Yet another puzzle

[gavin]

Ah, the tribulations of sticking your head up above the parapet.

You need a thick skin, but it does get tiresome.

Last year I made a proposal for a bee research project, and asked Eric McArthur as organiser of the CABA apiary at the time if he would cooperate in this. He agreed and so I wrote this into the proposal:

'As part of a survey of the degree of genetic mixing of races, the opportunity will be taken to assess diversity at the csd locus, the major driver of reduced fitness in inbred stocks of honeybee. An assessment will be made of progress being made by a beekeepers group in the west of Scotland to counter inbreeding by the exchange of stocks from isolated locations into and out from a shared apiary site.'

It was a small part of a larger proposal, but it shows how seriously I regard the need for diversity at the csd locus (=gene). Didn't get the money of course.

And yet tonight he wrote this in an email to me:

>From: apisscot <eric@XXX.XXX.com>
>To: Gavin Ramsay <diseases@scottishbXXkeepers.org.uk>
>Sent: Tuesday, 7 September, 2010 16:17:31
>Subject: Radio 2 Tuesday 9th Sept 2010
>
>
> Hi Gavin
>
> I saw this and thought of you! Stick with it! One day you
> might just learn something from your more informed and
> open-minded peers! Only a fool would deny the outcome of a
> closed population - as YOU did! No apology required!
> "Facts are chiels that winnae ding"!
>
> Best regards
>
> Eric

He was referring to this news item:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11199779#story_continues_1

and attached to the email was a copy of an article he published first in the Beekeepers Quarterly then the Scottish Beekeeper. I'll let you all see the article which he has kindly scanned for you all (367).

So here is the puzzle. Eric's BKQ/SB piece where he lays out his theory for why bees are doomed due to inbreeding (where he insults 'dogmatists', meaning me I think) contains some utter nonsense about the loss of alleles at a crucial locus. Surely it is just commonsense, or do you need a scientific background to see just how flawed his arguments are?

Some background information first. The 'csd' locus is the 'complementary sex determination' gene. If you have two different versions ('alleles') then you are female (if you are a bee). Just one, and you are a (haploid) male from an unfertilised egg. If you have two the same then you should have been a worker but the lack of difference between the two copies of the gene mean that you are functionally male. These 'diploid drones' in worker cells are usually removed at an early stage and are a major drain on the colony.

There is said to be around 19 different alleles of this gene in honeybee populations. So let's go with Eric's 16 different csd alleles, it isn't far from the truth. Perhaps you could also assume that each virgin mates with 15 random drones. Now consider an isolated apiary of 10 unrelated colonies. See if Eric's scheme shows any signs of being linked to reality, and if not where has he gone wrong?

Gavin

[Jon]

Dorian Pritchard did a good presentation on 'Inbreeding, its consequences and management' at the Bibba conference last weekend.
He mentioned 20 alleles but that's not too far from either 19 or 16. he may even have said 'about 20' but I wasn't taking notes.
One of the things he pointed out is that there is a very fine line between success and failure at a certain point and the tipping point is when a population drops to around 6 of the sex determination alleles.
He put up various graphs and the difference between a 75% chance of winter survival and 25% chance of survival was a relatively small difference in the number of diploid drones produced. ( when the number of alleles in the population was already low)
Diploid drones are removed by workers within 12 to 24 hours of the egg hatching.
I think the chance of dropping to 6 alleles has got to be remote unless you are talking about a small number of colonies in an island situation.
Your name came up at one point - I think in the context of the last SICOMM conference.

PS.
I just read the scanned article and I agree that Eric has got the wrong end of the stick re. how population genetics works!

[gavin]

Dorian knows his stuff.

Eric's contention is that in 10 colonies you start with 160 alleles (?!) and that each year if you have 50% losses then you lose half them every winter. 160 becomes 80 alleles in year 1 and so by year 5 your 5/10 fluctuating apiary is down to 5 alleles.

Each virgin queen in this isolated apiary will mate with a random sample of all drones in the apiary.

[Jon]

I think it is just a misconception about how genes are distributed within a population.
I discussed this with Doris as she was worried about the limited number of colonies on Orkney.
I reckoned that bringing in fresh genetics could do more harm than good unless you had proof that one or more alleles was absent from the island population and that the new blood would add that gene.
It's not the kind of thing you would do at an amateur level.

[gavin]

The sort of pseudo-scientific nonsense that gets into some beekeeping magazines confuses people on what the real threats are and, as you say, can lead to people doing more harm than good.

In *one* colony in a well-mixed apiary you could in theory have all 16 alleles (possibly even twenty) as the queen carries two alleles in each of her own cells and maybe another 15 in her spermatheca. In reality not all drones that mated with the queen will carry a different csd allele, but you get the idea.

Halving the number of colonies from 10 to 5 may mean that you lose no alleles at all. Losing one might be a possibility. As Dorian said, losing a few wouldn't be critical, and when numbers fall a little more then there is strong selection which favours the survival and propagation of the more diverse colonies.

[Jon]

I think Doris said there are something like 80 colonies on Orkney so probably no immediate cause for concern although the situation should obviously be monitored for any increase in Diploid drones.
Dorian P also stated that the natural gap rate in 100 cells is 6 so you have to subtract 6 from your sample of 100 cells when estimating the % of diploid drones.

The problem with genetics in general and bee genetics in particular is that it does confuse most people. (myself included)

Roger P stated at the start of his talk that as far as he was concerned genetics was a concept dreamed up on April 1st.

[gavin]

I understand that there is a small apiary in a very isolated part of mainland Scotland which today shows exactly the same rather unusual tight morphometry plots as it did when surveyed in 1993-94. More will be revealed at the bee breeding day in Fife in November.

[gavin]

One of the things he pointed out is that there is a very fine line between success and failure at a certain point and the tipping point is when a population drops to around 6 of the sex determination alleles.
He put up various graphs and the difference between a 75% chance of winter survival and 25% chance of survival was a relatively small difference in the number of diploid drones produced.

If you have three colonies fully isolated from all other apiaries then it will be hard to maintain 6 alleles in the long term. Easier with 4 colonies, not so hard at all with 5. The bottleneck is the queen. Each queen can only make drones of two types as the drones arise only from the genes carried in her own cells. The workers and queens each queen makes can be more diverse as they are fertilised with stored sperm, but over time this strong filtering when queens make drones will reduce the diversity in such small isolated populations. Of course few apiaries are really isolated. I would doubt, for example, that Mull is fully isolated from the mainland.

To misunderstand all of this, write an article castigating 'experts', robustly put forward a completely wrong view that is going to confuse everyone, then arrogantly declare 'I rest my case!' is fairly typical of this writer. We really need magazine editors that actually sift such pieces for quality and accuracy before they give them space.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin and Jon

Reassuring to see such a flurry of activity on such a tight time scale - the oil supply for the midnight oil lamps must have taken quite a 'tanking', (excuse the pun!) over that 8 hour time scale. I hope that the inbreedng issue will encourage many more hits than just the three of us. At the time I wrote the initial piece on the inbreeding problem facing Scotland's bees I had hoped to involve a geneticist in Strathclyde Uni but unfortunately this involvement it appears was discouraged by a more senior member of staff.
At the time Roger Paterson was having trouble with his queen bee failures I wrote suggesting that his problem was most likely inbreeding. This postulation was supported by an eminent beekeeper in Ontario, Canada in an e-mail at that time to Nigel Hurst, editor of the Scottish Beekeeper
Inbreeding in the honey bee has long been ignored by most beekeepers. "The problem doesn't exist"! Hmmmm. That was a numbere of years ago when I first mooted the dangers of inbreeding at a Glasgow and District meeting some years ago in the company of Ian Craig and a number of other experienced beekeepers - to a man they had never even considered the phenomenon.
Inbreeding is now coming high profile as honey bee colony and experienced beekeeper numbers diminish. The key word is "experienced"!
The inbreeding situation on Islay, in which I became involved in the early 70s, when I was the only beekeeper in Scotland actively marketing queens and nucleii gave me a deep insight into the problems of inbreeding, which actually ran parallel to the Paterson queen situation. Paterson implies that genetics was a device dreamed up by some April fool - tell that to Sir Alec Jeffries or Crick and Watson.

Now to the nub of the matter - in a closed population of 10 colonies entering their first winter, losing 50% of its number each winter but re-establishing the complement to 10 colonies each subsequent summer with the gene pool remaining; Since genetics is such a closed book - simplify the situation by substituting a letter of the alphabet for each individual colony- vis:
A,BC,D,E,F,G,H,I,J. So in the spring there are only 5 of the original colonies left: eg - A,C,E,G,H.- Go on do the elimination randomly and see how many generations it takes to have a classic inbreeding situation.

Eric McArthur

[Jon]

Hi Gavin and Jon

Now to the nub of the matter - in a closed population of 10 colonies entering their first winter, losing 50% of its number each winter but re-establishing the complement to 10 colonies each subsequent summer with the gene pool remaining; Since genetics is such a closed book - simplify the situation by substituting a letter of the alphabet for each individual colony- vis:
A,BC,D,E,F,G,H,I,J. So in the spring there are only 5 of the original colonies left: eg - A,C,E,G,H.- Go on do the elimination randomly and see how many generations it takes to have a classic inbreeding situation.

Eric McArthur

Hi Eric.
I think you are misunderstanding how this works.
You can start with ten colonies, lose 5, increase to ten the following year and still maintain every one of the CSD alleles.
Unless you are in a completely isolated situation, there will be incoming genetic material from neighbouring colonies via their drones.
Even in an isolated situation, bees can maintain genetic diversity as the queen mates with multiple drones.

Gavin explained it with the following two quotes:


Each virgin queen in this isolated apiary will mate with a random sample of all drones in the apiary.


In *one* colony in a well-mixed apiary you could in theory have all 16 alleles (possibly even twenty) as the queen carries two alleles in each of her own cells and maybe another 15 in her spermatheca.

This means that each and every queen in the apiary is likely to carry most of the csd alleles so even if half the colonies are lost each winter, there is not necessarily any loss of csd alleles.
The misconception is that losing half the colonies equates to losing half the genetic material and this is not the case.
If you read some of the papers by Beye et al you will see how this works.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

Well explained!
Recent research has now identified 11 -19 CSD alleles for the honeybee, therefore the genetic permitations i.e. genetic diversity you could have even in a small number of colonies is huge.

[gavin]

Once upon a time there was a magic bowl of fruit. It had 6 plums, 6 apples, 6 pears and 6 oranges. A hungry family ate half of the fruit each day - totally at random. This being a magic bowl of fruit, every remaining item duplicated itself overnight.

After the first night, how many types of fruit had you lost - any?! Half of them? I can't be bothered working out the probabilities, but in many cases all would survive into the subsequent year (no, day) despite the high overall attrition rate.

The system is self-balancing. If a fruit gets slightly more abundant than is its due, it is more likely to be picked and its frequency will fall back again. Although random events will eliminate single types of fruit from time to time, in general an equilibrium is reached.

