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Genetic Diversity: What Would Brother Adam Do... Today?

29K views 96 replies 24 participants last post by  squarepeg 
#1 ·
I have been reading about how Brother Adam traveled the world over years, identifying different races of bees, and returning to his home apiary with queens of these different races or strains in order to add them to his breeding program. Then I was also listening to a discussion about the importance of genetic diversity to the strength and vitality of the bees.

And I thought, how would one feasibly go about creating the widest genetic diversity in one's operation today?

To travel around and get permits and to gain access to the so many regions and bring back queens to one place as Brother Adam did would be nearly impossible today. It would certainly be cost prohibitive for most. Plus there's political upheaval and violence in a number of places... And now we have the work of Brother Adam to reference, so there's no need to try and 're-do' what he did.

But there might be value in genetic diversity - to a point. I don't think you'd want to get into such wild variations that you'd be a danger, or major pest to people around you, or to other beekeepers.

So, how would a person create the most genetically diverse - yet commercially viable - stock in a single operation today?

I've read that just a small number of breeders supply most of the world's queens, so what would be the best a regular beekeeper could do?

Adam
 
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#69 ·
So, if I am a beekeeper, trying to make the best start in moving toward the best bees for my part of the world, would it be a good idea to bring in a selection from a number of different breeders to begin with, as well as to collect swarms and cut-outs, and then select from there?

Or would you recommend just getting just one "kind" of bee from a reputable breeder, as well as collecting swarms and doing cut-outs and selecting from there?

Or some other route?

Everything takes time. So in my own efforts, I just want to do my best to head down the best path I can. Asking questions here is my effort to benefit from people more experienced than I am. I hope to avoid some time-wasting efforts on poor ideas.

Joe says "...knowing what is best for the bees, VSH and hygienic behavior being two that were mentioned. Both behaviors occur at very low frequencies in an unselected population. Perhaps there is a reason for this."

This is what concerns me personally, and part of my questions surrounding diversity. Our interests are not always in the best interest of the bees, and sometimes we don't know it. So is it best to begin with stock with a wide range of genetic backgrounds, so that the bees of my apiary have the most "material" to work with as the "regional selection process" begins?

Adam
 
#71 ·
No Jim...that is not the point.

You do a number of things to prevent swarming. You don't do everything possible (inspect each frame every day or every week), why? Because the expense of losing a few swarms is low compared to the cost of labor to inspect every frame every week, and the cost to the colony that such a disruption causes. This doesn't mean that "a swarm is better than an inspection", it just means that some methods of inspection are worth your while, but other methods are not.

deknow
 
#72 ·
Jim,

In theory, traits like VSH are a good idea, in practice, not so much. Varroa Sensitive Hygiene is misleading. SENSITIVE is the key word here. It turns out bees with high “VSH” expression are Sensitive about a lot of things. They uncap and remove not only Varroa infested brood, but seemingly healthy and viable brood too. The cost of sacrificing healthy brood is very high to a colony. The cost of making “mistakes” really decreases the value of trait like VSH.

Hygienic behavior is another behavioral trait, although not as intense as VSH that requires bees to correctly identify diseased brood. If you go back and read the original research published by Spivak, their highly expressive lines did not always clean up/prevent AFB. Keep in mind this was with the highly selected and inseminated test colonies. What happens in the real world?

Dean also commented about people advertising a trait, but seldom doing the selection and evaluation for the trait. This is a big challenge for beekeepers to sort through. Testing for hygienic behavior is not too bad, but screening for VSH is time consuming!

Joe
 
#73 ·
Great.

So where does that leave people trying to work toward treatment free bees? If VSH isn't really a good thing, and if queen sellers aren't even necessarily selecting and evaluating for it anyway...

Where does that leave one, in terms of picking a direction to go? How does one make the best-guided attempt? What does work in practice?

