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Systematic breeding in non-treatment management systems

14K views 36 replies 11 participants last post by  Oldtimer 
#1 ·
Its no secret that many beekeepers use systematic low-level, low tech, selective propagation measures to raise and maintain resistance to unwanted predatory organisms. The 'no-treatment' systems of management manage the varroa problem by utilizing longstanding traditional techniques; chiefly, making selection for mite resistance their highest selection criteria.

That this works, and it what accounts for their success is well evidenced, and the mechanisms are becoming well understood.

I'd like to be able to talk with other beekeepers about these techniques, to share and improve my understanding of how they are done and how they work; and to explore the informative parallels between natural selection and traditional animal breeding. Many non-treaters describe one of their aims as beekeeping 'naturally', so its good to understand just how nature keeps bees healthy and vigourous.

One of the aims of gaining a better understand of the techniques available to beekeepers, and the basic reasons why they work, is to be able to predict what will be likely to work in any given circumstances.

I would like to see discussions grounded in the well established but basic evolutionary biology and animal husbandry sources. While it will be good to look at the deeper nature of the mechanisms involved, I don't want high-level technical discussions or pet theories to drown out the simple foundations of non-treatment beekeeping.

The idea is that anything we learn here will be accessible to all beekeepers. The focus is practical non-treatment beekeeping.

Mike Bispham
 
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#3 ·
I would be very interested in this. I wonder if you could start by outlining your personal approach to treatment free beekeeping. I would very much like to get a sense of the different approaches.
Hello Adam,

I began collecting swarms and taking cut outs 3 years ago, and hiving on a mixture of recovered comb, foundation, and starter strips. The next year I made splits from the 2 survivors, (another had died through isolation starvation), added more swarms and cut-outs, and repaired queenless hives with a frame or two of eggs and brood from the strongest. With 12 colonies, mostly nucs, I didn't feed a lot going into winter, and made a silly design error with feeding candy which allowed mice into several hives in early spring.

I came through to this year with 4 hives, one of which subsequently failed, but 2 of the remaining built nicely. I've added more swarms and cutouts, made some splits, and tried to encouarge some serious comb building this year, after realising that comb shortage was slowing everything down. I got up to about 38 colonies, but have now tracked back down to about 28. I haven't fed this year yet, but I might help them on when it looks like ivy is over.

I haven't treated or manipulated at all against varroa, nor any other problem. So its rather a live and let die operation at this stage, offset I hope by the policy of making splits and requeening from the strongest.

The main objective is to get to a stage where I have plenty of bees (and comb) to work with, and enough variability to be able to locate strengths. I'll be tempted to assay for VHS using frozen brood tests next year, and setting up queen rearing on a scale sufficent to re-queen at will. I'm also mindful that if I have all similar colonies (in terms of queen age, year starting position and so on), I'll be able to make comparisons better. (This will mean tough decisions on things like stimulative feeding and nest spreading.)

I'm hoping my stock building strategy will have included at least some mite-managing skills. I have succeeded in bringing in 6 or 7 cut-out colonies with good histories, and I suspect about half my swarms are ferals. I know of ferals nearby, and don't have too many treated hives around to mess things up - though one of the reasons for going for good numbers is to be able to swamp the drone population.

Bought-in VSH and similar are not an option in the UK. But even if they were I'd like to try this way first. I want to raise bees that suit the locality - local ferals are first choice.

I'm lucky in being able to make my own hives (Nationals, using 6-frame nucs quite a bit) and in having some fairly good spots to park them - I can have 15 or so medium size hives at my own holding, and can place another 20 or more at spots within a 2 or 3 mile radius. I want to get up to 60 hives next year, with, hopefull, at least a majority equipped with a full brood box of combe and a couple of supers. I want more comb!)

So, that aside, its all been about finding suitable stock, sorting the goers from the duffers, and then bringing the apiary up to scratch. Next year will be about selecting for self-sufficient productivity, using queen raising, splits of various kinds, and seeking to maximise the route through the male side. I think I'll probably be fairly ruthless about this - perhps choose 3 or 4 lines that seem best, test for VSH, then use them to requeen half the weakest.

I'm not sure but I think that outlines the basic approach.

How about you Adam?