[gavin]

If these bowls of fruit were bee colonies (the example above is just to indicate statistical processes, not mimic units of bee populations) then the bowls which remain diverse reproduce themselves better, whereas those which, by chance, become less diverse are less vigorous and less likely to survive or to reach a size to swarm.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi
I found these interesting papers among many which qualify the csd factor. It would seem that the occurence of diploid males in a closed, and reducing population has quite a lethal effect, despite the csd factor. The observant experienced beekeeper has notice that most colonies today have varying and in some cases truly significant pepper-potting, resultig from inbreeding and diploid drone elimination.

Best Regards

Eric

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;

Population structure, mating system, and sex-determining allele diversity of the parasitoid wasp Habrobracon hebetor
M F Antolin1, P J Ode2, G E Heimpel3, R B O'Hara4 and M R Strand5
1. 1Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA
2. 2Department of Entomology, North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 58105, USA
3. 3Department of Entomology, University of Minnesota, St Paul, MN 55108, USA
4. 4Department of Ecology and Systematics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
5. 5Department of Entomology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
Correspondence: MF Antolin, Department of Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1878, USA. E-mail: antolin@lamar.colostate.edu
Received 10 April 2003.
Top of page
Abstract
Besides haplo-diploid sex determination, where females develop from fertilized diploid eggs and males from unfertilized haploid eggs, some Hymenoptera have a secondary system called complementary sex determination (CSD). This depends on genotypes of a 'sex locus' with numerous sex-determining alleles. Diploid heterozygotes develop as females, but diploid homozygotes become sterile or nonviable diploid males. Thus, when females share sex-determining alleles with their mates and produce low fitness diploid males, CSD creates a genetic load. The parasitoid wasp Habrobracon hebetor has CSD and displays mating behaviours that lessen CSD load, including mating at aggregations of males and inbreeding avoidance by females. To examine the influence of population structure and the mating system on CSD load, we conducted genetic analyses of an H. hebetor population in Wisconsin. Given the frequency of diploid males, we estimated that the population harboured 10–16 sex-determining alleles. Overall, marker allele frequencies did not differ between subpopulations, but frequencies changed dramatically between years. This reduced estimates of effective size of subpopulations to only Ne 20–50, which probably reflected annual fluctuations of abundance of H. hebetor. We also determined that the mating system is effectively monogamous. Models relating sex-determining allele diversity and the mating system to female productivity showed that inbreeding avoidance always decreased CSD loads, but multiple mating only reduced loads in populations with fewer than five sex-determining alleles. Populations with Ne less than 100 should have fewer sex-determining alleles than we found, but high diversity could be maintained by a combination of frequency-dependent selection and gene flow between populations.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Signatures of selection among sex-determining alleles of the honey bee
1. Martin Hasselmann * and
2. Martin Beye *
+ Author Affiliations
1. Institut für Zoologie, Biozentrum, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle/Wittenberg, Weinberg Weg 22, 06120 Halle, Germany
1. Edited by May R. Berenbaum, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL, and approved February 9, 2004 (received for review November 4, 2003)


The fact that allelic composition governs sexual fate has long been of interest to biologists (16), not only because of its differences from sex chromosomal-based sex-determining systems (1, 17, 18) but also because of its major impact on population genetics (9, 10). The sex-determining alleles provide an excellent example for the maintenance of genetic variation by natural selection under a well characterized mode of selection, in which homozygotes have zero fitness. In addition to the general biological aspects, the occurrence of diploid males in the economically important honey bee has considerable consequences for applied bee management and for bee selection programs (6, 19). The fact that allelic composition governs sexual fate has long been of interest to biologists (16), not only because of its differences from sex chromosomal-based sex-determining systems (1, 17, 18) but also because of its major impact on population genetics (9, 10). The sex-determining alleles provide an excellent example for the maintenance of genetic variation by natural selection under a well characterized mode of selection, in which homozygotes have zero fitness. In addition to the general biological aspects, the occurrence of diploid males in the economically important honey bee has considerable consequences for applied bee management and for bee selection programs (6, 19).

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

[Jon]

[QUOTE=Eric McArthur;2035]
I found these interesting papers among many which qualify the csd factor. It would seem that the occurence of diploid males in a closed, and reducing population has quite a lethal effect, despite the csd factor.

Eric.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean when you say 'despite the csd factor'

It's not so much in a 'closed and reducing' population as in one which has already been seriously reduced.
You don't get closed populations of honeybees unless you are on an island maybe 5-10 miles off shore or at an oasis in the middle of a desert.
No one disputes that diploid drones are a drain on a colony but it has been demonstrated that the issue only becomes a serious problem when the 16-20 or so CSD alleles drop to 5 or 6 in a closed population.
This is statistically highly unlikely. (see fruit bowl above)
Dorian Pritchard also quoted some Japanese research which stated that the csd alleles reach an equilibrium in a population and tend to be equally represented - so if you have 20 alleles each will make of around 5% of the total number of csd alleles.
I thought this unlikely and questioned him on it after his lecture but he assured me that the issue was clear.


The observant experienced beekeeper has notice that most colonies today have varying and in some cases truly significant pepper-potting, resultig from inbreeding and diploid drone elimination.

What makes you think this must be due to inbreeding?
There are other factors which cause pepperpot brood:

varroa damage to brood + hygienic behaviour
chalk brood damage + hygienic behaviour
Incomplete mating
Queen damage especially to antennae
AFB
EFB
etc etc.

In my own colonies I have seen sporadic pepperpot brood but this often cures itself over time which would not happen if it were caused by inbreeding, ie a queen storing semen with a restricted number of csd alleles some of which match her own pair.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

I have also noticed pepperpot but it was from an old queen who should have been replaced.
You also missed out another factor i.e. the beekeeper. I have heard it quoted that the main problem with beekeeping today stands behind the hive.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jimbo/Jon

I read both your replies with astonishment and begin to wonder how much science you guys have between you - one of you seems to be a greengrocer obsessed with bowls of fruit - and worse both of you seem to be in denial of the phenomenon of inbreeding - which is now quite widespread in Scotland's honey bee colonies. Read the prose in the previous reply! I spoke about the key word in beekeeping being "experienced" Any comments?
Read the appended - you both might learn something!
The post only permits 10000 characters- Access the original paper youselves - for further enlightenment!
Regards

Eric
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;
Genetic sex determination and extinction
Philip W. Hedrick, Ju¨ rgen Gadau and Robert E. Page Jr
School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
Genetic factors can affect the probability of extinction
either by increasing the effect of detrimental variants or
by decreasing the potential for future adaptive
responses. In a recent paper, Zayed and Packer demonstrate
that low variation at a specific locus, the
complementary sex determination (csd) locus in Hymenoptera
(ants, bees and wasps), can result in a sharply
increased probability of extinction. Their findings illustrate
situations in which there is a feedback process
between decreased genetic variation at the csd locus
owing to genetic drift and decreased population growth,
resulting in an extreme type of extinction vortex for
these ecologically important organisms.
Genetics and extinction
Several factors can contribute to the extinction of
endangered species, including habitat loss and alteration,
interactions with non-native species, and hunting or
killing by humans. Although these extrinsic ecological
factors can be dominant in influencing population or
species persistence, the general genetic effects of detrimental
genetic variants causing inbreeding depression or
genetic load and the loss of adaptive genetic variation that
is essential for future adaptation are also often significant
[1,2]. The overall importance of the influence of genetics
and evolutionary processes on the extinction of endangered
species is generally accepted, particularly in small
populations, but has been questioned by some
nongeneticists [3].
Low genetic variation at specific loci of adaptive
significance, such as the self-incompatibility (SI) genes
in higher plants and the major histocompatibility complex
(MHC) loci in vertebrates, has been implicated or
suggested to imperil endangered species [4,5]. The sex
determination locus csd (Box 1) in Hymenoptera (ants,
bees and wasps) has also been suggested as another
genetic system that can severely affect the persistence of
populations [6]. When this locus is heterozygous, normal
diploid females are produced. However, when it is
homozygous, inviable or sterile diploid males are produced,
reducing the number of females in the population
and decreasing the population growth rate. Now, detailed
simulations by Zayed and Packer provide a convincing
quantitative demonstration that lowered csd genetic
variation can result in a much higher probability of
extinction in solitary Hymenoptera[7].
Loss of sex determination variation and the extinction
effect
To examine the effect of the loss of csd variation
on extinction risk, Zayed and Packer developed an
individual-based simulation computer program, analogous
to VORTEX (http://www.vortex9.org/pm2000.html),
for a single population of haplodiploid organisms. They
determined the probability of extinction of the population
over time for a range of population growth rates and
carrying capacities, using initial demographic parameters
that mimicked those of solitary haplodiploid populations,
with and without the presence of the csd locus.
For low population growth rates and carrying
capacities, the presence of the csd locus increased the
probability of extinction by over an order of magnitude
compared to comparable situations without the csd locus.
For other combinations of low population growth rates and
carrying capacities, the probability of extinction was
100%, or nearly so, in 100 generations. In addition, the
extinction rates were also over an order of magnitude
higher than those estimated from inbreeding depression
in threatened diploid organisms.
Zayed and Packer describe the increased risk resulting
from the loss of variation at the csd locus as a feedback
loop that eventually results in population extinction, a
type of extinction vortex [8] that they call a ‘diploid male
vortex’. First, the population size is initially reduced by
extrinsic factors, such as habitat loss, non-native organisms
and so on. This then results in a sequence of events in
a feedback loop: (i) loss of variation at the csd locus
through genetic drift; (ii) increased production of diploid
males; (iii) lower population growth rate because there are
fewer females; and (iv) lower population size, which
results in further loss of csd locus variation, and so on.
Following this scenario, the basis of the high extinction
rates in the simulated populations observed by Zayed and
Packer becomes clear.

[gavin]

Hi Eric

1. I'm the greengrocer obsessed with bowls of fruit, not Jon or Jimbo. Did you think about the implications?

2. If you add up the science expertise of the two gents you mention it amounts to quite a lot, though Jon might protest that much of his is informal. They also have oodles of commonsense.

3. No-one is denying that inbreeding is an issue in some cases. Just that it is something that shouldn't be over-hyped.

4. Nothing in the csd abstracts and exerpts you quote disagrees with what anyone is saying as far as I can see - except your 'despite the csd factor'.

5. It is a good point that beekeepers see hygienic behaviour and confuse it with diploid drone gaps. I would have thought that with your enthusiasm for ferals and their possible role in spreading Varroa resistance you might have appreciated that.

6. I had hoped that *you* might learn something from this. Are you ready yet to concede that your articles were wrong on what happens when colonies in an isolated apiary reduces in number from 10 to 5 colonies then recovers repeatedly over several seasons?

best wishes

Gavin

[Jon]

Hi Eric

and worse both of you seem to be in denial of the phenomenon of inbreeding - which is now quite widespread in Scotland's honey bee colonies.

Is there actually any evidence for that - other than pepperpot brood which has a variety of possible explanations?
Have you measured the frequency of the aforementioned csd alleles in any populations where you think there is inbreeding?

