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Successful Treatment Free BeeKeeping = Breeding from Survivor stock

25K views 78 replies 30 participants last post by  charliesbees 
#1 ·
(First Year Beekeeper)
I have started a small 4 hive apiary this year and I have decided to practice the "Treatment free approach". I have a neighbour, less than a quarter mile up the road who has a 15 hive apiary who practices the “treatment approach”. I suspect our bees will mingle & my queens will potentially breed with his drones… Will his “treatment bees” significantly affect my efforts to succeed at Treatment Free Beekeeping? :scratch:
 
#2 ·
I'm not an old-timer who's been at this forever, or an expert on treatment-free bees, or on bee breeding, so take this for what it's worth. The premise of your approach is that over time, your bees will develop their own natural resistance to mites and other problems, correct? So, drones contribute 50% of the genetic material for any worker or queen that is raised by your bees. As a result, any drone that is not kept in a treatment-free scheme will 'dilute' your efforts, but not prevent you from getting where you want to go. It will just take longer than if all bees in a 5 mile radius were treatment-free.

You might want to try 'drone-flooding' by putting a frame of drone comb in each of your hives, greatly increasing the effect of your bees on the local drone population.

I'll be waiting to see what others think about this.
 
#7 ·
You might want to try 'drone-flooding' by putting a frame of drone comb in each of your hives, greatly increasing the effect of your bees on the local drone population.
As an alternative you can run some or all natural comb. Natural comb will have much more drone brood than standard foundation. Personally I use a combination of NC and small cell with a approximate ratio of 1:2
 
#3 ·
I'm no expert either, but I'm interested in what those that are have to say. My understanding is that queens come about through parthenogenesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis), and I think that makes the drone issue irrelevant. Also, my understanding is that drones and queens fly different distances to mate, so it wouldn't be drones from nearby hives that you'd need to be concerned about. Curious to read any corrections to that.

Edit: I reviewed that again - it's the drones that are produced through parthenogenesis - so that at least was wrong.
 
#4 ·
I don't consider drones true parthenogenesis. Drones are haploid. You need to look a your 'breeding' practices and determine what you want to get out of it. Most people assume treated bees have inferior genetics but I'm betting most treatment free bees came out of treated stocks at some point.
 
#5 ·
well, polar bears came out of grizzly bear stock, but if you want the characteristics of a polar bear, you don't pick a grizzly bear.

If you are going to puchase queens, then the drone supply in your area has no bearing on anything...the queens will come already mated, and you will replace them purchased queens if they superced in a way you don't like.

If you are going to make "progress" with breeding bees that don't require treatments, then you need to be doing some kind of selection. If you are raising queens, you might as well raise enough for your neighbor as well....select what queens you give him/her based on what you want for drones (ie, not closely related to the queens you want to have mated).

deknow
 
#6 ·
I'm a beginner, so I might be wrong, but my research and thought on the matter has convinced me that even treated bees are responding to evolutionary pressure from mites. Mites still kill treated bees. You can't breed from dead bees. So even treated bees should be getting slowly more resistant to mites. My personal feeling is that the process would move along a lot faster if no one treated, but obviously that is not a choice that someone dependent on bees for his livelihood is likely to make.
 
#11 ·
Ray, I think that is like saying that humans are becoming less dependant on eye glasses over time because people who need them to see well have access to them.

deknow
 
#8 ·
Depends on whether you are thinking of effects from his bees genetics altering that of your bees. Are your bees from tested hygenic or mite resistant stock? Will you be bringing in new queens from such stock or plan to grow from open mating of your present stock? Unless there is significant genetic difference between his and your bees I think they will not change the outcome from the genetics angle. His bees will certainly rob out any hives that get weak though! You will have to be on top of any thing that is a drag on your bees.
 
#9 ·
Good luck w/ that. I'd suggest you treat a few and not treat a few. Chances are you will be fine this year if they are first year colonies but next winter you will be wishing you treated for mites. Just because bees are treated does not mean that their drones don't have good alleles to offer the population. Treating does not select against more robust treatment free traits, just allows inferior traits that require periodic treatment to remain as well.