Mike
 
#17 ·
Counting mites in treatment free hives has showed me brood breaks here are the most important eliment as to why our local feral population is handling varroa and thriving, not VSH.
Good point, but it's not the only mechanism. I freely admit, I don't test for mites, but I do look for them. Even without brood breaks, most hives maintain a very low mite load year 'round. But that's here, 200 miles southeast.


Couple of points of how management undermines being able to keep bees treatments free in a commercial enviroment
We're not commercial, nor are most beekeepers. I was going to answer all your points, but I shall be skipping some of them as the Forum Rules state that this isn't the place to talk about commercial beekeeping. This certainly isn't the thread.


- Type of bee is also very important, bees that produce young continuously succumb to varroa quickly untreated.
But do they have to? I am confident that a bee could be created that doesn't suffer from that affliction and yet maintains the necessary brood pattern for the respective area. It may have to rely upon a different trait than the ones for which they are typically bred.


- Local survivors are the way to go for treatment free, BUT you have to manage them, like they manage themselve in the wild and not interfere with their ability to deal with the mites. Once you start managing them for prodution, their ability to cope goes right out the window.
I completely disagree. Manage bees as if it isn't a problem and eventually the problem will go away. That is what I have found. I do not manage to deal with mites or any other disease. I manage to keep bees. It's their responsibility to deal with mites.


- One other point - swapping drawn comb amongst hives spreads desease and should be avoided in a treatment free enviroment.
If it's their responsibility to deal with disease, then it's not a problem. A resistant hive will not see an infection. A weak hive will die of it. Anything in the narrow middle should be requeened for not producing enough honey.


Just my 2 cents.
Thank you.
 
#18 ·
We're not commercial, nor are most beekeepers. I was going to answer all your points, but I shall be skipping some of them as the Forum Rules state that this isn't the place to talk about commercial beekeeping. This certainly isn't the thread.
Poor choice of words on my part, I should have said "Couple of points of how management undermines being able to keep bees treatments free in a production environment".

I completely disagree. Manage bees as if it isn't a problem and eventually the problem will go away. That is what I have found. I do not manage to deal with mites or any other disease. I manage to keep bees. It's their responsibility to deal with mites.
I agree for us, but is it repeatable. Are the bees that you and I are producing going to work for others managed differently? I don't think mine will, managed in a production environment.

If it's their responsibility to deal with disease, then it's not a problem. A resistant hive will not see an infection. A weak hive will die of it. Anything in the narrow middle should be requeened for not producing enough honey.
I hope your right, you have more years of experiance than I.

I see some deseased comb doing cutouts and the quicker I get rid of it, the better the bees do.

Don
 
#4 ·
My story:

A lot of this is to be found elsewhere on this site, but things need to be repeated from time to time.

I started with 20 3 pound packages, an ambitious lad I was at the age of 19. I intended to be the second commercial treatment-free beekeeper. Things changed, and instead I now call myself an avid hobbyist. I have never treated with substance, don't do systematic splitting, don't do brood breaks on purpose, and only used screened bottom boards on a few hives (all of which died if I remember correctly) for the first couple years. I now have something like 26 hives and I think I've figured out how to do this thing.

We've oft heard the idea in treatment free beekeeping of 'breeding from the survivors. But how to get there?

We've oft heard the idea in treatment free beekeeping of 'breeding from the survivors. But how to get there? I actually really started splitting only a couple years ago. I started off so ambitiously that I quickly ran out of equipment and so never split, instead letting hives die off so I would have enough equipment for the remainders. I think I did one split the first year to make up a lost package, but that was about it until 2009. That winter, I lost all but two hives, and then commenced to buying more nucs and doing walk away splits. In 2011, I did a bunch of them, but I quickly realized that it was very inefficient, finding a handful of dead virgin queens collectively in front of the new hives. Also, several failed due to various reasons.

This year, I made a plan, researched some methods, and carried it through. I found what I consider the most efficient method of increase and which fits right straight into the Bond method. I kept track of which hives were performing well, had no obvious signs of mite issues, came through winter and built up quickly, and were sufficiently gentle. In one, I did a regular queenless cell builder/finisher. In the other, I did a queenright cell builder/finisher. The ones from the queenright hive were of better quality, finished more, and performed better.