I see the article you cut and pasted mentioned Amro Zayed.
He has published some interesting stuff relating to inbreeding and the consequences for honeybee survival.

http://zayedlab.apps01.yorku.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/zayed-2009-apidologie.pdf

It's 25 pages long but well worth reading if you are interested in haplodiploid genetics

I have argued elsewhere on the basis of this paper that you have to be careful with reducing numbers of colonies, mainly with regard to those who say we should all stop treating for varroa and let the survivor colonies regenerate. My problem with this is that no one knows if the survivors will be 5%, 1% or 0.001% and if numbers go down too much inbreeding could certainly become a problem.

However, the bbka had a press release a couple of months back claiming that UK colony numbers had doubled in 2 years so it looks like UK bee stocks are not even in decline.

Re denial, I make no claim to be a scientist but I have learned a lot by asking questions rather than trying to impose pet theories on others.
What's your background Eric? I know that Jimbo and Gavin do genetics as a day job and as such I tend to sit back and listen to what they say on the matter.

Genetics is not an easy subject for the layman with its specific language such as haploid, diploid, allele, csd locus and suchlike.

There are a lot of pet theories in beekeeping, Mike Bispham with his no-medication conspiracy theory mantra, Oscar Perone who claims that the key to beekeeping success is keeping a colony in an outsize hive, Boris whatsiname who claims that his bees never swarm due to some cockandbull manipulation, those who claim that everything wrong with bees is due to Imidicloprid in spite of a wealth of independent evidence which fails to support this.

What all these folk have in common is a tendency to get angry and browbeat anyone who happens to disagree with them.

Getting back to inbreeding, I may be mistaken but I think you may be confusing a general reduction in genetic material with the specific inbreeding problem which can be caused by a reduced number of alleles at the csd locus.
That is certainly the impression given in the scanned article in Scottish beekeeper at the start of the thread where you mention 160 alleles being lost over a number of generations.

[gavin]

Getting back to inbreeding, I may be mistaken but I think you may be confusing a general reduction in genetic material with the specific inbreeding problem which can be caused by a reduced number of alleles at the csd locus.
That is certainly the impression given in the scanned article in Scottish beekeeper at the start of the thread where you mention 160 alleles being lost over a number of generations.

Jon, I think that Eric's confusion here was that he thought that 16 alleles of csd might exist in one colony, and that 10 colonies would therefore have 160 alleles. Patent nonsense of course. It is the entire population of bees in a region that might have 16 or 19 or 20 csd alleles. Unless I misunderstood you Eric?

Gavin

PS Grammar, syntax and various items of editorial pedantry including spelling are of course optional on a forum like this, but I've just italicised the gene name as is the convention. Hope that you like it.

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

To answer your first point would 40 years working in scientific research in a Scottish University rated as one of the top 50 Universities in the World in one of the largest research institutes within the University that was rated 5* in the last RAE excercise a few years ago as one of the top institues in the world for the quality of our research be enough science for you?
Back to inbreeding I went for a second opinion today and asked one of our top genetic professors who's speciality is human population genetics. He did not use a bowl of fruit example but said if you have a large bag of hundreds and thousands of all diffrent colours (he admits to having a sweet tooth) and you take out a handful you will still have at least one of every colour. The probability of picking out all the red ones in the first handful is very remote therefore you will still maintain your genetic diversity. If you relate this to the bee with so many CSD alleles the probability of you getting inbreeding is remote. You could still get inbreeding if you were very unlucky and managed to picked out all the same allele but the probability of this was extremely remote.
I agree with Gavin in point 3 above that inbreeding is a bit over-hyped but beekeepers should be aware of the potential. I also think that there may be other factors involved. I was reading a research thesis today about the effects varroa treatments have on sperm numbers in drones and viability in the queen. To me that is more scary than potential inbreeding

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

Item 1 Re bowls of fruit! What implications are you talkng about? Are you coming to burn my house down?

Item 2 Hit a nerve there - They should be informing me of this! Not you! Pleased to hear that they have oodles of commonsense - whatever that means!

Item 3 Good to hear that you also consider inbreeding an issue, "important" would have been good!
What does overhyped mean? - When beekeepers are still breeding from their best colonies instead of all of their colonies in a scenario of constant colony loss "hype" is not the key word - "education" on the dangers of breeding from the few would be more relevant

Item 4 The Holy Grail of csd is stifled by chronic, related colony interbreeding - even Jon agrees with this postulation and I quote "I have argue elsewhere on the basis of this paper that you have to be caeful with reducing numbers of colonies...." .
Inbreeding is already a problem around Crinan and was in the Clydebank area until the Clyde Area Bee Breeder Group introduced new blood into the Clydebank, Hargate and Cochno areas of West Dunbartonshire this year. New colonies created this year were established in the areas mentioned where no honey bees had been seen for some 6 years.

Item 5 "It is a a good point that beekeepers see hygenic behaviour and confuse it with diploid drone gap". Get away wi ye! Treating against Varroa, especially with formic acid, would lay that particular ghost once and for all.

Item 6 Gavin, Gavin - Is there no hope for you? Over time when the reducing gene pool reaches critical mass as the random drones continue to meet their sisters, cousins and aunts in the love match, the colonies will initially exhibit loss of vitality and then just go into melt down. I have, as I have stated elsewhere been closely involved in such a real life scenario involving inbred colonies on Islay in the 70s - probably before you were even a twinkle in you dad's eye!
Unfortunately I go on holiday tomorrow - so I will have to take a rain check on further intercourse with this engrosssing discussion

Regards

Eric
Eric

[Jon]

Item 3
What does overhyped mean? - When beekeepers are still breeding from their best colonies instead of all of their colonies in a scenario of constant colony loss "hype" is not the key word - "education" on the dangers of breeding from the few would be more relevant
Eric

Eric
Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jimbo
I am impressed but not overwhelmed! Your prof, by your own admission used hundreds of thousands
of genes (coloured sweets!!) in his response to your question. In my postulation we are not dealing with hundreds of thousands of genes - we are dealing with - how many? You tell me! As I stated in my response to Gavin - I have witnessed massive inbreeding and colony collapse due to loss of genetic diversity caused by reducing colony numbers over time, (and not cosmic time!).
Your concurrence with Gavin puts you at odds with Jon, who rightly recognises that inbreeding can be an issue.
In the present scenario there are areas in Scotland which are either in a borderline situationn with inbreeding or are already suffering the effects. Most thinking, educated (in beekeeping !) beekeepers
are now aware that inbreeding is a problem waiting in the wings to manifest itself into a major problem as unrelated colony numbers continue to decrease.
Your input regarding anti Varroa chemotherapy is another topic I would be delighted to get embroiled in. But I go on holiday tomorrow - too bad!

Regards

Eric

[Jon]

Hi Eric:


Your concurrence with Gavin puts you at odds with Jon, who rightly recognises that inbreeding can be an issue.

Just to clarify, I think everyone recognises that inbreeding is 'an issue' but only in very specific situations where there is a demonstrable loss of alleles at the csd locus.
Demonstrable being the operative word.

Enjoy your holiday. I am sure there will still be vigorous and non-inbred colonies around when you get back!
-not to mention vigorous debate!

[gavin]

Enjoy your holiday Eric, and no, if your house burns down while you are away, it wouldn't be me!

Forget the fruit then. I thought that it was a clear way of seeing that halving the population size doesn't half the allelic diversity in it. It just seems like commonsense.

Anyone in an isolated location who obtains one colony (quite common with beginners) will be at risk of having problems with inbreeding.

In a good, diverse colony ...

Queen: ab
Sperm in her spermatheca: c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n (for example)

Next generation, still one hive, still isolated, one example:

Queen: bk
Sperm: a, b (no other options)

There are lots of other possibilities for the genotype of the queen, but the sperm in her spermatheca in this unusual case of total isolation can only be a or b.

So inbreeding is a serious risk when the population size is very small and the apiary isolated. It is hardly a risk when you have 10 well-mixed and diverse colonies dropping to 5, then doubling. However that was what you wrote in your magazine articles, and it is rubbish.

If I remember right Andrew Abrahams has his closed population which was based on 6 stocks sourced from several areas in Scotland with pure Amm. He built up the numbers, and inbreeding doesn't seem to be a problem for him.

all the best

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon

I think we have met before! The Irish forum springs to mind!

Regarding:
"Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem".

Not when all the drones are from your own colonies and a limited number of nearby apiaries with only a couple of colonies, over time!!

Regarding pepper pot phenomenon:

To eliminate any factors clouding a suspected inbreeding situation where peppe-rpotting is a symptom:
1 To eliminated any major Varroa presence where hygenic behaviour is manifest eliminate the mites with formic acid.

2 To clear up any chalk brood manifestation - feed colony with around 2 - 4 litres of 1 (sugar) : 2 (water) sugar syrup- this will clear up chalk brood in around 2 weeks - no need to requeen!
The floor board insert should always be in place to record such events in the colony - it will show chalk brood drop as well as mite drop! If the pepper potting does not disappear - the problem is inbreeding!

I heard that the BBKA apiary lost all its bees recently - and imported replacements because they could not get bees locally.

Jimbo I have no proof of identity - but I have a name in my mind! Gavin and I go a long way back and I don't really agree with much of what he says - right Gavin!! I believe the feeling is mutual but I lose no sleep over it.
Your conclusions on imidacloprid, I would dispute and opinions are formed primarily in the peer group to which one subscribes you being a Gavinite puts us pretty much on a collision course. But not to worry - history will declares a winner (and H. sapiens could be the loser!)

"Getting back to inbreeding I (you) may be mistaken but I think you may be confusing a general reduction in genetic material with the specific inbreeding problem which can be caused by a reduced number of allees at the csd locus".

Notwithstanding any bee population will ultimatedly collapse when all the colonies are too closely related - in a closed population scenario - the which I have had personal experience with in th epast.

Regards

Eric

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

In reply to your question there is one gene the csd gene with many variations as you can see another gene fem gene is implicated

The isolation of the sex determination locus in honey bees led to the identification of the complementary sex determiner (csd) gene (Beye et al., 2003) (Figure 3A). The csd gene encodes a potential splicing factor that exists in at least 15 allelic variants that differ on average in ~3% of their amino acid residues (Hasselmann and Beye, 2004). The csd gene product is necessary for female development, because inactivation of csd gene product in female embryos causes a full switch into male development (Beye et al., 2003). The target of the csd gene product was recently identified as the feminizer (fem) gene (Hasselmann et al., 2008) (Figure 3A). The fem transcript is splicing differently in males and females, so that only female cells have a functional fem gene product. In males, splicing introduces a stop codon into the fem coding sequence.

Going back to Gavin's point. Three isolated colonies have been found in an isolated part of Scotland that were surveyed for black bees in 1993-94. by the Stoakleys The colonies were checked again this year and still found to contain pure black bees. How have three colonies managed to survive for about 16 years in isolation?

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jimbo

Where are these bees located? Do they have Varroa?

