantly. They are not clones, in the same way that all of the sperm produced by a single drone are, but the average effect is the same as if the queen mated with multiple drones from the same queen (i.e. the 4a queen is the common ancestor).

 

[gmonag]

That's very interesting.

I understand that this strategy works for breeder queens i.e. queens used to produce more queens, but this would produce a useless queen for use in an apiary. A "normal" queen requires to mate with an average of 12-15 drones (and minimum of 8) from varied genetic lines to make a viable colony. Otherwise the performance of the workers will not be good across all the required tasks.

So any queen that is to be used by a regular beekeeper must be properly mated with many drones (open mated or II).

 

[jeff33]

Thanks Paul, the process is very interesting and indeed probably one to follow for pure breeding characteristics....although I am also surprised by the use of a single mother of the drones.

I am still scratching my head in a standard queen rearing programme using open mating and not pure bred queens how you would select your hives for the breeder queen and for drone production.

As an example, I have a hive which is defensive but very productive. I would like to see if I can duplicate the productivity trait but I will probably pass on the defensive traits as well. I am assuming that if use this queen to raise daughters from and use my very calm hives as drone production hives I may improve on the defensiveness but if I was using that queen as a drone producing hive, her drones would pass on all traits.

 

[B+.]

That's very interesting.

I understand that this strategy works for breeder queens i.e. queens used to produce more queens, but this would produce a useless queen for use in an apiary. A "normal" queen requires to mate with an average of 12-15 drones (and minimum of 8) from varied genetic lines to make a viable colony. Otherwise the performance of the workers will not be good across all the required tasks.

So any queen that is to be used by a regular beekeeper must be properly mated with many drones (open mated or II).

I wrote that piece as a short introduction to honeybee breeding and as an attempt to explain why breeders focus on queens and not drones. I don't expect everyone to "get it" straight away as it is quite a challenge to the paradigm of most beekeepers in this country.
There isn't any restriction on the number of drones a virgin queen can mate with in a control mating scenario. It's just that this is usually done on isolated mating stations where the provenance of queens in colonies can be assured. A lot of work goes into ensuring the drone producing colonies are unrelated to the virgin queens and fit for purpose (it isn't the number of drones a virgin queen mates with that is significant but that they are not related to her - a single drone can produce more sperm than a queens spermatheca can hold).

 

[B+.]

Thanks Paul, the process is very interesting and indeed probably one to follow for pure breeding characteristics....although I am also surprised by the use of a single mother of the drones.

I am still scratching my head in a standard queen rearing programme using open mating and not pure bred queens how you would select your hives for the breeder queen and for drone production.

As an example, I have a hive which is defensive but very productive. I would like to see if I can duplicate the productivity trait but I will probably pass on the defensive traits as well. I am assuming that if use this queen to raise daughters from and use my very calm hives as drone production hives I may improve on the defensiveness but if I was using that queen as a drone producing hive, her drones would pass on all traits.

A single 4a grandmother - not a single 1b mother. This is why the ancestry diagram is so important. When every individual in the diagram is a queen, you have to be very precise about where she sits in the chart and what she is being used for. A number of 1b queens that are all daughters of the same 4a queen will be placed in a mating station.
There are instrumental insemination techniques that use several drones from the same 1b queen, or even a single drone, to develop a specific trait but these are highly specialised techniques. Try not to confuse these with the limited scenario I discussed above.

 

[abeille]

I wrote this for my local association but I'm reposting it here so that others might understand how/why breeders do what they do.

Most people have come across a "family tree" with the maternal and paternal partners along with any progeny being shown.
The honeybee "ancestry" chart is a little different because the queen can have multiple partners and each of those (drones) has no father and all of his genetic material is received from his mother (a queen).
So, in breeding, we are concerned with the genes that may be inherited from queens and passed, via the drone, to the spermatheca of other queens. Consequently, we focus on the queen. This can be a little confusing, especially if you've put so much time and effort into learning the mating process and behaviour of different castes in the colony.
As explained above, we are only concerned with the heritable traits that a queen passes to her progeny and how they may be improved, generation after generation. To do this we have to limit the scope of mating partners a queen might have in a particular generation to drones produced by a single queen. So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen. This is all breeding does: it amplifies characteristics that might otherwise be diluted/confused if the queen mated with drones from lots of different queens. If we like what we see, we propagate it further in the next generation. If we don't, we choose another queen that meets our criteria more closely to propagate. In other words, we are selecting what genes go forward to the next generation.
We can keep track of this using an ancestry chart similar to the one below. For each queen, we record the queens unique reference that links to our stock-book (which contains information on her colonies performance), the breeder, the queens location and any information related to the queens racial features (In Germany, they have a whole licensing process dedicated to ensuring you focus on the best queens within a sub-species but I can go into that more another time). We also need to record where/how the mating/insemination took place.
Now, since we are only looking at queens, we need to know what purpose the queen served in each generation. This is given by either a letter "a" (dam/mother) or "b" (sire/father) as a suffix and a number that denotes the position in the hierarchy as a prefix. However, in most cases, we will only be interested in the 1a, 2a or 4a queens. 1a is the queen we are studying at the moment. 2a is her maternal ancestor(dam) and 4a is her paternal grandmother. The 4a queen can stand a little more explanation as the mother of the drones is really the 1b queen. However, to perform selective breeding on a larger scale, it is necessary to produce more drones than a single colony would normally produce - and to do this in an isolated mating station so that other drones are excluded. Since the 4a queen herself was control-mated, all of her daughter queens carry the desired DNA and these may be used to produce many more colonies that multiply the drone population significantly. They are not clones, in the same way that all of the sperm produced by a single drone are, but the average effect is the same as if the queen mated with multiple drones from the same queen (i.e. the 4a queen is the common ancestor).