So here's what happened. I robbed all but one frame of brood from seven hives to make queen castles in which were placed ripe queen cells. Those that came out well graduated into five frame or ten frame nucs. Some were sold, some were used to requeen, and some headed their own hives. I went from ten hives to 28 after selling seven. Naturally, I expect to be down to 20 after this first winter of testing for many of them.

The important philosophy and method behind the idea is to create a whole bunch of hives with the minimum amount of resources necessary from the best stock you have and evaluate the results. I think I have found the combination to that lock: grafting, queenright cell builder/finisher, queen castles, rob your middling hives for brood and stores, combine the dinks, requeen with the result.
 
#8 ·
Hi Solomon.

I robbed all but one frame of brood from seven hives to make queen castles in which were placed ripe queen cells.
All but one frame seems a lot to take. What was the thinking behind that - just the objective of multiplying hard? Part of what I mean is: the ones left behind must have had a pretty hard time of rebuilding. Do you seed syrup in this situation to help with comb building?

Also, do you know where we can find drawings for queen castles?

The important philosophy and method behind the idea is to create a whole bunch of hives with the minimum amount of resources necessary from the best stock you have and evaluate the results.
I agree - for people in our position anyway. Some people won't have the space, or will want to learn more slowly, but start out right, and make the right learning moves and investment in gear ready for a deeper go the following year. But before long, yes, dead right. Ruttner makes the link to nature:

"Breeding is by no means a human invention. Nature, which in millions of years
has bought forth this immense diversity of wonderfully adapted creatures, is the
greatest breeder. It is from her that the present day breeder learnt how it must
be done, excessive production and then ruthless selection, permitting only the
most suitable to survive and eliminating the inferior." Friedrich Ruttner,
Breeding Techniques and Selection for Breeding of the Honeybee, pg 45

There's a term for excessive production in nature - 'overfecundity'. Its a precondition for natural selection - there must be more than just replacement needs in order that the weak can be removed.

I'll be doing the same next spring. I tried to do it this year, but didn't have the resources in terms of worker numbers or comb. I tried queen raising and half a dozen small mating nucs, but they were not successful. If I'd known more about queen raising I'd have come to now with another 20 or 30 6-frame nucs. With that said just building hives and collecting swarms rushed me off my feet, as I have other stuff that must be done. Collecting swarms and cut outs achieved this first stage anyway.

I think I have found the combination to that lock: grafting, queenright cell builder/finisher, queen castles, rob your middling hives for brood and stores, combine the dinks, requeen with the result.
That sounds like gold to me.

Mike
 
#5 ·
solid plans for sure.

since the workers carry only half of the queen's genes, have ya'll thought about pushing for drones in your
strong hives?

i'm in an area with a good feral population, i'm hoping that some of the survivor traits from the feral drones are being passed into my yard via mating.
 
#9 · (Edited)
since the workers carry only half of the queen's genes, have ya'll thought about pushing for drones in your strong hives?
I'm planning to keep large hives (unlimited nests, spread for population and maybe drone foundation) scattered around my apiary. Headed by evaluated queens.

i'm in an area with a good feral population, i'm hoping that some of the survivor traits from the feral drones are being passed into my yard via mating.
No reason why not. To my mind its one of the best strategies.

Mike
 
#6 ·
I started two top bar hives three seasons ago. I treated with oxalic acid the first Fall, and my bees made it through with a tiny cluster.

Second season, I tried drone culling and oxalic acid and my bees made it through winter with bigger clusters.

This spring, I pulled an early drone comb to find it teeming with mites, and I just felt like giving up - on treating for mites. The bees seemed healthy, but there were tons of mites. After reading what seems like a million conflicting ideas and opinions from people more experienced than I, I have decided that there is no single human authority on how to effectively deal with mites, and no one really knows all the ways the bees deal with them on their own.

So I made a resolution to quit treating, Because I don't know the total effect of my actions, and that worries me. I feel like my effort to 'help' might be doing more harm than good. I've decided it's better to take that variable out of play in my operation - minimize my manipulations and let the bees do what they do as much as I can.

So I'm not treating. I caught a swarm, bought two local nucs and created spilts. Added 8 frame langstroth hives to my top bars, and now have 13 colonies going into winter.