Eric

[gavin]

A Gavinite?!! Come off it Eric ....

You could probably fairly easily model what will have happened at csd in these isolated colonies. I might even have a stab at it before the November meeting in Fife on bee breeding. Are you coming Eric?

[gavin]

Hi Jimbo

Where are these bees located? Do they have Varroa?

Eric

I suspect that the best answer to that one is to say - come to the November meeting and you'll find out from the person looking into them. If you can't we'll discuss it here afterwards.

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

Who mentioned Imidacloprid?

Time you had that holiday. Have a good one

Best wishes

Jimbo

[Jon]

Hi Jon

I think we have met before! The Irish forum springs to mind!

Hi Eric

Must be confusing me with someone else.
I read the Irish forum but don't post on it.
I'll start one of these days though.
Itchy trigger finger.


A Gavinite?!! Come off it Eric ....

All hail Gavin and his almighty potatoes.



I heard that the BBKA apiary lost all its bees recently - and imported replacements because they could not get bees locally.

I think that was propaganda from anti bbka folk.
There was a thread about this on the bbka site last year and Roger Patterson clarified that this was not the case.
The bbka , like most associations, has an anti import policy.


"Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem".

Not when all the drones are from your own colonies and a limited number of nearby apiaries with only a couple of colonies, over time!!

I think you are wrong in your assumptions here. If there is a good variation in csd alleles, it doesn't matter where the drones come from.
You need to have the data re. the csd alleles in the population.

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

To answer your question. No I don't know the location and I don't know if they have varroa. I did a second independent check on the morphometry and got the same answer as the original morphometry test. I also have a sample of the bees waiting for DNA extraction with a view to confirm the morphometry results by genetic analysis

[Jon]

What does overhyped mean? - When beekeepers are still breeding from their best colonies instead of all of their colonies in a scenario of constant colony loss "hype" is not the key word - "education" on the dangers of breeding from the few would be more relevant




In a good, diverse colony ...

Queen: ab
Sperm in her spermatheca: c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n (for example)

I think there are a couple of issues here worth clearing up so questions for the geneticists:

1. If you graft from your best colony you are not producing virgin queen clones!
Anyone who has reared queens will have noted that sister queens can look quite different from each other.

In the example above, with say a queen carrying 15 different csd alleles in her spermatheca,
the larvae she produces could be ac, ad, ae etc, or bc, bd, be.
ie, maybe 30 different permutations.
When you graft you could be selecting larvae with many different combinations. The queens have different fathers.

I can see how this would increase the frequency of 'a' or 'b' in the gene pool in the short term but the next queen selected would almost certainly carry a 2nd csd allele which is neither 'a' nor 'b'

2. What are the implications at the csd locus in a population with queens which live for several years vs a population with early supersedure of queens?
If I understand this right, early supersedure would mix up the combinations more quickly.
If you take the same ab queen example, all her offspring will carry either 'a' or'b' plus one other csd allele.
If early supersedure takes place, this potentially brings all the other csd alleles into play more quickly.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

I'm the Biologist so I will leave this one to the real Geneticist.

Jimbo

[Rosie]

If early supersedure takes place, this potentially brings all the other csd alleles into play more quickly.

We learned at the BIBBA conference from Jacob Kahn that bees seem to be making a deliberate selection when choosing a larva to develop into a queen. If I understood him correctly he had studied a population and found that the distribution of traits in one generation did not follow the mathematical probability distribution that could have been predicted from the previous generation. This suggested to him that the bees are skewing the results by selecting certain larvae over others. If this is possible, presumably they could be capable of manipulating the csd allele population similarly. For example they might be attracted to larvae carrying different csd alleles to themselves.

Jacob Kahn's observations made me wonder if we should develop queen rearing systems that afforded the bees some degree of choice rather than foisting our chosen grafts onto them. It would not surprise me if they were capable of making better choices than us. I just choose the larvae that seem to be about the right size so it would not be difficult for the bees to make a better fist of it than me.

Rosie

[Jon]

Jacob Kahn's observations made me wonder if we should develop queen rearing systems that afforded the bees some degree of choice rather than foisting our chosen grafts onto them.

They can of course chose not to proceed with a graft which is offered to them.
Sometimes I check a couple of hours after introduction and a lot of the larvae have already been removed at which point I regraft.
It's hard to say whether they were damaged of maybe actively discarded on some other criteria.

That Jacob Kahn lecture came early in the day and I was sitting at the back keeping an eye on Doris, Torquil and Roger Patterson.

I have a queen in a nuc which was mated at the end of June and is laying well.
I have removed a supersedure cell on 6 different occasions, the first after about a week and the last a few days ago.
they seem determined to replace her but on the face of it she is laying well.

Jurgen Tautz has suggested that workers can tell the difference between full sisters and half sisters in a colony. Maybe they can do that with larvae as well.

[gavin]

Interesting comments Jon and Mr Rosie with the partially white 'Tache.

Jon, your deductions above were perfect, I'm proud of you. I can see that you have been scribbling on the back of an envelope.

The only thing I could add is that there will be, of course, thousands of genes that differed in the two gametes that fused to make the queen, so there are almost an endless set of possible differences between each virgin queen. Not just at the csd locus.

G.

[Stromnessbees]

There's me, promoting this forum (including screenshot) in my talk at the Irish conferece and recruiting new members, and then I come back to this!

Very hard to get into this thread now, but the topic is very relevant to our situation in Orkney and I actually did take notes of Dorian Pritchard's talk, details later.

In defence of Roger, I have to point out that his remark of genetics having been dreamt up on an April 1st was obviously a joke, which earned him a number of laughs and a friendly response from Dorian.

Re. the situation in Orkney:
369
The red dots are the approximate locations of colonies up to this summer, the blue ones are new locations for 2010.

We have about 80 colonies, of which +/- 25 are in or around Kirkwall. The rest is scattered around the mainland and several islands. We don't want to import bees/queens to avoid getting varroa and other nasties.

I am not too worried about the inbreeding situation on the mainland, but the outer isles, some with single hives, definitely need a plan to avoid the problems of inbreeding.

I have bred queens this summer, but not for requeening, only for increasing the number of colonies. I don't want to produce too many daughters from one queen alone, as otherwise her genes would be overrepresented in the local genepool.

Like Jon I grafted a lot more larvae than I expected the bees to rear, giving them a certain amount of choice.

I had come across Eric's calculations previously and found them too simplistic.
Gavin, your example with the fruitbowl needs a lot of refinemet, too, for a start: I imagine that the fruitbowl represents an isolated apiary, but there is no pairing of traits.
I thought of my own analogy, which involved a chairlift carrying skiers in different coloured skisuits, who randomly have to share seats but get eliminated if they share with a matching suit...

One factor in case reports that doesn't get enough attention is the duration of a bottleneck:
A small number of unrelated colonies introduced to an island where they immediately can multiply is probably going to thrive, but the same small number introduced to an island where the number of colonies is kept low will lead to failure in the long run.

How much does it cost to determine the csd loci of one queen? Is it feasible to have our population analysed?

Doris

[Jon]

Hi Doris good to see you back.


In defence of Roger, I have to point out that his remark of genetics having been dreamt up on an April 1st was obviously a joke, which earned him a number of laughs and a friendly response from Dorian.

I know he was joking but I don't think he would like to be stuck in a lift with Gavin for too long!
There again, who would!

I like your ski-lift analogy.
It takes someone from Austria to come up with an image like that.
I have a mental picture of a double ejector seat like something from a Bond movie.


One factor in case reports that doesn't get enough attention is the duration of a bottleneck:
A small number of unrelated colonies introduced to an island where they immediately can multiply is probably going to thrive, but the same small number introduced to an island where the number of colonies is kept low will lead to failure in the long run.

I think that's true but it probably affects very few colonies - such as the example you gave of a single colony on an outer island.
In general terms, how many colonies on the mainland would be isolated from others by 10 miles or more? And the varroa free areas probably still have ferals.


There's me, promoting this forum (including screenshot) in my talk at the Irish conferece
Maybe the big man will pay you commission.

...but remember who showed you how to do the screenshot and paste it in Powerpoint!

[gavin]

Doris! Lovely to see you back.

I'm about to head off to Aberdeen, so more later ....

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Jon

Initially I was quite happy with my chairlift analogy, but if you take the sperm stored in the spermatheca into account, the matter gets very complicated and you may just as well stick with queens and alleles.

But we can give it a try anyway:

The double-chairs on the lift are the queens, controlled by the liftmaster (= the beekeeper).
The 2 skiers on the chairs are the alleles, dressed in different coloured skisuits (variants of csd).
The pairs never have matching colours.
Now, in their pockets they carry coloured hankies, corresponding to the colours of skisuits available in the area. When a pair has reached the top the two skiers ski down together and recruit more people as skiers, pair them up and give them skisuits: one of the new pair gets the colours of one of the hankies the originals have in their pockets and the other gets the colour of one of the original pair's own skisuits.
At the bottom of the run the new pairs accept new hankies from other pairs of skiers, but only of the colour of their respective skisuits!
They queue for the lift, where the liftmaster (and other factors) control who gets to go up.

(At this point I gave up trying to find a mathematical solution to the problem...)

If your extremely remote beekeeper has only got 2 colonies that don't swarm and just supersede every four years, your chairlift has only got 2 double-seats which only go up every four years. There are only 4 skiers on the run, with initially several different colours of hankies, but even after just one round there will be a maximum of 4 colours of hankies available.

That means he has only got 4 different types of drones for mating.
Every time there is another run, some of the same colours might get selected, reducing variety further.

... steaming heads all around, especially mine.

Comments?

Doris

[Jon]

If your extremely remote beekeeper has only got 2 colonies that don't swarm and just supersede every four years,

But the arithmetic changes completely if you get early supersedure, especially supersedure in the same season. The supersedure queen will more than likely have two alleles distinct from Those of her grandmother which is probably still producing drones. Without supersedure there would be at least one the same.

I have a queen from a grafted larva which started laying in an Apidea on 26th June.
I introduced it to a colony a few days later and I saw eggs on 4th July.
The colony made a supersedure cell almost immediately and when it was sealed I removed the frame with the cell and gave it to another nuc where the queen had got lost on a mating flight. This one hatched and mated quickly and was laying by the end of July which meant that I had grandmother, mother and daughter all laying in the same Apiary.
The permutations get complicated with supersedure especially if mother and daughter are both laying in the same colony for a few months. Sometimes the superseded queen is killed very quickly.

[Stromnessbees]

Yes, there can be temporary overlaps, which doesn't change the fact that in the next season, with only 2 hives (1 queen in each) overwintered, you again have got a maximum of only 4 types of drones available.

I forgot to mention that our liftmaster (= beekeeper) has so far been colourblind (= not noticed that there are different alleles at play), therefore he has not been able to select for diversity of skisuits (= diversity on the csd locus).

Doris

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Jimbo



Three isolated colonies have been found in an isolated part of Scotland that were surveyed for black bees in 1993-94. by the Stoakleys The colonies were checked again this year and still found to contain pure black bees. How have three colonies managed to survive for about 16 years in isolation?

