Drone Yard

[hilltop hives]

I'm planning on jumping into Queen raising next year and I need some advise on setting up good drone yards. I have a couple of out yards as well as my home yard to work with but I just can't get my mind wrapped around the drone colonies and their layout. Diagrams would be helpful.

[BjornBee]

hilltop,

Text book situation and diagrams normally do not work in practical terms. Finding locations never are in line with anything on paper.

Start with a yard as your home or breeding yard. Then on a map, look for other suitable yards to surround that yard. These don't need to be just drone hives or in some way "extra" or "waste" hives. Use these sites as honey yards or nuc building (comb) yards.

I have a detailed map of my county and after choosing what yards would be the best queen yards, I made a two mile circle on it. This allowed me to drive around and look for yards on the edge of the circle. This way, once a yard is found and another circle is drawn, the circles intersect about 1/2 to 1 miles from each yard. My best yard has five drone source yards. It's not always as easy as the books make it seem having a yard this distance or that location.

The drone yards need to be maintained with genetic stock different than the queen stock you have for breeders.

Sometimes it is even suggested to have a couple remote yards where you have queen evaluation yards with different genetic stock. That way on different years, you can rotate of bring in new genetics to breed. Keeping the lines separate is one of the biggest keys for hybrid vigor and genetic diversity, but its one of the most difficult to maintain for a small breeder. So sometimes just keeping good breeding yards with good drone saturation, and bringing in a good queen yearly from outside sources is best. As you grow bigger and focus on your own stock, then maintaining a line is easier. Easier, but certainly not easy.

I have wondered if queens or drones flew in a certain direction based on such items as scent from the winds. Like...could they smell hives or queens from the west if that is the way the winds primarily blow, etc. But studies have suggested that DCA's exist in the same spot year after year. So it's probably based on geographic locations. So I just try to have the drone yards surrounding the breeding yards.

Text book setup does not always exist. Just remember that the goal is to have your queens being raised from a different source than the drones you are providing. Even if you have just one yard, bring in a queen from a reliable quality breeder and use that. If your hives have been at a location for a number of years already, you have been slowly saturating the local area with your stock. So to just pick a queen to breed from an existing yard, may mean already breeding back to the same stock. Although many people can breed for the first year and see no problems.

So spend the first year setting up your yards, getting skilled at grafting, and perhaps testing and placing some queens in a remote site. (When I started I bought 25 queens each from various places and put them in out yards. Then picked which one's looked good to start with the following year.) That way, the following year you can select the best queen you have and start breeding knowing the queens and drones are completely separate genetically (in practical terms of the pool of genetics we have)

[Eaglerock]

I would say Bjornbee knows what he is talking about. I know you wanted help Hilltop, but I also have learned something.

Although it is a lot to take in everything he said, however, you could print it out and study it and use it and then when you have more questions write them down before you forget them, then later post them.

[longrangedog]

I'm somewhat confused (easily done) by conflicting info on diversity when breeding queens. I know of two large commercial guys who have been participants in the USDA Russian project for several years. They go to great lengths to have only USDA Russian bees so that they produce Russian Queens as opposed to some type of hybrid. The use these in their own operation and also sell queens and packages. This seems to conflict with Bjorns breeding philosophy which is widely held and frequently presented in bee publications. I've been buying queens from Purvis, Tabers, and other breeders in order to expand my genetic pool. Purvis uses genetic diversity as a selling point. How does the Russian breeders program produce the consistently high quality queens without diverse genetics?

[BjornBee]

Longrangedog,

You have to look at this as a multiple layered effort. For breeders such as myself, I need other breeders, or sources of other genetics, to keep diversity and hybrid vigor at its peak.

If you look at the bee genetics from a huge world wide pool, we need as close to pure as possible in regards to Italians, Russians, etc., and as much variation to the different strains as possible. As a whole, this allows as many possible selection chances to combat different possible problems in the future. For instance...if a particular virus is found to be deadly to one strain of bees, hopefully we have another that can deal with it. Russians may be the answer this time, AHB the next and so on.

So we do not want a fully mixed genetic pool of bees. What we need are protectors and breeders on several different levels.

Malcolm Sanford is trying to spearhead efforts to find and isolate as pure lines as possible around the world. The problem is that much of the world is like what we have done. They ship bees around etc. Finding pure Italians or Carni's may be difficult because beekeepers in those areas have mixed the bees also.

So if we can keep the pools separate, then we need breeders to keep the lines going. We need Russian breeders, Carni breeders, Italians, etc. Some line offer traits that may be useful to one group of beekeepers, while traits from another may help another group.

Then we have breeders who select for a variety of desirable traits based on demand and the ability to mix and breed bees.

So we have three things going on.
1)We need to help regional bee populations stay intact in areas of the world so we can pull pure stock from time to time.
2) We need breeders to maintain the pools as pure as we can. (Which does not always mean having them as we like with all the traits as positive)
3) Then we have breeders and producers who select traits based on demand.

Problems I see is

1) Malcolm has no money and needs help.
2)The Russian USDA program ran out of funds and now the Russian line is left to the Russian breeder association. Open mating, no matter how good, will eventually result in a much watered down version of what the Russians should really be. Not from a selection criteria standpoint, but from a genetic standpoint.
3)The above two effects the third and what is left to select from.

What we do not want, is a a total hybridizing of the bees across the country. Hybrid vigor and diversity is something best for end production bees being produced, but the sources need to be maintained so we always have the options of selecting what we want, what we need, and what may help the bees in the future.

In a nutshell.... we need Russian breeders. The buying public needs to make the decision if these pure lines will fit all the expectations of what you want in a bee. To keep Russians as pure as we can, means we may have to accept the good and the bad. While breeders such as myself may see the benefits of diversity, we may also lose out in other areas while selecting for traits people want. I do not want to be held to some guideline that may not be what I’m looking for in a bee program. So, although I realize the need for Russian breeders, I have chosen other factors for my breeding protocol.

For your last question...
The Russians breeders association right now have a certain amount of lines that they will trade back and forth as outlined in the program.

[longrangedog]

That helped. Thanks.

[adamf]

Great information in this thread.

Animal breeding/Animal husbandry's goal is to select from desirable units
to propagate desirable offspring. Making progress towards a local
population that expresses desirable qualities the breeder has determined
are economically and aesthetically valued.

Achieving this for the most part requires some degree of crossing/mating
within the population to group desirable traits to be expressed. Simply:
some degree of inter-breeding within the population.

Honey Bees are very sensitive to genetic homogeneity because their basic
sex (read: worker or dead egg) is determined genetically, NOT chromosomally
like ours.

Thus, if a breeder with good intentions selects a fantastic population from
what he/she is working with, the chances of the future generations losing
vigor due to poor brood pattern from like (homogeneous) sex alleles becomes
greater every season.

This is why Bjorn suggest bringing in new stock. This is why in the Russian program,
each breeder gives some of his/her stock to the others: if one gets bees too inbreed at the sex allele locus,
one's bees will not perform or be very hardy.

One has to zero-in on what one wants in bee breeding, then zoom back out a
little bit to ensure the fitness of the population. Or one can have completely separate
populations and cross them occasionally. Or trade stock with other like-minded breeders.

Having some out-crossing (Outbreeding) when one is queen rearing is a GOOD thing.

Adam Finkelstein
www.vpqueenbees.com

[TwT]

look at this page below, it shows how they worked the russian lines, seems they imported 100 queens and set up 24 different lines.

http://www.russianbreeder.org/docs.htm