I'm looking at threads like this to help me to map out my management plan going forward.

Adam
 
#14 ·
This all sounds great. However none of you guys are truly breeding treatment free bees. I don't say that to be defeatist or mean spirited. Follow if you will and answer these questions.

1. Are you really breeding or just letting your surviving hive reproduce? There is a difference.

2. If you are breeding, how are you deciding what to breed from? Are you are basing your decisions on hive strength, populations, apparent ability to survive? If so since the queen has mated wit say 15 or so drones, the drone mix has as much to do with overall hive performance as the queen does.

3. How are you managing drones? Drone flooding is not a dependable method of attaining the desired genetics. If you really intend to breed, you almost have to use ai on the queen with selected drone semen.

4. How do you limit outside genetics? Once again the only way is to select larva from a desired queen and AI. Otherwise you have very little chance to avoid cross breeding with less than favorable drones.

5. How do you access your new queens for selection? This take time(years) ro verify resistance and the propagate.

If you are not using AI or are not completely isolated then you are not in control of your breeding program. If you are not checking for mites and other pathogens/diseases then you really don't know what you are selecting for.
I believe you are making the best choices you can bases on limited information and time. But if you really want to breed to treatment free you have to do more than put hives out there and let them live or die. Open mating in a non isolated area is not a viable method of breeding. Introduction of outside genetics must be controlled and evaluated. But once again the only real way to do this dependably is through II.
 
#16 ·
However none of you guys are truly breeding treatment free bees.
I disagree.


1. Are you really breeding or just letting your surviving hive reproduce?
Breeding. Little to no swarming goes on here.


2. If you are breeding, how are you deciding what to breed from? Are you are basing your decisions on hive strength, populations, apparent ability to survive? If so since the queen has mated wit say 15 or so drones, the drone mix has as much to do with overall hive performance as the queen does.
I breed based on a bunch of aspects, first, did the hive survive the winter? If not, I don't breed from it.
Second, can I work the hive without gloves while it's raining? Did the hive make a goodly amount of honey last year? Did the hive build up well this spring? Most other aspects weed themselves out. There are a lot more things you can breed for, but I find that the hives that do the above things well just about never have problems with other aspects. For instance, I had one hive that produced a lot of sticky propolis. It didn't make honey and didn't build up well, requeened, problem solved.


3. How are you managing drones? Drone flooding is not a dependable method of attaining the desired genetics. If you really intend to breed, you almost have to use ai on the queen with selected drone semen.
I have a location to the north and south of my location to add drones to the mix. I feel AI is unecessary and somewhat antithetical to the ideal of treatment free beekeeping.



4. How do you limit outside genetics? Once again the only way is to select larva from a desired queen and AI. Otherwise you have very little chance to avoid cross breeding with less than favorable drones.
By letting them die over winter or by not breeding from undesirable hives.



5. How do you access your new queens for selection? This take time(years) ro verify resistance and the propagate.
I think you mean assess, so I'll reply on that assumption. One or two winters pretty well does it for me. After increase made from the same queen for two years, I move to different ones to avoid too much inbreeding.



If you are not using AI or are not completely isolated then you are not in control of your breeding program. If you are not checking for mites and other pathogens/diseases then you really don't know what you are selecting for.
I do know what I am selecting for, I am selecting for survival, gentleness, and production. I don't care about the specifics, and many small beekeepers don't have time or resources to care either. I don't care what trait the bees use to survive, only that they do, same with gentleness and production. The results are well within acceptable to me.


I believe you are making the best choices you can bases on limited information and time. But if you really want to breed to treatment free you have to do more than put hives out there and let them live or die. Open mating in a non isolated area is not a viable method of breeding. Introduction of outside genetics must be controlled and evaluated. But once again the only real way to do this dependably is through II.
No. What you're describing is a totally different mindset to the way I think and carryout my beekeeping practice. Control is for treatments and inbreeding to express a certain trait. I'm not going there. My method fits just fine with the idea of keeping bees in the context of a hobbyist. I don't need every hive to produce a bumper crop every year. I don't need every hive to survive every winter. I don't need to breed for a certain specific trait for the bees to survive. And I don't need to control much because it's not necessary. Nature controls what I need to control for me. Outside of that, I have all the control I need by getting rid of mean or unproductive queens. Winter does the rest. This simple method of breeding from what I want and discarding the rest is the same thing that all manner of farmers have done for thousands of years. There is only so far you can go with it. II is only going to produce a hive, same as mine. Maybe it produces more honey or is nicer or whatever, maybe not. There's no guarantee either way. I've never even seen anyone guarantee that the drone they got is from the hive they got it from.
 