With four hives I don't think you have enough to try to go 100% treatment free. If you had 100 then maybe you'd have a shot at having a few starters that can make it through. Better approach is to treat a portion and then try to wean off over the course of a few years once you have hives surviving PAST two years. I have 4 too and treated one. One hive is supposed to be mite resistant but they have quite a few mites so we'll see how resistant they really are.

Queens are not produced via parthenogenesis. They are diploid, 50% related to their queen and 50% to a drone sperm. Same with all workers. Males are haploid so are 100% related to their queen. As a result, workers are more related to their sisters than their own offspring (average 75% vs 50%)--except for males. This is why nature has "allowed" them to raise sister queens as opposed to raising their own daughters and also leaves an incentive for laying drone eggs--hence drone-laying workers if not suppressed. This is at the heart of one theory as to how sociality evolved in bees, ants, and wasps.

Anyway, I'd worry less about mating right now and more about varroa because there is some pain ahead.
 
#10 ·
Just because bees are treated does not mean that their drones don't have good alleles to offer the population. Treating does not select against more robust treatment free traits, just allows inferior traits that require periodic treatment to remain as well.
Most traits that provide for resistance of any kind (chemical, parasite, predator) are metabolically more expensive (requires more energy). If you start with a mixed population (some resistant, some not) and treat them all, the resistant individuals are at a disadvantage because they are expending the energy to maintain these traits, but gain no advantage over non-resistant because the threat is chemically eliminated. Those expending less energy (the non-resistant individuals) have a clear advantage in either natural selection or beekeeper selection.

deknow
 
#13 ·
If no one had glasses (or some way to compensate for poor eyesight), people with poor eyesight would be at a competitive disadvantage (as far as survival and reproduction). Giving people glasses significantly narrows this gap in survival and reproduction.

deknow
 
#15 ·
This spring will make me five years treatment free, but I think a big reason is there are almost no other hives in my area, so I don't get a lot of cross-contamination. If I had a neighbor that had fifteen hives I may have lost all mine already. I am hedging my bets by keeping one yard that I treat and one that I do not treat. The bee inspector just gave me a clean bill of health on the treated yard and knows that I keep a yard where I do not treat about eight miles away. If you can, you may try placing two of your hives in another location, that way you will have some live bees to borrow brood, stores or whatever from in case the mites start winning. Just saying might not want to put all your eggs in the same basket.
 
#16 ·
I was involved in an effort to breed an improved avocado (as a supplier of the pollinator). The project is 15 years old. Selected crosses were planted at 5x10 spacing on 80 acres (>60,000 sports). Sports were grown to evaluation (freeze tolerance, fruit quality, resistance to armored and soft scale insects), plowed under and reselected against the qualifying F2. We are now at F4 with 60,000 sports per generation. When the selection is made, it can be propagated ad infinitum clonally. (Hass avocados are famously a backyard sport).

I tell you this because a backyard beekeeper with four hives is not going to affect honeybee genetics. Queens are obligate and wild outcrossers. Hygenic behaviour is associated with 17 trait loci. The swarm queen (F1) from a "selected colony) will breed, and 50% of those trait loci will carry on to the F2 workers of the new hive. She will breed with 20 fathers. In 17 Traits that are heterozygous, 1 in 131,000 F2 queens will have the same as the F1 combination from the mother. And any two queen cells have only a small chance or sharing the same father, so the liklihood of any two F2 daughter queens being the same genetic combination is small (on the order of 1 in 2 million). The epigenetics (the combination of the 20 fathers) that yields the most diverse and appropriate combination of worker types within the hive (only partially related to the mother queen) must be optimal. That involves the selection and reselection of 20 haploid (drone) resortments of the genetics of queens from a community-wide scale.

A backyard beekeeper could have a perfect hive, but will not be able to reproduce that genetic line under any realistic scenario. A Treatment-Free colony is very likely to suffer higher mortality and higher supersedure, so the likelihood of death of the genetic line is very high, making all previous effort for naught. If you could "clone" your queens the possibility of genetic improvement at the backyard level might be considered, but (as per the real-world avocado example) the effort and scale of a directed selection when the colony fitness is expressed in community scale epigenetics of an F2 is massive and decades long.