I disagree with this quote as it is not correct

So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen.


And in our experience, the focus on queens and not drones is one of the major factors in the poor quality queens that are widely observed today.

 

[pargyle]

I disagree with this quote as it is not correct

So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen.


And in our experience, the focus on queens and not drones is one of the major factors in the poor quality queens that are widely observed today.

Unfortunately, you can disagree if you wish but B+ has not been around here since July 2021....The thread is a very old one which you have resurrected. Nothing wrong with that - if it interests you.

 

[Erichalfbee]

I disagree with this quote as it is not correct

So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen.


And in our experience, the focus on queens and not drones is one of the major factors in the poor quality queens that are widely observed today.

All Paul’s study queens are II so he has complete control over what drones she mates with

 

[Wilco]

And you'd be factually incorrect. Each worker comes from a single fertilised egg. That means one egg (haploid) and one sperm (haploid), creating a zygote. For that individual worker, half the DNA comes from the queen and half comes from a single drone which, in turn, comes from another queen.

Other workers from the same queen will be made using sperm from other drones as the queen has mated with and stores sperm from multiple drones, but at the individual worker level each gets 50% of their DNA from the queen and 50% from a single drone.

You'll also find serious breeders do think about good drones.

 

[abeille]

And you'd be factually incorrect. Each worker comes from a single fertilised egg. That means one egg (haploid) and one sperm (haploid), creating a zygote. For that individual worker, half the DNA comes from the queen and half comes from a single drone which, in turn, comes from another queen.

Other workers from the same queen will be made using sperm from other drones as the queen has mated with and stores sperm from multiple drones, but at the individual worker level each gets 50% of their DNA from the queen and 50% from a single drone.

You'll also find serious breeders do think about good drones.

Yes, but he said

So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen.

It may be lost in translation, but in order for this to happen then you must be talking what we refer to as line breeding. That is back breeding to the same line. That is to say crossing a queen with her own drone line.

There is not an animal in the world that we have studied where this produces good outcomes

 

[abeille]

All Paul’s study queens are II so he has complete control over what drones she mates with

Which is a worry. Back breeding with the same line as the post suggest, is a terrible idea.

 

[abeille]

Unfortunately, you can disagree if you wish but B+ has not been around here since July 2021....The thread is a very old one which you have resurrected. Nothing wrong with that - if it interests you.

Thanks.
Only just noticed the post dates and duly noted.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Which is a worry. Back breeding with the same line as the post suggest, is a terrible idea.

Paul isn’t here to defend this so perhaps this isn’t the place

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

you must be talking what we refer to as line breeding.

is that what happens after a successful evening of line dancing?

 

[Wilco]

Yes, but he said

So, all of her female progeny (workers and queens) will receive 50% of her DNA and 50% from another (but only one) queen.

It may be lost in translation, but in order for this to happen then you must be talking what we refer to as line breeding. That is back breeding to the same line. That is to say crossing a queen with her own drone line.

There is not an animal in the world that we have studied where this produces good outcomes

It does not imply back breeding, in the example above he's talking about restricting to drones from a single queen. There's no mention of the queen the drones come from being the same queen as the one producing the egg - the implication is that it's not. It'll be from whichever queen they think has the desirable traits. Likewise there will still be multiple drones and, with independent assortment of alleles, there will still be a small amount of variation.

As I understand it, he was/is part of an international breeding programme where favourable genetics are shared. This significantly reduces the narrowing of genetic diversity which you refer to.

Incidentally, a supposed wild living colony in a theoretical remote area would potentially have the same issue of reduced genetic diversity yet there are plenty of people on here who, if such a strain were discovered, would celebrate it as a locally adapted free living strain which needs preserving. Funny old world.

 

[beeguy]

Hmmm some good information in this post. Following

 

[Erichalfbee]

It does not imply back breeding, in the example above he's talking about restricting to drones from a single queen. There's no mention of the queen the drones come from being the same queen as the one producing the egg

I talked to Paul about "selfing"
He's never done that
It involves restricting the queen till she becomes a drone layer then using her drones for her II

 

[rolande]

Incidentally, a supposed wild living colony in a theoretical remote area would potentially have the same issue of reduced genetic diversity yet there are plenty of people on here who, if such a strain were discovered, would celebrate it as a locally adapted free living strain which needs preserving. Funny old world.

Which just shows how clueless 'plenty of people' must be. Quite different from the way I understand B+ description; to me, it reads that he's using what is undoubtedly reduced diversity compared to that resultant from free mating in a natural congregation area but nevertheless he clearly states in one of the later posts that

"lot of work goes into ensuring the drone producing colonies are unrelated to the virgin queens and fit for purpose"

so it's not the kind of limited genetic diversity as an inbred population would show.

 

[rolande]

so it's not the kind of limited genetic diversity as an inbred population would show.

But it's not the diverse combination which we might expect from an uncontrolled congregation area either, which might be of real concern outside of a very intense breeding program despite B+ stating:

"it isn't the number of drones a virgin queen mates with that is significant but that they are not related to her"

I personally thought that both factors were of great significance -in the context of the diversity of the subfamilies which make up the colony but of course that's *not* what this thread is about.

 

[abeille]

Which just shows how clueless 'plenty of people' must be. Quite different from the way I understand B+ description; to me, it reads that he's using what is undoubtedly reduced diversity compared to that resultant from free mating in a natural congregation area but nevertheless he clearly states in one of the later posts that

"lot of work goes into ensuring the drone producing colonies are unrelated to the virgin queens and fit for purpose"

so it's not the kind of limited genetic diversity as an inbred population would show.

However you look at it, it is physically impossible to get 50% dan from one queen, and 50% dna from another queen.