#22 · (Edited)
Mike,

Pretty much the answer I expected. Looking for affirmation from likeminded keepers. You are not actually doing systematic breeding. You are managing in a treatment free manner. There is a large difference. You have no control over what your queens breed with. Every time you bring cut outs or swarms into the apiary, you are bringing in possibly treated bees, or poor survivors, which will also saturate the area with poor or at best, unknown drones. By the time you can access the survivability of your queen, you have already released thousands of unproven drones into the area. This is not a breeding program. It is a management style. There is nothing wrong with managing that way, but that is what it is management, not a breeding program.

It does not matter whether you agree or not, it is what it is. You allude to rolling the dice. I agree all breeding is a dice roll. But when you control what breeds and when, you are rolling with say two six sided die instead of two 20 sided die. You may get what you want but probably not. You can increase your chances a lot by controlling the breeding, with how and when. Furthermore, by controlling both sides, you are not inadvertently promulgating inferior genetics by allowing unselected drones and queens survive.

Yes, your management style is better than none and more likely to result in treatment free bees than a similar management style with treatments, but don't delude yourself into thinking you are systematically breeding treatment free bees.

If you want to do that, you will either have to control the drones input via instrumental insemination.

But at the end of the day we each have to keep our minds open and do the best we can within our abilities, time, talents and resources. Doing something almost always beats doing nothing.
 
#24 ·
Mike,

Pretty much the answer I expected. Looking for affirmation from likeminded keepers. You are not actually doing systematic breeding. You are managing in a treatment free manner. There is a large difference.
JB,

I don't know about 'affirmation'; I'm looking to share thoughts about what works and why.

I think we've stated our positions now. You have made a fair point, but the issue has become one of semantics and unsupported denial of efficacy. To reiterate my position on the semantic side: 'breeding' is a term wide enough to be legitimately used to describe what we do. Here is the (UK) English Oxford Dictionary definition (The US English is slightly different and you may think supports your position more strongly):

Breed
verb (past and past participle bred /bred/) [with object] cause (an animal) to produce offspring, typically in a controlled and organized way:

Examples of use:
'he wants to see the animals his new stock has been bred from[no object] (of animals) mate and then produce offspring:'

'toads are said to return to the pond of their birth to breed'

(as adjective breeding)

'the breeding season develop (a kind of animal or plant) for a particular purpose or quality:

'these horses are bred for this sportrear and train'

'(someone) to behave in a particular way or have certain qualities:

Theresa had been beautifully bred cause'

'(something) to happen or occur, typically over a period of time:

success breeds confidence'

Physics creates (fissile material) by nuclear reaction.

noun
a stock of animals or plants within a species having a distinctive appearance and typically having been developed by deliberate selection.

a sort or kind of person or thing:

a new breed of entrepreneurs was brought into being

You have no control over what your queens breed with.
It would be accurate to say we have limited control. That's not 'no control'.

Every time you bring cut outs or swarms into the apiary, you are bringing in possibly treated bees, or poor survivors, which will also saturate the area with poor or at best, unknown drones. By the time you can access the survivability of your queen, you have already released thousands of unproven drones into the area.
This is only occuring at the outset (when initial stock is being collected). After that any new entrants can be kept at a remote apairy while they are tested. This is a good point, and a useful reminder to manage the way new genetics are bought in. Thank you.

Again, having large colonies with large drone populations both within and at a distance from the apairy loads the dice toward your proven genetics.

This is not a breeding program. It is a management style. There is nothing wrong with managing that way, but that is what it is management, not a breeding program.
Whatever: its accurate to say that this is a tradional method by which bees are kept healthy and vigorous. If you read, for example, Wedmore91932) or Manley (1945) you'll see that this is their prescription for propagation in a commecial apiary - although they preferred pure-race bees. And they describe this as 'breeding'.