The claim by some of the forum participants that they can create Treatment-Free lineages in three years is ludicrous. The more documented efforts are now entering their 2nd decade with only marginal shifts in fitness (per isolated Swedish experiments) and the constant need to combat inbreeding depression with the addition of fresh genetic material. As anyone who has purchased the highly selected hygenic races knows, these rapidly revert to the wild type norm when allowed to naturally supersede.

Selection of highly modified bees runs counter to the primary honey bee evolutionary inertia. The breeding system produces a generalist bee and resists fractioning into types with incompatible modifications. The marked inbreeding depression (eg. shotbrood) and mating system has huge emphasis on reverting the honey bee to generalist type.

The adaption to Varroa that does seemed to have fixed into the wild is the aggressive desert bee (AHB?) of Arizona and Texas. These swarm frequently, seem to maintain multiple queens in reserve, and have other relatively simple trait responses. They overwhelm Varroa (and other bee genotypes) with fecundity: swarming, multi-queen brooding, and willingness to divide and abscond.

These desert bees are being mailed all over the US as an 'improvement'. I'm not certain this is a good thing at all.
 
#21 ·
The adaption to Varroa that does seemed to have fixed into the wild is the aggressive desert bee (AHB?) of Arizona and Texas. These swarm frequently, seem to maintain multiple queens in reserve, and have other relatively simple trait responses. They overwhelm Varroa (and other bee genotypes) with fecundity: swarming, multi-queen brooding, and willingness to divide and abscond.

These desert bees are being mailed all over the US as an 'improvement'. I'm not certain this is a good thing at all.
I'm not certain you have any credible evidence for these assertions.

BeeWeaver bees do not seem to exhibit the behaviors you claim, in general, according to those who have reported their results with this line of bees.
 
#25 ·
JW: I don't understand why this [TF lineages die off/blink out at higher rates] is true. Please explain to someone like me who knows little about genetics.
Fitness traits are not binary, but represent proportionally and marginally better survival. For example, a constellation of traits might confer 3% better year-over-year survival -- all other factors being equal. That 3% would represent a nearly unprecedented quantum jump in typical evolutionary fitness.

We have been conditioned to think of all traits like GMO-injected Round-up ready corn -- a binary state, this is not true of whatever the mechanisms are for genetic resistance to parasite vectored disease.

Various traits have been proposed:
Hygenic removal of diseased larvae in both the Minnesota and Louisiana lineages.
Grooming behavior (may be a single loci) in AHB influenced genotypes
Leg-biting behavior observed in Indiana and Mexican bees.
Swarm rate / Supersedure at 3 months (maintains young healthy queens)
Russian-style strategic brood breaks when disease levels peak
Enhanced immune response to virus (multiple loci involved)
Reduced development days. (AHB trait)
Multiple queen maintenance (AHB trait)
Direct resistance to particular virus.
Change of pheromone odors reduce mite homing and mating
Life history stage changes in bees (increased nurse, reduced foraging).

The selected trait(s) confer the narrowest margins of improved survival in a system of natural selection. In an evolutionary time-scale (where hundreds of thousands of years blink by) these razor thin margins can establish new genotypes, where an accident of isolation permits a local population to "fix" the genotype without dilution.

In a treatment-free apiary, 30-90+% of the trialed hives die. This includes the vast majority of colonies with marginally "improved" genotypes, they are good, just not perfect, and the mites overwhelm them despite their marginally better fitness. These lineages are now dead, extinct, unable to contribute to the next generation. The lines that survive are accidents of fate.

In a directed selection model, the best examples are preserved, treated and promoted as the progenitors of the F2 generation. Their lineages are intact and able to contribute genes.
 
#47 · (Edited)
The selected trait(s) confer the narrowest margins of improved survival in a system of natural selection. In an evolutionary time-scale (where hundreds of thousands of years blink by) these razor thin margins can establish new genotypes, where an accident of isolation permits a local population to "fix" the genotype without dilution.
Not so. A single change can make a 100% difference. And it can happen almost overnight.

In Africa there are no longer any large tusked males. In the early to middle parts of the 20th century all the large tusked males were hunted out. The genes for large tusks were removed from the population.

Hunters weren't interested in small tusked males: for the population the problem was fixed.