There might have been some drones flying in from further afield, but let's ignore that option for the moment.

These 3 colonies might have started with a very diverse set of genes, and with long-lived queens there might not have been enough generations yet to show the full effects of inbreeding.

According to Dorian, colonies with less than 75% brood viability (25% of larvae lost: 19% diploid males plus 6% other causes) will die out in winter, that is under regular management. Maybe these colonies were rather pampered by their beekeeper and just about managed to survive.

Of course, if they started as black bees and there was no other input, they will still be black bees now. The interesting thing would be to look at their brood pattern and count the number of empty cells within a randomly selected area (- count several and take an average if you like). Any more than 6% points to inbreeding.

Doris

[Rosie]

Hi Jimbo

Any more than 6% points to inbreeding.

Doris

I think I would be a bit cautious about that assumption. It might be true for new comb at the start of the year but it takes no account of pollen within the nest or hygienic behaviour, both of which seem to be additive during the season. There are also those new-fangled heater bees that recently hit the news.

Rosie

Thanks for an interesting talk, by the way, at BIBBA

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Rosie

Glad you enjoyed the talk. It's been a very long time since I have had to talk to an audience, especially as there were thousands of years of accumulated beekeeping experience in that room, very daunting for me with just a few.

The 6 % are quoted from Dorian's talk, and I suppose that we can allow for a few extra percent in adverse circumstances.

More figures I jotted down during the talk:

"If there are only 6 sex alleles present in the area the colonies are doomed."

"Aim to have at least 11 sex alleles in your local population."

"Only half of all colonies are effective drone producers."

"Within an area of 255 km2 (radius 9km) should be a minimum of 30 colonies to allow for enough genetic diversity, barriers like mountain ranges limit genetic exchange further."


Plenty there to discuss...
Doris

[Rosie]

Doris

I made a few notes from Dorian's talk too, but even he conceded that you had to be careful about counting the holes in the nest and the 6% allowance was based on another researcher's work who was probably working with exotic bees. He also said that the count only worked when the queen was introduced to a empty, drawn comb which needed to be counted 12 days after the introduction. If you wait too long to do the counting the queen may have returned to fill all the gaps.

Dorian's 30 colonies are also mentioned in Laidlaw and Page but but I think their figures and Dorian's were based on mathematical models. However, my interpretation of what Jacob Kahn had to say suggests that the bees are making choices that skew the results away from those predicted by statistical analysis. I don't know, however, whether the bees make things better or worse. Perhaps we should put our faith in Darwin and assume the bees have evolved to make good choices.:)

All the best

Rosie

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Rosie

... fair enough. I suppose the 6% apply to otherwise perfectly healthy colonies under ideal conditions, so allowances should be made. We just should not dismiss the idea of inbreeding problems alltogether.

Regarding the bees having evolved to make good choices: could Apiary Vicinity Mating, supposedly a trait of Amm, not be a possible Achilles' heel?

Doris

[Jon]

Regarding the bees having evolved to make good choices: could Apiary Vicinity Mating, supposedly a trait of Amm, not be a possible Achilles' heel?



Apiary Vicinity mating is one of those things I would like to see either proven or disproven as I suspect that the supposition originated with Beowulf Cooper and has been oft repeated ever since.
I remember it was one of the points Richard Bache latched on to and he was right to imho.
The AMM folk need to follow science or the claims will be no more valid than those made by small cell or top bar devotees.
It shouldn't come down to a matter of faith.
Were it true, it would tend to limit genetic diversity one would imagine.

[Rosie]

Hi Jon

Richard Bache seems to assume that if something has not been scientifically proven then it doesn't exist. Although I have not personally witnessed AVM I know at least 2 and I think 3 who have actually seen it. Beo Cooper was a professional entomologist and I very much doubt that he would have made it up in the first place. Peter Edwards reported that last season he had a whole batch of near native virgins mate at 5 degrees C. I very much doubt if they found a drone assembly at that temperature. Most research has been done with exotic strains of bees so science has little information to offer AMM enthusiasts.

Doris wondered if it were an acheles heel. It is believed, however, that it's only used in conditions that preclude other forms of mating and is an adaptation of AMM to our weather conditions. An occasional inbreeding event is probably better than no mating at all and is very soon corrected in the next generation.

I am perfectly comfortable about believing that it exists and that it is a strength rather than a weakness.

Rosie

[Jon]

I am perfectly comfortable about believing that it exists and that it is a strength rather than a weakness.

I am open minded on it, but I do think that the evidence is scant.
I heard the 5c claim made by Peter Edwards but my own bees usually only start foraging at around 7c-8c and drones don't usually leave the landing board until temperatures are considerably higher.
What date did this happen? I can't remember if he mentioned it. It must have been very late in the year.

[Rosie]

I think he said it was late last season but I can't remember the exact date. He often rears queens very late to improve his chances of AMM matings. He also said that one of these late queens went on to be one of the best of his 150 and will be used as a donor. I know Peter quite well and if he said that it happened you can rest assured that it really did.

Scientific evidence might be scance but eye witness accounts from people I trust are good enough for me. People deny lots of things that haven't been proven scientifically like foraging in the rain and mating successfully 6 weeks after emerging but these are things I have seen recently in my bees. But we are wandering off the original topic now.

[Jon]

But we are wandering off the original topic now.

Well spotted! back to inbreeding. Doris and Gavin will be along in a minute.
I totally agree that observation of your own bees can provide a wealth of information, not all of it to be found in print.
Peter Edward's record keeping is second to none as well.
I think he has been lined up to speak at the UBKA conference next March.

[Trog]

For what it's worth, most of my bees fly at 5C and also seem to be able to mate late in the year. They also fly in the rain. They have to!

[Rosie]

Trog, if your bees are like mine they don't seem to care what the temperature is as long as the sun is shining. In dull or wet weather they like about 9 degrees.

[GRIZZLY]

My God you lot, talk about giving someone a headache !!! I'm struggling to keep up with all the concepts and arguments.I hope Eric went on holiday with a bag of "hundreds and thousands" and as for me - I'm off for a headache tablet.I'm glad I'm just a simple OLD beekeeper of 40 years experience who just practices "seat of the pants" beekeeping and lets all the boffins play with the "scientific" bit.

[gavin]

OK folks ....

I suspect that we're all just seat-of-the-pants beekeepers at heart. I'm already behind schedule with the autumn treatments and feeding.

Fruit is healthier than hundreds and thousands, so I hope Eric took plenty of self-replicating fruit with him!

Fruit bowl was not supposed to be analogous to a hive or apiary but just an example that Eric might relate to that shows why his halving of everything assumption was fallacious. But I give up, when Eric doesn't want to know something, he will not listen.

Could AVM or even late-season cool weather mating be an Achilles' Heel of Amm? Maybe, but then it has survived in the UK since the last Ice Age, so as a general strategy the advantages must outweigh the benefits.

No-one should assume that all of the theoretical stuff means that this is what you will see. Selective queen raising was mentioned. AVM was also mentioned - and there will be other reasons why apiaries in well-populated areas sometimes suffer from inbreeding. It *is* an issue, but to properly understand it (just like many other issues I'm afraid) one of the first steps for Scottish Beekeepers is to ignore the rants of folk who like to think that they understand and tell everyone that they do, but they don't.

best wishes

Gavin

[Stromnessbees]

By the way, have these two papers been mentioned here already?

http://www.busybrealty.net/honeyrun/pdf/closed_breeding.pdf

and

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/bienenkunde/forschung_lehre/Inbreeding%20effects%20of%20queen_1989.pdf


Doris

[gavin]

They have now! And there was me trying to drag myself away from the laptop for a while .....

[Alvearium]

Thanks for the informative discussion folks.....there are not many forums with this level of knowledge. I do see Gavin's point. The first page of Eric's article would have made sense until he got on to the simplistic reductionist arithmetic on page 2.
Alvearium

[Jon]

Yes, there can be temporary overlaps, which doesn't change the fact that in the next season, with only 2 hives (1 queen in each) overwintered, you again have got a maximum of only 4 types of drones available.

Doris

Hi Doris.
Re. your totally isolated outer island population with only one or two colonies:

Without taking the obvious step of increasing the population to several colonies, I can only see two ways to avoid the bottleneck.

1. Requeen with a mated queen from elsewhere every time the colony starts to make swarm preparations..

or

2. Introduce several virgins from Elsewhere in Apideas and chose one with a decent brood pattern for requeening once mated.

Your first link, the Page and Laidlaw paper from 1985 was interesting and it seems we are not discussing anything new.

Did you see the paragraph on Page 5 which states that supersedure causes the sex alleles to be lost more slowly from a population as it increased the effective number of breeders?

I wonder has anyone done any research which demonstrates that supersedure of queens increases as the number of sex alleles in a population decreases?
You would intuitively think that should be the case.

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Jon

Re. the isolated colonies on the outer isles:
The problem lies, as so often, not with the bees but with their keepers. In this case I did try to raise the topic but they just want to let the bees get on with it.

Re. Bienefeld's study:
It looks like they only inbred the bees/queens once and looked for effects. I think that in many cases inbreeding (with a varying percentage of related drones) goes on over many generations. And that would render the discussion about different effects of inbred workers vs inbred queens futile. Or did I misunderstand the whole paper? Shame he didn't turn up at the Irish conference.

Will have another look at the other paper re. supersedure.

Doris

[Neils]

Once upon a time there was a magic bowl of fruit. It had 6 plums, 6 apples, 6 pears and 6 oranges. A hungry family ate half of the fruit each day - totally at random. This being a magic bowl of fruit, every remaining item duplicated itself overnight.

After the first night, how many types of fruit had you lost - any?! Half of them? I can't be bothered working out the probabilities, but in many cases all would survive into the subsequent year (no, day) despite the high overall attrition rate.

The system is self-balancing. If a fruit gets slightly more abundant than is its due, it is more likely to be picked and its frequency will fall back again. Although random events will eliminate single types of fruit from time to time, in general an equilibrium is reached.

As I'm frantically hanging on by my finger nails to the rest of the conversation, would it be overkill to model this and find out? That I can at least do as long as people are happy enough that the RNG won't be truly random.

[gavin]

Yeah, I did wonder about the claimed differences between workers and queens when they are essentially the same thing.

Those Orcadians who prefer to carry on as before - do they have a successful record over several years of just letting the bees get on with it?

Nice to see all the discussion folks. I'm supposed to stand up at the Fife November meeting and talk knowledgeably on the topic - thanks to you I may actually be able to pull it off!

Had a nice evening in Edinburgh tonight where the local beekeepers wanted to know about disease, health and good husbandry. I'm useless myself at the last of these of course, but I can pretend otherwise when necessary.

:o

[gavin]

RNG?

Of course this is only magic bowls of fruit we're talking about, not bees.

Modelling three colonies in one isolated apiary, each with queens of different genotype and a pool of randomly chosen drones, 10 types per queen and 15 types in the population, over a period of years and assuming annual requeening, also assuming random mating within the apiary and no incursions from outside .... now *that* would be a nice model.