They managed, its worth noting, to maintain their strains in the face of mongrels and other imported races (and the indiginous bee) by these methods alone. That demonstrates that it works - and that, in the final analysis, brings it quite firmly into the description 'breeding'.

It does not matter whether you agree or not, it is what it is.
'It' here is you claiming narrow interpretation of the term 'breeding' - reserving it for mid-tech AI. That's all.

You allude to rolling the dice. I agree all breeding is a dice roll. But when you control what breeds and when, you are rolling with say two six sided die instead of two 20 sided die.
I'll accept, for the sake of argument, the odds you supply. But the combination of propagating only from winning queens gives us control over 50% of the parentage material. Repeating that process by requeening the weaker rapidly brings the required genes forward. They can then be made to supply perhaps half of the male side - and we have 75% breeding pair control (and the advantages of open competitive mating).

That's not all that far from the odds you get with 100% parental. And each time its repeated things are moving the right way.

You may get what you want but probably not.
There is plenty of evidence that demonstrates that it works. If you are choosing not to look at it, that's up to you.

Yes, your management style is better than none and more likely to result in treatment free bees than a similar management style with treatments...
For reasons that I've outlined to you previously on another thread (which you haven't responded to), treating, unless accompanied by a strict selective propagation program, absolutely inhibits the rise of resistance.

I don't want to have that argument here. We know what sorts of things work, and we want to talk about and share them. The premise of this thread it that low-level low-tech selective propagation is at the heart of successful non-treatment beekeeping, and that its fair to describe that as 'breeding. I've no desire to contest either the premise of the thead or the semantics of that key term anymore.

Best wishes,

Mike
 
#28 ·
How about breeding by FedEx?
I used to bring in new stock, 1, 2, 3, or 4 queens per year, depending on the year. The funny thing was, when I got to the point of buying 4 queens, I started having lots of bees surviving the winter, which means I still have two of those queens (marked) and a number of offspring from a third.

It is an option to buy already resistant stock and StevenG has posted numerous times on how he's done that and been quite successful, keeping over 30 hives, having very low winter mortality, and making great honey. But that's off topic.

Mike wants to talk about low-tech breeding so let's keep it on topic. No 'Fed->Ex', no 'you're not actually breeding.' If you want to talk about something else, start your own thread. This thread is Mikes and we're talking about what he wants to talk about.
 
#29 · (Edited by Moderator)
I have a couple of reoccurring thoughts regarding "Natural Selection" type of focus on a breeding program. Or treatment free methods.

First and simplest I will just put out there. How does the Keeping of bees at all make it impossible to be treatment free. I understand that treatment is meant to attempt to cure from disease. but my idea of treatment is broader than that. As in how where you treated the last time you visited the in laws?

Associated with my first thought and to me far more important is this one.
Basically treatment free to me is a recognition that nature has a better method of selecting than we do. we make mistakes that weaken the species. So treatment free is also a returning toward (not to, but toward) natural selection.

I will assume that the majority will agree that natural selection can and most likely will solve these problems. It is a fair bet that if you are an advocate of treatment free beekeeping you have a faith in natural selection.

A stable population is one in which the number of any given species remains the same. For bees I will consider a colony as an individual of the species. So regardless of how many offspring are produced when the parent has passed only one offspring has survived. In bees I consider there is only one colony producing parent, the queen. so in a stable system for every hive that dies out it has manged to only produce one surviving colony.

So just what sort of numbers are we looking at, when do they happen and what might be the importance of those losses on improving the qualities of the bees?

I will just take some numbers that it seems to me are fairly common. A healthy hive that is left to manage itself will produce something in the neighborhood of 20 queens. cast a primary swarm and multiple after swarms.

I don't know the nature of an after swarm as well as the primary swarm but my understanding is it is multiple tiny clusters of bees that will actually group together each containing several queens.

It also seems to me that the overall opinion is that a primary swarm has a better chance of survival then an after swarm. a larger swarm has a better chance than a smaller one etc. But is this true. Are our observations in beekeeping being altered due to the fact we "Keep" bees.

