Royal Lines

[Thymallus]

Just came across an interesting paper that suggests that honeybee queens are not reared at random but are preferentially reared from rare “royal” subfamilies, which have extremely low frequencies in the colony's worker force but a high frequency in the queens reared. They are quoting that about 20% of the least frequent families in the workforce constitute up to 100% of the queens raised, at least under emergency conditions with AM carnica and AM capensis (they didn't test normal swarm queens to see if the same occurred).
It suggests that only a small percentage of the possible queen parental lineages are used in these "royal lines" and these are preferentially selected under the emergency response.
If this is the case then it suggests that grafting is not the way to rear the best queens as you are randomly selecting the larvae for these queens which, for reasons best known to the bees, wouldn't normally be selected for queen rearing....assuming this research is correct. I can't find any follow up papers to it.

Anyone come across this idea before.

 

[For want of a better word]

There is a lot to be gained from allowing the bees to select their own queens, which larvae to pump full to the brim with royal jelly etc.
I seem to raise better quality queens by using the Nicot cage system, that does allow the bees to select which cup to bring on... however it seems that the Millar or Hopkins systems may have some advantage after all.
Once hatched but not mated bees show a certain preference for a particular queen.

A well know West Cornwall beefarmer who so happens to use Native black bees demonstrated this.
He places eight introduction cages with queens in them on top of a queenless colony, within a few minutes the bees were crowding one cage... showing a preference for that particular queen, Repeating the test on another queenless colony, preference was shown for a different queen... the queenless colonies were Apidea

Thanks for that my fishy friend!

Yeghes da

 

[Thymallus]

Thanks for that my fishy friend!

Yeghes da

No problemo my AM(m)ish mate.
Very interesting nevertheless.

 

[wheeler]

Very thought provoking paper.
If this is normal queen rearing procedure I don't see how the 'non royal' lineages would exist,
since they would rarely get the chance to breed.
However I can see evolutionary logic for it as an emergency response.
If the queen is lost then the colony is judged to be failing
Therefore the minority members of the colony are judged to be least responsible for the colonies failure.
Therefore breed the next colony from the minority members.
If this is the rational then It may even be the opposite for normal reproductive queen rearing. Where, by the same logic
the most predominate gene lines in the colony should be used for the next generation, since in this case the colony is judged to be a success.
If you hear that the experiment has been repeated with non emergency cells let us know.
Thanks for the link.

 

[Thymallus]

Very thought provoking paper.
If this is normal queen rearing procedure I don't see how the 'non royal' lineages would exist,
since they would rarely get the chance to breed.

I guess the non royal lineages in a particular hive would be the royal lineages of other hives, manifested through the drones that inseminated the queen. Just that they are not being selected in that particular colonies chosen ones. But unless they look at normal swarming in bees and find the same thing then it will just remain as an interesting observation.
However, there is evidence for these "Royal Lines" in termites and ants. One newspaper article is here and suggests that some ants cheat the nurture system so that their offspring become the reproductive queens of the next generation.