Or did Laidlaw and Page already do this?

G.

[Neils]

Random Number Generator (or if you want to be picky, it's a pseudo Random Number Generator because it's not truly Random).

I was thinking you need a collection of fruit not to exceed 24 pieces. You seed the collection with 6 of each type. Using an RNG to determine which 50% get removed each "turn" then double the remaining pieces. How many turns does it take to reach a point where one of the types reaches 0? And for more fun allow it to run multiple times and take an average number.

[gavin]

Ahhh. And I'm not picky about such terms, just genetic ones.

[Stromnessbees]

Those Orcadians who prefer to carry on as before - do they have a successful record over several years of just letting the bees get on with it?


Hi Gavin

Like you I very much appreciate the chance to have a good discussion here. It's amazing how much harder you have to think about your concepts when you want to write them down and know that you won't get away with half-baked ideas.

Your post prompted me to make two phonecalls:

First one to Westray... result: 1 hive left on the island, apparently looking very poor now.

Second one to Hoy... result: the last hive there died out 2 weeks ago.

Having lived for 6 years on one of the outer isles myself and trying to keep a hive going while struggling to raise a family I know how hard it can be to find time for even the most essential beekeeping tasks.

When people now are interested in starting up I make it very clear to them that they would have to 'sacrifice' several of those rare warm and calm summer afternoons for the bees and that there is a lot to learn at first. Nevertheless, we had one very enthusiastic beginner from Eday this summer, and she is delighted with her new colony and prepared to either get a few more colonies or to exchange queens with the mainland.

At the moment we are trying to organise monthly sessions for the winter, to make sure nobody needs to struggle on their own anymore. Also having the local Yahoo group helps a lot to keep in touch.

Doris

[Stromnessbees]

Modelling three colonies in one isolated apiary, each with queens of different genotype and a pool of randomly chosen drones, 10 types per queen and 15 types in the population, over a period of years and assuming annual requeening, also assuming random mating within the apiary and no incursions from outside .... now *that* would be a nice model.


According to the back of my envelope (a big brown one with lots of scribbles on it) you lose 6 alleles in your first season already, as with 3 queens you can only keep a maximum of 9 alleles going.

After that you are bound to lose more soon, as some of the alleles will turn up in more than one queen and therefore not leave room for all of the other variants.

Doris

[Neils]

I'm game if you want to try it but I need a fair but of input to define the "rules" and it would come with the caveat that it'd be for illustration purposes only.

The magic bowl of fruit would be a lot easier though ;)

[Johnthefarmer]

Once upon a time there was a magic bowl of fruit. It had 6 plums, 6 apples, 6 pears and 6 oranges. A hungry family ate half of the fruit each day - totally at random. This being a magic bowl of fruit, every remaining item duplicated itself overnight.

After the first night, how many types of fruit had you lost - any?! Half of them? I can't be bothered working out the probabilities, but in many cases all would survive into the subsequent year (no, day) despite the high overall attrition rate.

The system is self-balancing. If a fruit gets slightly more abundant than is its due, it is more likely to be picked and its frequency will fall back again. Although random events will eliminate single types of fruit from time to time, in general an equilibrium is reached.

Strangely chosen analogy if you wanted to demonstrate the robustness of an isolated population/ closed system, under threat, and its ability to maintain diversity. In this fruit bowl story, the inevitable outcome is a bowl containing 24 of the same fruit. This could happen after two days, or two years; but it would happen, unless a pear spontaneously mutated into an apple overnight.
How else do apples reappear once they are eliminated ' from time to time'?
What we're discussing is surely the nub of decreasing biodiversity in a time of increasing environmental threats and only snailpaced species adaptation/mutation. To minimise current risks to so many species in fragmented, depleted environments is a suprising move for a beekeeping genetisist, so I will assume the' fruit bowl' is a devil's advocacy ploy, and it's working.

[gavin]

Hi John

Welcome to the forum.

I thought that I was trying to get Eric to see that his 50% reduction in diversity every generation wasn't right, that's all.

It isn't about trying to advocate that certain systems are robust or fragile, but to inject some realism into the arguments that have been made in the beekeeping press.

Yes, the fruit bowl *could* turn rather boringly uniform quickly, but usually it will take many generations to do so. The diversity of the bowl is at risk, but just don't expect it to half every day.

In terms of real populations of bees or wild animals or plants, fragmentation of habitat is a massive issue. The linkage (in terms of cross-breeding) between isolated populations is crucial to maintain the genetic integrity of the overall population ... which is why gene flow between fragmented populations is a big issue.

Interesting to have a perspective on bee gene flow between isolated populations which comes from watching the movement of an invading pathogen like Varroa. Varroa has had some big hiccoughs in its march westwards and northwards due to restricted opportunities to leap between widely separated apiaries. The same must apply to small vulnerable bee populations - little chance to mate with the neighbouring apiary if it is over the mountain range and in the next valley.

best wishes

Gavin

[Adam]

Keep going guys. I don't know if I'm any the wiser but it's interesting to wade through the thread from time to time. This post has now had 900 views so others must be looking at it too!

[gavin]

Many of these views will be by the crawl-bots used by the main search engines ... and also the spam-bots looking for sites with poor security. But a fair number will also be by interested beekeepers ...

As a special reward for all the intelligent comments here, some words from a great Scottish philosopher. Thanks to David Ollason and my lovely sister-in-law for the prompt, unconscious though it was.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJZ9cIXQgdc

[Adam]

Blimey, I haven't heard Ivor Cutler since I listened to John Peel who played his stuff when I was at school!

[gavin]

Ah ... another person of culture!

At the risk of disrupting an excellent thread further, another small gift for the beekeepers amongst you who believe that you should always strive hard to understand the map, and never assume that you always have it right!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2XEF387F4

[gavin]

According to the back of my envelope (a big brown one with lots of scribbles on it) you lose 6 alleles in your first season already, as with 3 queens you can only keep a maximum of 9 alleles going.

After that you are bound to lose more soon, as some of the alleles will turn up in more than one queen and therefore not leave room for all of the other variants.

Doris

Doris, you are a genius! I have to say that when you posted that I thought .... hmmmnn .... I'll bet that there's more than that, I'll work it out later. You are in fact spot-on! Here is my offering for the most diverse combinations from three colonies in a fully-isolated apiary. I see that I allowed myself 15 sperm alleles per queen, but it doesn't affect the outcome. Double digits indicate a subsequent generation. q above the queen genotype, s above the types of sperm she carries (but the software isn't allowing me the extra spaces so its a bit bunched up):

q1 s1
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q

q2 s2
c d a b e f g h i j k l m n o p q

q3 s3
e f a b c d g h i j k l m n o p q

q11 s11
a g a b c d e f

q22 s22
d h a b c d e f

q33 s33
e i a b c d e f

Beyond that second generation you're just into a fruit bowl situation. Expect to see something of this turn up in the genetics talk at the Fife meeting, for those who are going.

Now then, should I find another Ivor Cutler video as a reward?! It is said that he kept some Ivory Cutlery in his kitchen drawer simply to entertain guests.

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Guys
Honey, I'm home!! Guernsey was stunning!

Dear All
I have surfed the current thread and I note the chickens are still running around as if they were headless.
At least they have a choice for comfort. As well as the bowls of hypothetial fruit to dine on they also have nesting material from the skiers.
I suppose the thread is now virtually dead apart from some really interesting input from Doris and John the Farmer. Just as well I am not superstitious or a Carib Juju worshipper!
I have lifted some comments, which I found interesting, listed not necessarily in chronological order.
I do not expect any responses!


Gavin
If you have three colonies fully isolated from all other apiaries then it will be hard to maintain 6 alleles in the long term. Easier with 4 colonies, not so hard at all with 5. The bottleneck is the queen. Each queen can only make drones of two types as the drones arise only from the genes carried in her own cells. The workers and queens each queen makes can be more diverse as they are fertilised with stored sperm, but over time this strong filtering when queens make drones will reduce the diversity in such small isolated populations. Of course few apiaries are really isolated. I would doubt, for example, that Mull is fully isolated from the mainland.


(Hi Gavin
I seem to remember that the original postulation was about annual loss of 50% of coloniies, you are cheating. You do not have the luxury of "in the long term" if you remain true to the original post!)
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(JON)
I think you are misunderstanding how this works.
You can start with ten colonies, lose 5, increase to ten the following year and still maintain every one of the CSD alleles.
Unless you are in a completely isolated situation, there will be incoming genetic material from neighbouring colonies via their drones.
Even in an isolated situation, bees can maintain genetic diversity as the queen mates with multiple drones.

(Hi Jon
Watch my lips! The original post referred to a totally isolated apiary. Your statement - viz - "Unless you are in a completely isolated situation, there will be incoming genetic material from neighbouring colonies via their drones". misses the point When I was a student the most important factor when answering a question was to understand the question!

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Jon
Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem.

(Hi Joh
Blundered again! There is no local population - the apiary in question is totally isolated!)


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Jimbo
Going back to Gavin's point. Three isolated colonies have been found in an isolated part of Scotland that were surveyed for black bees in 1993-94. by the Stoakleys The colonies were checked again this year and still found to contain pure black bees. How have three colonies managed to survive for about 16 years in isolation?

(Hi Jimbo
From the two statements by Jon above - your school don't believe in "isolated". Gavin rfused to divulge the location of these colonies or if they had varroa when i asked for that info. An honest reply would have clearedup any dubiety re isolation!)

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Jimbo
Who mentioned Imidacloprid?

(Hi Jimbo
In the classic West of Scotland school pupil reply - "It wisnae me"! I'm not a clype but it was Jon)


Jimbo
Back to inbreeding I went for a second opinion today and asked one of our top genetic professors who's speciality is human population genetics. He did not use a bowl of fruit example but said if you have a large bag of hundreds and thousands of all diffrent colours (he admits to having a sweet tooth) and you take out a handful you will still have at least one of every colour. The probability of picking out all the red ones in the first handful is very remote therefore you will still maintain your genetic diversity. If you relate this to the bee with so many CSD alleles the probability of you getting inbreeding is remote. You could still get inbreeding if you were very unlucky and managed to picked out all the same allele but the probability of this was extremely remote


(Jimbo
In my postulation we are not dealing with hundreds of thousands of genes - we are dealing with - how many? You tell me! As I stated in my response to Gavin - I have witnessed massive inbreeding and colony collapse due to loss of genetic diversity caused by reducing colony numbers over time in a totally isolated apiary situation, (and not cosmic time!).

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Doris
There's me, promoting this forum (including screenshot) in my talk at the Irish conferece and recruiting new members, and then I come back to this!
( Hi Doris
Was meinst du damit? Unsinniges Thema oder nicht das Redenswert? Meines Errachtens ein solches Thema, für dich sei äusserst relevant!)

In defence of Roger, I have to point out that his remark of genetics having been dreamt up on an April 1st was obviously a joke, which earned him a number of laughs and a friendly response from Dorian.