Adam
 
#75 ·
What does work in practice?
That was one of the primary issues that attracted me to the Pol-Line bee. These bees were outcrossed VSH bees that were field-tested and proven performers. The result, at least in my two years of experience with them has been outstanding. During the same two-year period I also tested pure VSH bees and had very poor results. Out of the 20 VSH queens (3 II and 17 F1 daughters) I've brought into my yards NONE are still alive today. In fact, I have only overwintered 1 VSH F1 daughter during this period, most dwindled and died before Fall.
 
#76 ·
OK
I probably (if not already) will be labeled as a heretic after this post. This very useful discussion supports my personal feelings (as a biologist,not beekeeper) regarding bees genetic specifics. This is what I would do to accommodate Adam's initial request for bee-diversity :

Scenario 1 (remote area, enough space, no established bee-colonies around).
I would create 5-6 small isolated bee-yards at the distance 2-3 miles, so they are overlap, but not too much. I would place one established beehive with pure (as much as you wish) queen in each bee-yard and let them bee for couple of years. I would let them swarm and become feral if they wish. Each bee-yard should have a different initial genetics (pure queen). Eventually, some hives will die and would be replaced on bees with different genetics. Colonies, hopefully, will grow (some) and bees from different bee-yards will overlap and mix. Note that this is most difficult scenario because commercially it is completely non-sound.

Scenario 2 (urban area, small number of colonies).
Simple - adopt a local feral bees! Let them grow their own queens. Do not re-queen since it will break a reproduction cycle and introduce unwanted genetics.

Scenario 3 (near commercial bee-estate).
Do not waste your time - move away! Commercial bee-estate would be a constant source of numerous problems AND mono-everything (bees, nectar source, treatments etc). I would imagine, that commercial people would think the same way about you: that you do something wrong with bees (do not treat, for instance) and it affects their business.

It would be great if more experienced people would point on obvious flaws in my model and please, keep in mind,it is just my thoughts, which may be different from yours. Sergey
 
#80 ·
If you are looking for a recipe, or paint by numbers for breeding bees, I will have to disappoint you.

No matter what you do there are trade offs. I can't really offer any more than to help you understand the tradeoffs so that you can make your own decisions. You are also free to make your own decisions without understanding the tradeoffs.

I know few (if any) beekeepers who are really happy with their queens....except for those that breed their own...and they all understand that breeding is a process...they are both happy with them, and are always trying to improve them. The type of bee that Adam wants is not a mystery....productive, mite resistant, gentle to work....this doesn't make me a mind reader, this is what virtually everyone wants. Have you noticed that no one is selling them? Have you noticed that there are no credible easy answers? Do you think that perhaps a deeper understanding of the issues might help Adam make decisions that will get him where he wants to be?

deknow
 
#81 ·
adam, if i were going to trap out ferals or catch their swarms, i would try to locate them early in the season. that way, i would at least know they made it through the harsh winter up there. i think that would be a good starting point to getting some hearty bees.
 
#82 ·
Adam, Hope,hope,hope that those 10 Buckfasts you got have some mite resistance. Look for the one, ones, none that live from
being eaten up with mites. Raise your next round of queens from those. Don't cross your current Buckfasts with any VSH bees
in an attempt to transfer some type of mite resistance into the genes they currently have. It's just to risky and complicated,and
you might not get a perfected bee from it. Don't raise bees from those Buckfast/VSH mutts that make it through next winter in an
attempt to tune your living bees into something that you like. It's not like it's been done before...Oh, wait. Yeah, catch those same
feral swarms, from the same stock you could buy where you're at now. The same stock that you've already been working with.
Okay I'll go with that.
 
#83 ·
Deknow,

Thank you for your detailed response. While it is not 'paint by numbers' as you say, it is still the kind of answer I'm looking for. I appreciate all the thoughtful responses each of you has offered.

