Sex alleles

[jenkinsbrynmair]

Finman says he doesn't have a large enough gene pool

I can well believe that.............................

 

[Finman]

I can well believe that.............................

You are a believer.

.

 

[For want of a better word]

Highly revered by UK beekeepers are "local" swarms of bees. It's not surprisng that few harvest more than a super of honey....and that's in a good year.

I buy in queens from established breeder each year. Some are breeder queens, good for one generation of offspring. I enjoy rearing my own queens.
Otherwise I'd just buy replacement F! queens as needed.
It also allows me to indulge my curiosity about how different strains of bees thrive in my local environment. The results can be quite surprising. The worst bees of the lot are the local supposedly well adapted mongrels. Bad temper, poor honey yields, annual swarming. Needless to say I haven't kept any of these queens for many years.

Swarmy bees will breed more swarmy bees.... and have swarmed originally from a managed colony somewhere... even if they have spent a few seasons nesting in a tree!... we do not have feral colonies of bees in the UK... only feral honeybee sites.
Buying in foreign queens must by definition dilute the gene pool of native bees not add to it... unless playing around attempting to produce the perfect honeybees is your hobby.



The Native Cornish Black bees that I keep have been maintained and managed by beekeepers here over the centuries due to the simple fact that they survive the inclement temperate maritime climate we have..... and produce very reasonable amounts of honey... season in... season out.

My half pennieworth!

Yeghes da

 

[Finman]

Buying in foreign queens must by definition dilute the gene pool of native bees not add to it... unless playing around attempting to produce the perfect honeybees is da

Dilute genepool... At least I buy foreign queens, that I want to see, what they do. It is not against law and so I do it.

Local queens..

50 years I gad local queens. They were reared 10 miles from me, buy the mother queen was from Canada. There queens were imported from Russia via Mexicon border.

 

[REDWOOD]

Stagnant gene pools can create lots of problems in a small apiary and is worth investing in a couple of bought in queens from a reputable supplier to liven thing up a bit. I place one smaller frame in desirable hives to promote natural drone brood, you get good fat drones that way, and I cull all other drone brood from less desirable hives. It seems to work for me.

 

[Finman]

Stagnant gene pools can create lots of problems in a small apiary and is worth investing in a couple of bought in queens from a reputable supplier to liven thing up a bit. I place one smaller frame in desirable hives to promote natural drone brood, you get good fat drones that way, and I cull all other drone brood from less desirable hives. It seems to work for me.

At least I have found that small apiary will be ruined in few years if you do not bring new blood into it.

It is a luck of draw when you select a mother queen which is sensitive to nosema.
You find it out too late. I saw it next spring, what the mother queen actually was.

One year I reared 50 virgins from one huge hive. 80% of daughters were sensitive to chalkbrood, even if mother hive had no sign about chalkbrood.
.

 

[B+.]

It is a luck of draw when you select a mother queen which is sensitive to nosema.
You find it out too late. I saw it next spring, what the mother queen actually was.

One year I reared 50 virgins from one huge hive. 80% of daughters were sensitive to chalkbrood, even if mother hive had no sign about chalkbrood.
.

What about the colonies that provided the drones?

 

[Finman]

What about the colonies that provided the drones?

I know nothing about them.

I have mating yard near my cottage. My neighbour has good quality bees, and drones come from there, because my hives are scattered here and there on summer pastures.
.

If I move mating nucs far from my cottage, wild Carnional drones are met there, and it promises swarming.

When I stopped to keep Elgon bees, after that it took 4 years that Elgon genes vanished from my environment.

Every of my hives was sensitive to chalkbrood, when I started to breed the disease off. And drone hives were sensitive too.

But is 10 years from that era.
.
After that I tried, how to manage hybrid vigour, but it escaped from mitten, as we say..

 

[Michael Palmer]

So you gave up and now buy in your queens?

 

[Finman]

So you gave up and now buy in your queens?

I continue Queen rearing. . Just now I wanted to polish swarm genes out of my apiary. Next year I don't buy new queen's. I rear all myself. I do not have any more drone potential from old stock.

Then I look, how long recent stock will be OK.

IT is very easy and interesting to rear queens. I change larvae into swarming cells and I get fat queens from them . I make nucs and spare hives from mating nucs. Own reared queens are important..

I will make the hives broodless in July. Then I polish mites away on last week of July. But it is too late to start queen rearing in this episode. Perhaps some part of queens.

 

[B+.]

Having studied Module 7 Selection and Breeding of Honey Bees made me ask this question to which I have yet to find an answer.

The text books say there are up to 19 different sex alleles, I read a paper (can't remember where, sorry) stating that there may be 50 or more sex alleles. Are certain alleles associated with certain sub species? Are there any alleles that are Unique to say Am mellifera, lingustica or carnica?

Has any work been done in this area?

This may help https://youtu.be/yy3qSx5wc7w?t=5m12s

 

[Icing Sugar]

Applying an idea from Chapter 4 of John Atkinson's "Background to bee breeding"

Having studied Module 7 Selection and Breeding of Honey Bees made me ask this question to which I have yet to find an answer.

The text books say there are up to 19 different sex alleles, I read a paper (can't remember where, sorry) stating that there may be 50 or more sex alleles. Are certain alleles associated with certain sub species? Are there any alleles that are Unique to say Am mellifera, lingustica or carnica?

Has any work been done in this area?

TWO POTENTIAL STUDIES

STUDY ONE: "How many CSD genes do we estimate to be contained within the honey bee super-super-population that inhabits the land mass of mainland England, Wales and Scotland?"