I don't know how many years elephants take to become fertile, but they do need to be large enough to defend a harem. We're not taking about rapid turnover here. Simply the excision of those genes that caused a problem (being hunted)

Evolution works in many different ways simultaniously JW, and your analysis misses some of the most essential, most relevant ones.

In a treatment-free apiary, 30-90+% of the trialed hives die. This includes the vast majority of colonies with marginally "improved" genotypes, they are good, just not perfect, and the mites overwhelm them despite their marginally better fitness. These lineages are now dead, extinct, unable to contribute to the next generation. The lines that survive are accidents of fate.
Accepting, for a moment your figures (which are ill-founded because circumstances are different everywhere according to prior conditioning, and because your premise, as I've shown above, is also ill-founded...)...

...What has died are not 'lineages' but individuals. And that happens all the time in nature - to a small degree in some species, to a vast degree in others. Its a normal and beneficial part of the process of conditioning an existing population to the environment. It doesn't significantly reduce genetic diversity.

In nature somewhere in the region of 80% of swarms don't make it through their first winter. They simply don't establish. Those that do, however, are the best suited to that locality/climate. And it is from them that the next generation is made.

Of course, as you say, there is of course an element of fate; but that can be discounted on the basis ceteris paribus ('all else being equal') As somebody who dabbles in scientific reasoning you really should be familiar with that concept.

Somehow, in your interest with detail, you seem to me to miss the beautiful simplicity and elegance of natural selection for the fittest strains. It is very very simple - breathtakingly so - and in that simplicity is its explanatory power. You're somehow looking at the trees and missing the wood - and your explanations as a result are fundamentally wrong.

In a directed selection model, the best examples are preserved, treated and promoted as the progenitors of the F2 generation. Their lineages are intact and able to contribute genes.
Now you are giving us a good summary of how nature works, as outlined above, and a model for us to follow. And its simple... However, in tf beekeeping 'best' for selection means those that thrive without treatments. You don't keep lame cattle alive to breed from - you send them to market pronto. Individual terminated.

Mike (UK)
 
#17 ·
Researchers that have compared the honey bee genome with other insects remark that the HB DNA is much simpler than those they contrast it with.

This make perfect evolutionary sense --- instead of the genetic overhead and fragility of depending on multiple alleles and loci; the honey bees depend on social organization and polyandry. The social parallel to multi-alleles are found in the mating system that emphasize multiple father (half-queens) contributing to a super-organism of half-sister worker bees. The particular fitness of these half-sisters are equivalent to multi-allele expression in a more conventional mating and solitary living system.

Most insects are specialists -- they have co-evolved with their host-plant or prey into very elaborate and specific, very local and calendar limited lifeways. Honeybees are broad generalists-- they resist specialization. Rather than pollinating special flowers like night-blooming cereus which requires a moth tongue 20 cm long on a single night of the year, they pollinate flowers (and ensure the plants competitive advantage) that are basic, open and of a general design. The genetic basis of this resistance to specialization is the outbreeding system.

The effort to "specialize" the bee by inbreeding a mite-resistant race is mitigating against the bees own evolutionary pattern. It will tend to produce an inbred, and hence vigor impaired colony. Bees will tend to have the highest fitness when they are in dense breeding aggregations -- the more fathers the better the colony. The better the colony, the more dense the natural population was -- a virtuous cycle. Isolating your bees is the wrong evolutionary decision.
 
#46 · (Edited)
The effort to "specialize" the bee by inbreeding a mite-resistant race is mitigating against the bees own evolutionary pattern. It will tend to produce an inbred, and hence vigor impaired colony.
As you say outside material will keep coming in. The trick is to try to minimise genetic material that contains little or no conditioning to mite presence due to treating, and maximise its opposite. That means bringing in plenty of feral, preferably local material, and keeping plently of hives.

Commercial beekeepers have always maintained large drone hives as a deliberate policy to maintain the characteristics they desire. As and when inbreeding has shown up, they buy in a few unrelated queens.