(I corresponded with Mr Paterson about his queen problems a number of years ago- he was in denial of inbreeding then! As now? What do you know of Harry Wickens?

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We have about 80 colonies, of which +/- 25 are in or around Kirkwall. The rest is scattered around the mainland and several islands. We don't want to import bees/queens to avoid getting varroa and other nasties.

(Your scattered colonies are in imminent danger of inbreeding problems! You have an intelligent breeding program pending I hope.)

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I have bred queens this summer, but not for requeening, only for increasing the number of colonies. I don't want to produce too many daughters from one queen alone, as otherwise her genes would be overrepresented in the local genepool.

(Good thinking! But I think even Gavin would agree that breeding multiples of queens from all of your Orkney colonies and then distributing them "with malice aforethought" would be a good ploy. Considering the foregoing arguments regarding csd.)

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I had come across Eric's calculations previously and found them too simplistic.
Gavin, your example with the fruitbowl needs a lot of refinemet, too, for a start: I imagine that the fruitbowl represents an isolated apiary, but there is no pairing of traits.
I thought of my own analogy, which involved a chairlift carrying skiers in different coloured skisuits, who randomly have to share seats but get eliminated if they share with a matching suit...

( Why does no-one do the Math here - I penned the original piece which appeared in both the bq and the SB try to stimulate awareness ininbreeding. This thread has hopefully focused some beekeeper minds on the need for good stock management!)

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See Part 2 for continued reading!

[Eric McArthur]

Doris
One factor in case reports that doesn't get enough attention is the duration of a bottleneck:
A small number of unrelated colonies introduced to an island where they immediately can multiply is probably going to thrive, but the same small number introduced to an island where the number of colonies is kept low will lead to failure in the long run.

(Kangaroo Island is a classic case of this although there are rumblings that some drift from mainland Oz has had some "sweetening" influence). For Gavin's info - his statement in one of his responses that the Colonsay apiary was grounded on 6 colonies is incorrect. Kangaroo Island was grounded on 6 colonies. I spoke with Andrew in the presence of the legendary Berhardt Möbus way back in the early 80s about his project. He stated at that time that he was working with a 50+ complement., which according to the German Körung (you explain Doris!) exponents in the Carniolan breeding program was just about the lowest viable number of colonies in a managed isolated breeding program.

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Grizzly
My God you lot, talk about giving someone a headache !!! I'm struggling to keep up with all the concepts and arguments.I hope Eric went on holiday with a bag of "hundreds and thousands" and as for me - I'm off for a headache tablet.I'm glad I'm just a simple OLD beekeeper of 40 years experience who just practices "seat of the pants" beekeeping and lets all the boffins play with the "scientific" bit.

(Grizzly
Beat you by 3 years! Seat of pants is OK - but it is good to change the underpants occasionally! I hope you get the pun!!)
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Gavin
Fruit bowl was not supposed to be analogous to a hive or apiary but just an example that Eric might relate to that shows why his halving of everything assumption was fallacious. But I give up, when Eric doesn't want to know something, he will not listen.

(Gavin Many thanks for these wise words. Only a fool would have ever cosidered keeping bee in a fruit bowl. Re the "cloth ears" - It takes one to know one!)
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Alvearium
Thanks for the informative discussion folks.....there are not many forums with this level of knowledge. I do see Gavin's point. The first page of Eric's article would have made sense until he got on to the simplistic reductionist arithmetic on page 2.

(Alvearium - Have a read at the prose below by John the Farmer. Ever heard of Sod's Law?
"Strangely chosen analogy if you wanted to demonstrate the robustness of an isolated population/ closed system, under threat, and its ability to maintain diversity. In this fruit bowl story, the inevitable outcome is a bowl containing 24 of the same fruit. This could happen after two days, or two years; but it would happen, unless a pear spontaneously mutated into an apple overnight.
How else do apples reappear once they are eliminated ' from time to time'?
What we're discussing is surely the nub of decreasing biodiversity in a time of increasing environmental threats and only snailpaced species adaptation/mutation. To minimise current risks to so many species in fragmented, depleted environments is a suprising move for a beekeeping genetisist, so I will assume the' fruit bowl' is a devil's advocacy ploy, and it's working")

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

Jon
Did you see the paragraph on Page 5 which states that supersedure causes the sex alleles to be lost more slowly from a population as it increased the effective number of breeders?

(Jon
Radical thinking. What would happen to your superseding colonies if the new queens regularly finished up as a swift's lunch!)

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Doris
Modelling three colonies in one isolated apiary, each with queens of different genotype and a pool of randomly chosen drones, 10 types per queen and 15 types in the population, over a period of years and assuming annual requeening, also assuming random mating within the apiary and no incursions from outside .... now *that* would be a nice model.
According to the back of my envelope (a big brown one with lots of scribbles on it) you lose 6 alleles in your first season already, as with 3 queens you can only keep a maximum of 9 alleles going.
After that you are bound to lose more soon, as some of the alleles will turn up in more than one queen and therefore not leave room for all of the other variants.

(Doris
You are getting warm! In my postulation you do not have the luxury of constant colony numbers - 50% go to meet their maker every winter/spring!
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John The farmer
Strangely chosen analogy if you wanted to demonstrate the robustness of an isolated population/ closed system, under threat, and its ability to maintain diversity. In this fruit bowl story, the inevitable outcome is a bowl containing 24 of the same fruit. This could happen after two days, or two years; but it would happen, unless a pear spontaneously mutated into an apple overnight.
How else do apples reappear once they are eliminated ' from time to time'?
What we're discussing is surely the nub of decreasing biodiversity in a time of increasing environmental threats and only snailpaced species adaptation/mutation. To minimise current risks to so many species in fragmented, depleted environments is a suprising move for a beekeeping genetisist, so I will assume the' fruit bowl' is a devil's advocacy ploy, and it's working.

(John the Farmer
Nice one John! We seem to be the only two on the planet that understands Sod's Law)

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;
Gavin
Yes, the fruit bowl *could* turn rather boringly uniform quickly, but usually it will take many generations to do so. The diversity of the bowl is at risk, but just don't expect it to half every day.

(Gavin
Game set and match Dr Ramsay! Sod's Law postulates that if it can happen it will happen!
See your answer to John the Farmer!)
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Gavin
Doris, you are a genius! I have to say that when you posted that I thought .... hmmmnn .... I'll bet that there's more than that, I'll work it out later. You are in fact spot-on! Here is my offering for the most diverse combinations from three colonies in a fully-isolated apiary. I see that I allowed myself 15 sperm alleles per queen, but it doesn't affect the outcome. Double digits indicate a subsequent generation. q above the queen genotype, s above the types of sperm she carries (but the software isn't allowing me the extra spaces so its a bit bunched up):
q1 s1
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q
q2 s2
c d a b e f g h i j k l m n o p q
q3 s3
e f a b c d g h i j k l m n o p q
q11 s11
a g a b c d e f
q22 s22
d h a b c d e f
q33 s33
e i a b c d e f

(Gavin What am I to make of your earlier statement?
Viz-
Each queen can only make drones of two types as the drones arise only from the genes carried in her own cells. The workers and queens each queen makes can be more diverse as they are fertilised with stored sperm, but over time this strong filtering when queens make drones will reduce the diversity in such small isolated populations. Of course few apiaries are really isolated. I would doubt, for example, that Mull is fully isolated from the mainland.

Do I perhaps hear rumblings of "Petards and hoisting"? My hypothetical apiary is extremely isolated!!!

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[gavin]

Hi Eric

Great to see you back and feeling so full of energy! Did you find any bees on Guernsey?



Do I perhaps hear rumblings of "Petards and hoisting"?

I don't see the problem. Queens carry two alleles in their own cells and a bunch more in their spermatheca. That governs all of these arguments .... what was petard-hoisting about what I said? If you need us to explain further, just ask.

best wishes

Gavin

[Rosie]

Queens carry two alleles in their own cells and a bunch more in their spermatheca. That governs all of these arguments ....

Hi Gavin and all

I am not sure what can be controversial about CSD theory as it's basically very simply as Gavin has said above. It only gets complicated when we wish to analyse probabilities when lots of queens, lots of generations and limited outbreeding are involved.

But is it really that simple? When a colony decides to swarm it produces say a dozen potentilal new queens. Between them they could carry the mother's 2 alleles plus 12 others. If the other 2 hives on an isolated island of 3 colonies swarm, then there will be 42 possible alleles and hence plenty of room for duplication of the 19 or so. However, if the population is stable at 3 colonies (presumably the environment will only support 3) then there will be plenty of selection going on, either by the bees themselves, fitness for the environment, or by meddling beekeepers. I doubt if anyone is capable of analysing that model but to me it suggests the simple model used by geneticists is pessimistic.

I am happy to accept that even with the more complicated model the island bees will eventually run into trouble but I think they will last longer than the simple maths would suggest.

The presence of varroa, of course, wrecks this optimistic picture because it gives the beekeeper almost total power of selection because the ones he does not treat are likely to perish, regardless of their alleles. This island though, almost by definition, is free of varroa.

Rosie

[Jon]

Hi Eric.


(JON)
I think you are misunderstanding how this works.
You can start with ten colonies, lose 5, increase to ten the following year and still maintain every one of the CSD alleles.
Unless you are in a completely isolated situation, there will be incoming genetic material from neighbouring colonies via their drones.
Even in an isolated situation, bees can maintain genetic diversity as the queen mates with multiple drones.

(Hi Jon
Watch my lips! The original post referred to a totally isolated apiary. Your statement - viz - "Unless you are in a completely isolated situation, there will be incoming genetic material from neighbouring colonies via their drones". misses the point When I was a student the most important factor when answering a question was to understand the question!

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Jon
Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem.

(Hi Joh
Blundered again! There is no local population - the apiary in question is totally isolated!)

Hi Eric.
I thought I had addressed all this in post 10 on the thread.
I highlighted above the part you must have overlooked where I took into account a completely closed population.

Re local population, if you have no local population you have no bees. In a closed population the local population originates completely from the isolated colonies.
If you start with a population containing all or most of the csd alleles and you maintain a reasonable number of colonies on your island, the bee population will almost certainly outlive all of us even if you invoke sod's law and half the colonies are lost every winter; being renewed through swarming or by the beekeeper the following summer.

With two or three colonies in a completely isolated situation you will hit what Zayed calls the diploid drone vortex very quickly, but if you have 10 colonies and you start with all or most of the csd alleles this is highly unlikely.
You need to focus not just on the genetics of each queen but also on the genetic material which she stores in her spermatheca which comes from a selection of drones from within her local population.

Your article assuming that losing half the colonies over winter equates to losing half the genetic material is completely wrong. It is based on false assumptions.

[Stromnessbees]

I now have the Tarpy & Page article about the link of inbreeding to brood viability:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/mehlyml4b8yrchcr/

I'll have to correct my previous quote


... colonies with less than 75% brood viability (25% of larvae lost: 19% diploid males plus 6% other causes) will die out in winter

to 72% as threshold.