Regardless of the rats next of questions this alone can bring up. At this point just where the issue of only one queen, one colony can now survive nature is accepting 95% losses.

Are you willing to accept that only one out of every 20 queens will survive? That according to the above evidence is the direction yo may be choosing to go.

Is it critical that you accept that part of natural selection? I personally believe it is. It is just such heavy losses that improve the species. Eventually after successive generations of such loses the species in improved to some degree and the population begins to increase.

Also keep in mind that one of the ways nature stops a plague is that the victim species is driven to very near extinction. when the disease no longer has nay hosts. it then dies out. the population of the host is then able to recover. Sometimes not. extinction does happen naturally.

It has been observed that feral colonies are development resistance.

I suspect a fairly heavy loss in queens is made right at the outset. I suspect at best only 25% of the queens that swarm from the hive ever live long enough to find a location to colonies. They die or are killed in the cluster or shortly after the bees find a place to build the hive.

What is the survival rate of primary swarms> what is the survival rate of secondary swarms. What is the survival rate of queens in a secondary swarm?

Just one idea that has come to mind that might improve queen production. No proof just an idea that at least falls partial in line with the thoughts above.

Produce 20 times the number of queens desired from carefully chosen queen stocks. Keep these queen cells in groups of 20. and only the one queen able to survive gets to live and produce a colony. I seriously doubt there is much accuracy in that or that it woudl even be on the right track. but at least it give some idea of what matching natural selection might look like.

Keep in mind that in feral colonies even these sort of losses are resulting in barely noticeable resistance. Natural selection is not so much about the strong surviving as it is about the weak dying.

Mice. one in 365 offspring in just a single year can be allowed to live in a stable population. In many birds only one in 35 to 40 survive after one year.

Even bears only one in about a dozen or so can survive and remain stable. and that is during the parents entire life.

In deer a species low on the food chain only 1 in 4 or so over the parents lifetime. funny how the prey species has lower production numbers. That is because any species that has to hunt and kill to eat is more likely to die than thrive. Nothing has to happen to keep a bear population in check other than it doesn't find enough food. Mountain lions is about 1 in 24 survive over the lifetime of the parent.

Nature produces some fairly grand numbers just to remain stable. death is the rule. death is the control. Avoiding gross odds of dying is what produces blood lines that are very suitable to survival.

Okay I am not saying anything with all that except. What if that is what it takes?
 
#30 ·
What if that is what it takes?
In my experience, it doesn't, or it shouldn't. It may at first, but we're beyond that stage now. Coincidentally, I have one of my original twenty if you don't count the dozen or more descendents I have of it. What I mean is, one of the original hives survives, in the same hive, with natural line of succession from the original queen that I bought in 2003.

What I have found is that once the population and resistance levels out you get what Michael Palmer describes as thirds. A third of new hives are great, a third average, and a third dinks. Way better odds that one in twenty.

It has also been my experience that afterswarms are not nearly as common in the US, being more common to strains of bees (i. e. 'swarmy' like the German Black Bee) which we do not keep nearly as much. I believe it is due to our selective breeding over the last 150 years for bees that swarm less.

Natural swarming, or walkaway splits, or natural supersedure is very wasteful, yielding fewer than one in ten viable queens from one episode. That's why we use grafting and cell builders and mating nucs, to speed up the process, to make more queens, and to increase faster. But there is a price to be paid. It deselects for emergence time in queens. Fortunately, some of it is made up through natural swarming and supersedures, but it is something to keep in mind.
 
#33 ·
I tend to agree, but I cannot discount the effect completely. Remember that a freshly hatched queen due to her early emergence is 'not done' in a sense. Her exoskeleton is till very soft, much less developed than a worker.

If the first queen out were somehow superior, we'd see one hive do much better than all the rest, but I still see thirds. What the effect results in is the genes that might retard development will be eliminated. But there are a lot of queens eliminated for one reason or another anyway. I don't think it's something we need to worry about, especially since its been done for over a hundred years. Like other things, I think this one is self-righting.
 
G
#35 ·
My sister is working on beekeeping, she want to involve me in, but I am totally a fresher in this region, I appreciate your ideas that combine avaliable techniques and natrual ways together, I will follow your post, hope you will post more experience on it.
 
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