Bees will tend to have the highest fitness when they are in dense breeding aggregations -- the more fathers the better the colony.
That is one account: the study we saw recently about the genetic origins (and the two distinct parallel populations) by Dr. Deborah Delaney of US honeybees didn't reinforce it. Another study by the same researcher centred on the quality of commercial queens shows it to be incorrect.


Isolating your bees is the wrong evolutionary decision.
In nature the resistant colonies are rapidly and comprehensively isolated - by the death of the non-resistant. And the population rebuilds, now (largely) resistant to whatever the problem was. That's the bit to emulate.

Mike (UK)
 
#20 ·
I am neither going to comment on the eye glass analogy or the math laid out by CWC which went over my head. I will comment, though, about my experiences. I see bees now that are far less prone to collapse than when varroa first impacted us over 20 years ago. I like to think its because there have been incremental improvements in bees tolerances to varroa together with a greater understanding of treatments and IPM methods by beekeepers. This year we ended up with close to 20% of our hives that have essentially not had a treatment in over a year due to the fact that they have been treated with thymol in less than ideal treatment temps. As a group they are clearly poorer than our earlier treated bees but still lots of good hives among them. In the early 90's such hives wouldnt have had much of a chance.
 
#27 · (Edited)
My "desert" bees don't swarm any more than regular bees, nor do they keep multiple queens. The worst attacks I have experienced have come from domestic stock. So the points said about "desert" bees are not accurate. Mine do not seem to be as affected by varroa as the domestic bees I have gotten (which do not seem to survive). I prefer a little wild in my bees because I KNOW they will survive. Traits I HAVE observed include seeing them groom mites off each other (yes, I have sat and watched them). They do have them, but it never seems to reach a point where it causes issues.

I don't mail my bees around, because in my opinion, they need to stay regional or we end up with no regional adaptations. Nor will I ever buy a queen from outside my region ever again.

Now by "desert" bees, you need to be specific about that which you are speaking of - are these Texas bees, or true desert bees? I am sold on the wild bee you get from high altitude where I live here in NM, but the ones down in the flats, not so much. And TX bees - well not sure I care for them either. Most I have ever had were not a lot better than the others, and sometimes had an attitude.
 
#28 ·
I have experience with Arizona/Sonora desert bees. This type has been imported and spread into Southern California. I have direct experience with Michoacan and Oaxacan bees post AHB replacement (also Guatemalan and Costa Rican). The Texas bees I generalized from the detailed descriptions of genotype studies on the invasion of AHB types into southern TX.

I think your theory of a NM refuge for Spanish colonial bees is interesting and compelling. Iberian bees are genetically distinct from the rest of Europe. Their mitochondria links them to North African races. The North African (and by extension Iberian bees) were able to fix genotype differences due to the "island" oasis effect in a drying Saharan desert during the post-glacial period.

The Arizona bees from low desert (the type that has spread into Ca by direct importation) don't resemble your descriptions of Spanish colonial-NM bees. They are ground nesting, small-colony, multi-queened, defensive and mean as no-tomorrow, and willing to abscond at the drop of a hat. In August, we saw migratory swarms that attacked and robbed fixed colonies, before moving on. This same "migratory" pattern has been described from East Africa. Nests are not permanent, but are temporary and seasonal.
 
#29 ·
Yes, we do have bees somewhat matching that description in the southern low deserts. They like to nest in the old pack rat burrows under the mesquites. They are not common. but you do see them every so often. Most of the bees from the low desert here are way too runny and annoying for my taste. Their aggression levels vary, most are not that aggressive. There is a definite difference in them once you cross about 6000' in elevation. Can't prove anything, but they are definitely different. If I were a scientist, I would be investigating it, but alas, I am not. Most of my speculation is based on anecdotal evidence and a couple of genetic studies done by Roxane Magnus.

Now, mind you, I do not think that it is the same for the entire state. Those areas where there have been lot's of beekeeping are not so much this way, but areas like the Gila region and parts of the southern Sacramentos, most definitely. Beekeepers, even in the old days, are few and far between here. The little town I live in HAD a beekeeping industry way back in the 1940's/50's, but it collapsed when the apple industry collapsed shortly after the railroad pulled out. Whatever was left from that has most likley been homogenized with the preceding feral stock. The old timers, like Les Crowder, do mention having seen Arabic type bees in the Southern NM area back in the 80's. Who knows? All I know is that here in NM, our honeybee genetics seem the most varied in african influences, more so than anywhere else. probably because we are somewhat remote, somewhat cold, and the "sky island" ecology dominates.