It seems that, like so much of beekeeping, we just don't know what to do. There are few 'right' answers, as a total understanding of the bee escapes us. Dean, your recent posting of the talk by Randy Quinn is relevant to this conversation as well. For all his 'success' in bee breeding, he seemed to think it was all misguided somehow, and that is telling.

I'm going to start a new thread which is more specifically focused on my specific situation, and how I might move forward. The title of this one versus where it has wandered is now incongruent.

I hope you will continue with me there.

Thanks again,

Adam
 
#84 ·
...there is much more to discuss, we have not talked about the positive side of bottlenecking, success on a colony level vs. Population level, etc.

For the sake of continuity, i am going to continue on this thread.

Deknow
 
#86 ·
Deknow.a few other things I see that you missdirect..

Hybridization is a means to an end not the end in itself. You don't want to produce hybridized bees to sell in mass. Although many do for reasons of profit. For the most part it is a disaster. Hybrid bees are the way to consolidate a trait so that it can then be cross bred with other bees. hopefully resulting in several fixed traits in a non hybrid bee. I have said nothing about the reality of doing this. No it is not simple.

II is not a method to produce massive numbers of bees. One couple I read about manages to inseminate 2000 queens a year between the two of them. not exactly mass production. again it is a means to an end. control of genetics is relatively very few bees. those bees would then be used to produce the thousands of queens for sale.

So nothing I have been describing about II or in breeding or anything else is about mass production of queens.it is about getting the genes into or more importantly out of the queen you do want to mass produce. Just one queen. mass produced into the millions.

So can you take a Hyg. bee and breed it to a Hyg.bee and get a HYg.bee? Nope. and that is why you need to understand genetics. specifically the genetics of the bee. Do Hyg. bees turn out to be the holy grail of beekeeping? Nope, who thought they would be? Is any bee goign to be the perfect bee for everyone? Nope. It is most likely to be the best you can get and you will still have to live with it. Is a Hyg. bee that is less productive but disease free preferable to a disease ridden less productive, or dead one? IS it preferable that perfectly good brood is dead after 8 days so teh queen can get that cell productive again or that the bees dies in 28 days wasting more time. more room. more resources before it dies? You have to have an acute ability to see progress when progress is made. You have to be able to determine if it is even progress. If you continue to discount every advancement simply because it still contains some negative. you will never get anywhere. Do you have any idea how many people died in developing the heart transplant? How many times did Edison fail to make a light bulb work? That is the process you are looking at here. get through the how not to do it methods as fast as possible.

II, iNbreeding, outbreeding, cross breeding, rotational cross breeding, introduction of new genetics, Hybridization are all methods to an end. Not the sole way to that end. So you are the only one that thinks anyone is saying do this or that and get better bees. YOu say that none of these methods are hwo ti is done and then proceed to say what happens when it is done. SO which is it. are people usign these methods in breedign bees or not.

As for your definition of breeding or rearing. I am not sure what made you qualified to define them. if you want to do that for yourself fine. but the words do have definitions and I am not sure if anyone asked you if they where correct. But when I say breeding I mean breeding and when I say producing or rearing I mean rearing. you keep wanting to apply my words to methods of rearing. not breeding. Rearing queens is making a bunch of hives. producing thousands if not tens of thousands from them and open mating them, if they are mated at all.many are sold as virgins. The breeder is producing the queen the producer will buy. And you will not find them in the tens of thousands. it would likely have to be a top breeder that produces them in a couple of thousand at all. It is also likely that those couple of thousand breeders would have come from only one queen. There was after all only one Man o' war. You never mass produce the best. You can only mass produce from the best.
 
#88 ·
Deknow...

As for your definition of breeding or rearing. I am not sure what made you qualified to define them. if you want to do that for yourself fine. but the words do have definitions and I am not sure if anyone asked you if they where correct.
Absolutely astonishing ....:eek:

Shall we invite Daniel Y to detail his qualifications to speak authoritatively on this subject? Perhaps not, otherwise we may get more on such key points such as Man o' War and the lightbulb.

