When queen rearing what traits do you look for?

[blackbrood]

DREAM LIST

Of course it is a dream list but I wanted to be aware of what I could breed for.

As a new bee keeper looking at breeding one or two queens, for me traits should be at the fore front of my breeding efforts.

When I sat down and started making the list I would not have come up with half of the the options on the list but then again if you ask most individuals nether would they. Together quite a lot of suggestions were made and then I started thinking about which ones were important to my perception of what I want from bee keeping and my bees

BB

 

[blackbrood]

Black brood
Try this for Rons info.http://www.moraybeedinosaurs.co.uk/stanton_park.html
kev

thanks Beebreeder. I have not seen this site and I have been trying to track sites down about Ron Hoskings and his endeavours and found very little.

 

[Finman]

I could breed for.


BB

I cannot argue with two hive owner. It would be easier to quess lotto numbers.

 

[blackbrood]

I cannot argue with two hive owner. It would be easier to quess lotto numbers.

LOL... everyone has to start some where Finman. Just because you never looked to the future, or planned or thought about expansion when you had 2 hives dont knock it in others.

Or did you just simply start with lots of hives that were given to you as a freebie , no hard work, no planning, no fore thought , no reading, no research , no speaking to like minded individuals?

 

[hedgerow pete]

because ihave a small tock of starter breeder queens my breeding programe(lol) is basicly breed 20 queens and then remove all the queens with bad traites and keep the few that show promise

i would love to be able to breed queens properly and with reasonable reasults

i was looking at several years ago buying in very exspensive queens as stock to breed from with then the idea that a goog start of my breeder programe.

very much in the ideal of farmers buying top quality stock to breed from rather than waiting 20 years for me to get my act together

 

[Finman]

LOL... everyone has to start some where Finman.

Yes and those starters know everything because they know so few. That is life.

You are not able even listen to experienced beekeepers. If you read experienced guys in this chain, they say "good if you hunt couple of those features".

One thing is that you need not to be experineced and you may buy most of those features you have mentioned.

Beebreeding has been efficient 70 years when they inventented artificial insemination.

First step in breeding was a frame invention. You may open the hive and shange the queen.

 

[blackbrood]

I cannot argue with two hive owner.

Finman, you are a funny man., quite clearly you are and can argue with a two hive owner... LOL.

 

[blackbrood]

Y
You are not able even listen to experienced beekeepers. If you read experienced guys in this chain, they say "good if you hunt couple of those features".

by this you mean you! I , you will be surprised to hear, disagree. I have not mentioned breeding for any of the traits I posted the list just to say these are traits that can be bred for. I never mention I was breeding for them all or any.

I will be breeding for some


BB

 

[Scutellator]

If you read experienced guys in this chain, they say "good if you hunt couple of those features".

TRUE.
You could not expect when rearing just a single queen, that SHE will be the ONE with all the qualities you want, just because you had pray a lot. You can rear thousand of them and still could not expect that, not even in billion.
But it's very probable to find some of the sought properties in a single queen and the rest of them in other queens. One step at a time. And hopefully one day you will be closer to integrating all the qualities in a strain.

I want to mention one example here.
At the present bee breeding program in Bulgaria there is lots of effort to standardize the bee- every collony that show bees with yellow markings is banned immediately from the program. Then the rest are sampled and are further strained by wing measurings and genetic fingerprinting. By irony, the more they are trying to weed out those markings, the more frequently they appear.

Beebreeding is exceptional case in animal breeding.

Finman I apopogize if I've offended you.

 

[Finman]

You could not expect when rearing just a single queen,

But it's very probable to find some of the sought properties in a single queen
u.

however it is better to look that it have 6 legs and 2 antenna. Sometimes some of them is missing or is rigid when workers had violated them. oooppps now it flies somewhere, come back, hey come back...