This would need to be a collective study involving as many of us as possible. The starting point is as follows:

• In a closed breeding population of open-mated queens in equilibrium, the average proportion of diploid drones produced in the worker brood of all its colonies is likely to be the reciprocal of the number of CSD sex alleles in that population. (This is the John Atkinson bit - he theoretically applied this principle to all of the apiaries on the Isle of Wight after it had been pulled a bit further out to sea).

As is often the case when researching things of this nature, we would have to make some assumptions... and we would have to be perfectly open about the potential confounding nature of these assumptions when considering the results.

Here are the assumptions that I would propose:

1. If we are to work with the idea that the breeding population is near-enough closed then we will need to say something like this: As queen bees have been imported to the UK for over 100 years, mostly from the same countries of origin, we will assume that the CSD genes from these geographically-remote sources have fully integrated into our gene pool over that time, at least locally to their innumerable points of introduction.
2. If we are to work with the idea that the CSD genes are reasonably homogenously spread within the study area, we will need to say something like this: As honey bees are likely to have colonised this land mass for thousands of years during which time each open-mated queen will have had the opportunity to encounter drones from a roughly 16km radius, and as there are very few areas completely devoid of honey bees, we will assume that the CSD genes derived from the original black bee population have, over time, spread themselves widely and fairly evenly over the land mass of the study area.
3. In order to acknowledge the potential for geological and/or ecological barriers to create isolated subpopulations, we will need to say something like this: Any fully- or partially-isolated populations might have a smaller number of CSD genes within their population and these geographic areas might throw up different numbers from the bulk of the study area. (These areas might theoretically contain some CSD genes that no other area has but this study has no way of identifying that).
4. Diploid drone larvae are not the only cause of empty cells within the brood nest but for the purposes of this study we will assume that they are the only contributory factor.

We could put in very many more assumptions but I would suggest that these are of a lesser order of magnitude to the four I have given.

What each of us could then do is calculate the average percentage of empty cells within the brood nests of the colonies within our own apiaries (N.B. Only those of us with open-mated queens should contribute). This could be done using a rhombus cut-out in a piece of card that allows us to count the number of empty cells in a patch of exactly 100 brood nest cells. If this is done at each inspection for each hive then it is possible to calculate an apiary average for the year. (Using an average like this incorporates acknowledgement for the unpredictable order in which sperm from different drones fertilise the eggs in the worker brood area). If these apiary averages are uploaded to a central point at the end of the 2017 season along with the postcode of the apiary site then, using a Geographic Information System (GIS), a map of all these data points could be created. This would reveal the national picture and any interesting regional variances. From this work, we might be able to have an educated guess at the number of CSDs represented in this particular landmass. The next study might shed light on the question of whether different parts of the landmass host different CSD genes.




STUDY TWO: "Do different parts of England, Wales and Scotland host different collections of CSD genes?"

This study would not require nearly as many participants, but it would still require quite a lot, and it would attempt to answer questions such as this:
(i) If I open-mate 5 virgin queens from Durness in St Ives will their brood areas, when properly established, contain fewer empty cells than the brood areas of 5 virgin queens from St Ives that are open-mated in St Ives? (and vice versa) - to look at the impact of distance on CSD gene distribution.
(ii) If I open-mate 5 virgin queens from Whitby in Kendal will their brood areas, when properly established, contain fewer empty cells than the brood areas of 5 virgin queens from Kendal that are open-mated in Kendal? (and vice versa) - to look at the impact of geological features such as the Pennines on CSD gene distribution.
Many different places can be substituted in these questions. The more people attempting to answer questions like this by swapping VQs with other suitably interested parties (and it would require a lot of participants to become statistically relevant) could help us discover if different areas host different collections of CSD gene.




If anyone else is interested, I have GIS experience and could collate any data that was collected for study 1. I am also happy to swap VQs for study 2. I suspect that, at a national level, the gene pool is very mixed up these days and CSD distribution will be pretty homogenous throughout the landmass. However, at individual apiary level, I would not be surprised if those people using purchased queens from a queen breeder to populate their colonies (especially if they always use the same breeder) have a narrower range of CSD genes than those using swarms.

 

[Fusion_power]

Just an opinion, but for the money and time tied up in making an estimate, it should be possible to collect a few thousand drones and perform DNA tests to know with certainty how many sex alleles are present.

 

[Finman]

Just an opinion, but for the money and time tied up in making an estimate, it should be possible to collect a few thousand drones and perform DNA tests to know with certainty how many sex alleles are present.

First we should collect few ten thousand dollars. Perhaps 100.000 $

What do you think the unit cost of indentifying one drone's alleles?

When do we start?

.

 

[For want of a better word]

First we should collect few ten thousand dollars. Perhaps 100.000 $

What do you think the unit cost of indentifying one drone's alleles?

When do we start?

.

£160 each

Do not see the UK government sponsoring that... looking to spend £6 Billion on a railway link from London to Manchester so that 20 minutes can be slashed off of the journey time!
If that could be spent on the impoverished NHS.... or solving the bee diseases problem.... or proper control of contaminated imports.....


Not going to happen is it?

Nos da

 

[Finman]

£160 each




Not going to happen is it?

Nos da

I looked from internet that a gene test is about 2000 $.

Well, the goal is 1000 drones and budget 2 000 000 $


Fusion has 20 hives and that value of his hives

per propduction unit is 100 000 $ / hive.

You get best inseminatet mite resistant DVDH queens with 500 $

.

it should be possible to collect a few thousand drones .

 

[Fusion_power]

Dedicated single tests can be performed for roughly $50 each in U.S. dollars. This would enable tests on 10,000 drones for $500,000. There would still be concerns over getting enough diversity in the sample so that 10,000 drones is representative of the sampling area.

 

[Finman]

getting enough diversity in the sample

However, bye a new bee stock. Counting does not add diversity.