:lpf:
 
#90 · (Edited)
I have to say breeding bees is extremely difficult to maintain any kind of true genetic lines. I read everything youall write, and still am unsure of exactly how I will continue to, not only improve my stock, but perhaps contribute to the genetic lines in general.

For example:
I have a great stallion and a few nice mares. If I don't breed my mares every year..no matter, I still have exactly the same genetics next year to work with.

Not so with the bees. Even if I could inseminate my stock, every year my lines would vary somewhat from the new generation of replacement population. Some call the dilution 'hybrids' and some call them 'mutts'. So the hybrids are high performers and the mutts are the average queens or the duds, LOL. They are all produced the same way and it's the breeder or producers job to keep the best and squish the unworthy.



I have about 20 daughters from my Glenn breeder queen I am overwintering, That queen never would build up much, I attributed that to the probable 'over hygienic' nature of this queen. Her best daughters are much better. I am assuming since the VSH gene is said to be recessive and assume this queen was homozygous for the recessive trait, my best generation of these daughters will be those that produce about 25% of the workers that exhibit the hygienic trait. Enough to keep the hive tidy, but enough non hygenic workers to build up and get down to business of producing product.
(But Wait! I culled quite a few daughters from that Glenn queen, but truthfully the mother queens was probably unproductive because of the same reason she made a good breeder queen. Homozygous recessive genes. So those unproductive daughters I culled may have been great breeding stock for the same reason)

I have a real hard time breeding anything that is weak. Is it because of inbreedings desirable traits that it has a lack of vigor or is it because they are duds?

Recessive genes suck.

I understand the significance of the two parent lines being inbred so they are homozygous for positive traits. Cross together they produce the F1 hybrid. Those offspring have almost a 100% predictable genetic outcome, especially if those homozygous traits are dominant.
You hope for a resulting line with the best traits from both parents+ the hybred vigor from the outcross.

But what confuses me a bit is many of you think the hybrids are just a dilution of pure lines and basically not the way to go.
If I don't bring in any new lines, my stock will soon be survivor hybrids, always slightly changing and evolving, but will only consist of the high performers as long as I continue to cull without fail. Isn't that how all lines are eventually established?


All great in theory, until the guy down the road buys new package bees up from California. There goes my drone purity percentage.

I assume the haploid nature of the drones is the key to keeping genes around as long as possible.. If a person collected drone semen the year before, froze it and inseminated daughter virgins from the over wintered sister queens, you'd have half of the next hybrid parentage without loosing too much in dilution. Cross those inbred daughters with unrelated drones with the traits you want and that season's hybrid cross is complete. Cross again too soon within those lines and you'd be at risk for inbreeding's predictable eventual cost-weak traits and poor vigor...But sometimes a superstar. Isn't that the lure?
I have heard though frozen drone semen is unstable and queens inseminated with it are superceded quickly. You'd have to be quick about harvesting your graft larva.
 
#95 ·
I have to say breeding bees is extremely difficult to maintain any kind of true genetic lines.
Aint that the truth!

For myself, I have not been able to genuinely achieve it. And I know at least one breeder using II who has also not been able to maintain his true lines regardless of the II.

Brother Adam appeared to be able to do it, and that was without II. Of more recent times Robert Russell has mastered the fixing of a trait, I would love to spend some time in his operation to do some learning.
 