Now I did a removal a few months back that had some of the most aggressive bees I have ever seen. They were almost totally dark black, and the queen, when I found her, was jet black with brightish (almost flourescent) orange speckles and spots. Some of the strangest I have run across. Totally runny, and when you smoked them they all came out of the hive and sat in a big buzzing ball on the ground. What they could have been, I have no idea. Not at all like the ones I am used to seeing. Maybe they were a pure Brazilian?
 
#31 ·
I queened a split with a BeeWeaver queen this summer. She did well for about 2 months or so and then was superceded. Her daughters were peaceful and did well, and the supercedure queen continues to be productive. Can't yet say if they have any mite resistance, but I saw none of the behavior attributed to Africanized bees. That said, the company offers to replace any queen that make aggressive bees. Some of them must be hot. So were the black bees of Europe, I understand, so aggression is associated with other lines.
 
#34 · (Edited)
Not to discount anything especially their lost lives, but that is in Costa Rica and Mexico where the bloodline is full strength. Totally different situation. All bees are dangerous - even the "nice" ones.

A lot of recent research is starting to point to these bees adapting to a temperate climate and expressing more of the AMM side of their nature. And yes, they are dangerous too - but that sort of bee has been around for years. I think a lot of the dark feral bees we see nationwide are these bees that have adapted to a temperate climate and homogenized with the locals - sort of a mutt with the genetics of all of our bees, including AHB.

The full strength Scutellata should not be the same in a temperate climate, as they are a tropical bee. I doubt they will live long except in places such as the ones they currently inhabit along our borders that resembles their habitat. They will have to adapt to move into the other areas - such as the bees I described above. I would not be surprised if people tested these dark ferals and they came back African - an MtDNA test,not a nuclear DNA test. They can be African and not express African nuclear DNA. Does that make them bad?
 
#35 · (Edited)
I have recently posted a link to a Master's Thesis showing that A. Scutellata isn't as big of an issue in Florida as some would have us believe.

Let's not assume that all ferals are 'Africanized', even the mean ones.

It's clear to me that mistakes have been made in this regard. So, it's important to remain objective.

PS-The faculty adviser for the thesis is featured in a video link on the 'Treatment-Free Dilemma' thread.
 
#36 ·
I agree, I think the term "Africanized" is overapplied. Not only that, the testing is suspect. Few of the current test methods give accurate results alone. Like I said, just because the maternal DNA points to Africa it does not mean it is "Africanized".
 
#38 ·
JW:

I'm sorry for your 'Living Nightmare' experience. I truly am.

However, AHB seems to be in the SW rather than in Florida, etc. .

Delaney has done the work examining ferals in NC, etc. .

They are different than AHB.

So, the 'Hybrid Swarm' isn't the same in all parts of the country.

I, for one, would like to know what's here in the North East.
 
#40 ·
I would like to mention the 'Reproductive Isolation' hypothesis at this point since we're on the topic of drones.

I found it fascinating that Dr. Delaney mentioned that drones are produced with different timings depending on the stock, feral/domestic.

I can swear that I've seen a difference in early (April) vs late (June) queens from the same open mated, queen breeder.

There's something to that hypothesis, IMO.
 
#41 ·
We definitely need more true research on our current feral population - what it is, what it does, traits, etc. and not just a generic study like the USDA did with "AHB". Their study is quite flawed and paints the picture that they are all the same, when we actually have many different populations of distinctly different genetic descent. I would love to find out "what's in" all the other feral bees - especially the northern ones.

I feel the USDA did beekeeping a grave dis-service when it basically reinforced all the stuff that the Brazilian government said to discredit Mr. Kerr for his social activism.
 
#42 ·
Uh, Huh.

I'm waiting for the day that everything is 'illuminated' regarding the issue of genetic diversity in feral Honeybees.

Paul, while I'm kinda busy right now, I do similar work regularly.

So, while I'm working on plants, I can do work similar to Dr. Delaney's.
 
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