#92 ·
I think it was Larry Connor? who advocated, in one of the bee mags, alternating each year between two different bee suppliers. I would buy more queens if I lived closer to a breeder, but after seeing many timing, mail order, and supply problems discussed I buy very few and produce (not breed) my own. I have moved away from MH bees as the descendants of these had become too testy. My theory is that I will produce from the survivors of the bees I have, a mish-mash of genes from a trap-out I did, and a NWC queen I bought, and whatever the local drones will add to the mix. I cheat - I can't afford a set of breeder queens and figure that if I buy a queen each year from a reputable supplier there will be a healthy enough proportion of production genetics in there to give me bees that will work if I raise some queens from her.
Evaluating queens seems to be fraught with so many difficulties that I wonder with what level of confidence the suppliers can make any claims. I am not skilled enough in observations to be overly selective. I propagate queens from hives that survive, it's really hard to propagate from the dead ones.
The related questions I have are given the experience of the bee breeders/selectors, how long do you think it takes for a beek to produce a type of bee that is adapted enough to one's area? Are we talking in terms of years, or decades? I am 49, and that given with the fact that I can never see me having more than 100 colonies is a reason I don't worry too much.
My suggestion to Adam is don't sweat it too much. Do the best you can with what you can get. The Buckfast seems a good place to start.
 
#94 ·
That's an interesting paper...it's not a study in itself, it is a review of some other reported results. Regardless of what was written in 2007, I'm not aware of anyone who actually does II today for production queens...both because of cost, and because of performance.

deknow
 
#96 ·
Dean I have pointed out several times II is not for producing queens. no way. Who can afford $100 plus queens for every hive. Plus I don't think anyone could Inseminate queens fast enough.

As far as being able to get a queen get a few queen cells from her and then let those virgins open mate. That woudl be exactly like me getting a pure bred dog of any kind and then let it run around the neighbor hood to breed. Am I going to get pure bred pups? Does anyone think that is a workable situation for breeding a quality line of dogs? Sure I may get lucky and my female gets caught by the fells pure bred champion down the road. that is if there is a pure bred champion down the road. Plenty of people say mutts make the best dogs as well.

So depending on your opinion of what a good dog is. It is pretty obvious I have zero chance of a pure bred but maybe a better than average dog out of my pups.

But if you buy a queen for a queen rearer (that is the mass producer selling queens for $25 each) and you like what you get. the only way to get it again is to go buy another one or get some of their breeding stock and breed your own from it. Now unless you need to breed quite a few queens it is not goign to be worth buying breeding stock. And still you will have to open mate them unless you get the breeders drones or semen from their drones and inseminate. Keep in mind the queen you bought from them was open mated. The queen they produced your queen from may have been inseminated.

I hope that helps put insemination in it's place for folks. There are a lot of decision that need to be made before you aver get to that issue. do you even desire that much control over the mating of the bees. are you satisfied with the open mating results in your area. Can you st up a few drone colonies just to boost the number of preferable drones in your area?

Okay so most of us are the little guy like me and we really can't go to all this to get good queens. I know for me there is a big guy that is just 30 minutes away and another one 40 minutes away and a whole bunch of them including Randy of scientific beekeeping just an hour or two away. Susan Cobey is 2 hours from here. So how bout I let them do all this breeding insemination blah blah blah stuff and I just gets my queens from them when needed? Still I want to know what I am getting and why I picked it. I am not just going to buy some queen because someone is selling it. Any more than I would buy a registered purebred dog without giving a very careful looking over. I woudl want to see it pedigree. look at it's sire and dame, see it's litter mates. maybe talk to owners of other dogs from this pair. if they show I want to see the record of how the pair did in competition. Medical records proving they pair have been properly cared for and should be healthy. I will want to see a litter history on the mother size of litter mortality rate and any known health issue with any offspring she has ever produced. I will evaluate the pup as to it's development at it's age.

And I would take just as much care in choosing my queen. But I also need to learn what to be looking for as well. Dogs I know and I know well. bees not so much yet.
 
#97 ·
you can research your queen's linage to your heart's content, (at least what lineage there is to research).

and that can be useful, to a point.

but in the end, you just have to evaluate each queen's, (and her queendom's), performance.

you either like what you see, or you don't.

if you do, breed from her, give her lots of brood comb, and good luck.

if you don't, well, you get the idea...
 
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