Colonies above 72 % brood viability in this study survived the winter, compared to only 37.5% of colonies surviving below that threshold.

Doris

[Eric McArthur]

John the Farmer wrote:
Strangely chosen analogy if you wanted to demonstrate the robustness of an isolated population/ closed system, under threat, and its ability to maintain diversity. In this fruit bowl story, the inevitable outcome is a bowl containing 24 of the same fruit. This could happen after two days, or two years; but it would happen, unless a pear spontaneously mutated into an apple overnight.
How else do apples reappear once they are eliminated ' from time to time'?
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Hi Gav
I am sticking with John. You yourself conceded rather swiftly that your fruit bowl example was fatally flawed. You can't justify giving me stick when you conceded to John like a wimp! See your own prose below!!

Eric
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Gavin's reply to John

Yes, the fruit bowl *could* turn rather boringly uniform quickly, but usually it will take many generations to do so. The diversity of the bowl is at risk, but just don't expect it to half every day.
Think Sod's Law! Gavin!
Interesting to have a perspective on bee gene flow between isolated populations which comes from watching the movement of an invading pathogen like Varroa. Varroa has had some big hiccoughs in its march westwards and northwards due to restricted opportunities to leap between widely separated apiaries. The same must apply to small vulnerable bee populations - little chance to mate with the neighbouring apiary if it is over the mountain range and in the next valley.
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That last sentence embraces my diminishing colony numbers.

I hope your petard was fully loaded!!

Eric
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Hi Doris
Many thanks for your good wishes! Yes Guernsey was a treat. Well worth a visit. The island was actually featured in a BBC series last night - which gave me the chance to relive the island experience!

I read the link in your post - the fact that only three related drones demonstrated a progressive "Doomsday scenario" was extermely interesting. In the diminishing isolated colony postulation coupled to Gavin's illuminating statement: and I quote - "The same must apply to small vulnerable bee populations - little chance to mate with the neighbouring apiary if it is over the mountain range and in the next valley". The key word is ISOLATED.
Gavin can rumble on if he likes - I have seen inbreeding due to isolation "in the flesh" on Islay in the 70s.

Nobody took me up on the Harry Wickens question, relative to Paterson's Curse - does anybody understand the implication of Wickens work. Done in good faith! Wickens was Manley's manager. When Rob died Harry took over and soon became the biggest supplier of queen bees in England. When I attended the NDB course at Hampshire College in 1978 I visited Wickens' operation - He was at that time selling and distributing many thousands of queen bees to commercial and hobbyist beekeeper alike - all from the same queen mother. He had good stock but he only sold bees from his top performing ladies - over time the areas of highest concentration of Harry's bees had to be dominated by a massive related gene pool - ask Paterson about areas where Harry's repeat queens and of course their year on year progeny were extant - it might just throw some light on his problem!
- INBREEDING!

Regards

Eric

[Stromnessbees]

... ask Paterson about areas where Harry's repeat queens and of course their year on year progeny were extant - it might just throw some light on his problem!
- INBREEDING!

Hi Eric

I agree with you that inbreeding can be a problem in isolated sites, but Roger Patterson's area in West Sussex is far from that. The opposite is the case there, nucs and queens are brought in from abroad all around, and for anybody down there it's impossible to keep their stock from mongrelizing.

For the queen mating problems and early supercedure Roger may very well look for other reasons than inbreeding.

Doris

[Jon]

Nobody took me up on the Harry Wickens question, relative to Paterson's Curse - does anybody understand the implication of Wickens work. Done in good faith! Wickens was Manley's manager. When Rob died Harry took over and soon became the biggest supplier of queen bees in England. When I attended the NDB course at Hampshire College in 1978 I visited Wickens' operation - He was at that time selling and distributing many thousands of queen bees to commercial and hobbyist beekeeper alike - all from the same queen mother. He had good stock but he only sold bees from his top performing ladies - over time the areas of highest concentration of Harry's bees had to be dominated by a massive related gene pool

Hi Eric.
I honestly think you have the wrong end of the stick re. breeding from your best queen or couple of queens.
In post 35 (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?301-Yet-another-puzzle&p=2071&viewfull=1#post2071) I pointed out that selecting larvae from a single queen produces up to 30 different combinations of virgin sisters (combinations of csd alleles) so this is unlikely to lead to an inbreeding problem.

In a subsequent post 'Rosie' mentioned that there is some research which suggests that bees can actively select one larva over another with regard to raising a queen. The bees can also reject a graft offered by the beekeeper.



I agree with you that inbreeding can be a problem in isolated sites, but Roger Patterson's area in West Sussex is far from that. The opposite is the case there, nucs and queens are brought in from abroad all around, and for anybody down there it's impossible to keep their stock from mongrelizing.

I think that is the case in most areas.
Those of us who are interested in breeding native bees always seem to have the opposite problem - genetics from other types of bee cropping up in the apiary.
I always have the odd colony which produces a majority of yellow banded bees even though my queens are black.
I put this down to a neighbour who keeps Buckfast.

[gavin]

Hi Eric

I don't like to see you getting so confused.

> You yourself conceded rather swiftly that your fruit bowl example was fatally flawed.

No, I've said repeatedly that the fruit bowl was not a direct analogy for an apiary but it was simply an example to show you why your arguments about halving the genetic diversity when you half the number of meta-populations (in the current jargon) are just plain wrong.

I don't know why you keep challenging me over some denial of an effect of inbreeding. Nor am I or would I deny the effect of chance events. You are just continually misunderstanding my motives, as you have been doing for years now.

And wasn't I the one warmly welcoming you back, and asking about Guersey? I'm sure that Doris feels the same, but that time I was the one trying hard to be nice to you ....

take care

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi All
This current thread has been fun! From the number of hits, many others have also been interested. If the colony losses of recent years in Scotland continue at the present rate this "academic" (in the sense of armchair!) debate might just demonstrate a surprising result - especially in regions, which are trying to preserve their indigenous stocks, without intoducing new blood stock, which of course could easily be introduced without problems of any kind.
Many thanks for your kind felicitations about my recent holiday, Gavin. I'd much rather you would just be honest about where we stand - judging from remarks made by yourself, while being involved in the Irish forum regarding my integrity. The Himalayan balsam fiasco springs to mind - your climb down was embarsssing even to me - (it is all in the public domain archives of the Irish Forum for anyone interested).
We have all been cherry picking here - So I am just going to have a piece of fruit from your by now quite famous bowl of fruit, Gavin!

Regards

Eric!

[Jon]

Hi All
This current thread has been fun! From the number of hits, many others have also been interested. If the colony losses of recent years in Scotland continue at the present rate this "academic" (in the sense of armchair!) debate might just demonstrate a surprising result - especially in regions, which are trying to preserve their indigenous stocks, without intoducing new blood stock, which of course could easily be introduced without problems of any kind.

Hi Eric.
I don't think there are many armchair beekeepers posting on the thread.
I have increased my stocks from 11 to 30 this season - by grafting from my two best queens.
I do keep inbreeding in mind, and I took quite a few Apideas to a friend's Apiary for mating to introduce some different genetics via his drones.

You should get over your differences with the corpulent fellow from Perthshire.
I doubt if he is the devil incarnate - although his profile picture does suggest otherwise.
We are all here to become better beekeepers.

Jon

[gavin]

Hi Eric

My views on Himalayan balsam have been consistent throughout, and I really don't think that I made remarks about your integrity. You, however, have been rude in private and in public. Despite all that, here I am still trying to be nice and educate you about genetics.

People trying to preserve indigenous stocks need to know the truth, not some imagined and exaggerated version of it. Inbreeding is indeed a big issue for those keeping their bees in smallish numbers and in scattered locations, and these beekeepers need good advice. Beekeepers in general need good, balanced, impartial, intelligent advice, and I'm hoping that any looking in will get it.

all the best

Gavin

[Trog]

Time, gentlemen, please!

I suspect this thread is becoming less informative and useful as it progresses. Perhaps it's time to close it?

[gavin]

Or turn it useful and informative again?

[Eric McArthur]

Hi All
I am of like opinion and appreciate the need for such a forum as this for a free and frank exchange of views, opinions and information to the benefit of us all!
I have one minor quibble with the structure of the Forum – it smacks of “Animal Farm”, in which all the animals were equal – but some were more equal than others. Why does the Forum have Junior and Senior members and who decides who goes into which category? Also in the past some threads in which I was involved were moved to another category – with the resulting loss of continuity. One particularly successful thread concerning emotion felt by beekeepers who had suffered high losses, myself included. just disappeared without rythme or reason. It was reinstated after I complained about the vanishing trick to the administrator in a different location – but the impetus was unfortunately lost!
As a beekeeper of some 43 years experience, starting in the late 60s, I was a successful commercial honey producer and honey bee breeder long before many of you youngsters were the proverbial gleam in dad’s eye. I was also a regular contributing author in the Scottish Beekeeper from the early 70s. As a matter of fact one of the leading members of the present SBA executive, in a moment of weakness, I think, approached me later, when I was editor of the SB and thanked me for invaluable information he had gleaned from reading my articles as a beginner beekeeper. If he is watching this thread from the side lines - I say “Hello”!
The nub of all this prose is that I resent being categorised as a Junior member – the membership title would be better served with just the member name / nom de plume without the elitist differentiation.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;
Jon
I’m afraid I am still unrepentant about the dangers of “breeding from the best”. In the hands of a competent and aware beekeeper such as yourself, with access to unrelated bloodstock the situation is under control. However in the hands of a less informed beekeeper in a borderline area with very low beekeeper numbers, managing less than 4 hives/beekeeper in the present colony loss scenario, his situation is fraught. The old school of thought at the highest level, pre Varroa advocated the “breeding from the best” doctrine – knee jerk! As I stated in an earlier reply in this thread – I mooted the dangers of inbreeding “post Varroa”, a number of years back (now that the vast majority of ferals are no longer with us!), to a group of very experienced people at a Glasgow meet, who still bred from the best, without any escape clauses. They had not even questioned the possible effect of lower beekeeper and colony numbers on such a procedure, and worse they had never considered the important contribution that the ferals had made pre Varroa. It gave them food for thought. I hope any beekeepers kibitzing this thread have learned something from the exciting to and fro-ing.

[GRIZZLY]

Hi Eric,I'm now on 2 paracetamols every 6 hours -thanks to this thread and a dose of early 'flu and yes I change my underpants every day for 40 years - how about yourself ?.

[Jon]

Hi Eric.


I have one minor quibble with the structure of the Forum – it smacks of “Animal Farm”, in which all the animals were equal – but some were more equal than others. Why does the Forum have Junior and Senior members and who decides who goes into which category?

It's the computer which decides rather than the fat controller.
When you make 100 posts it automatically upgrades your profile to 'senior'
Most internet forums I have been on seem to work in this way.

Re. lost posts or threads, I always use the button at the top left of the screen - the one which says 'new posts'
That brings up every new post or thread since your last visit and you can chose which ones you want to read or reply to.
It is a lot easier than trawling through the various sub sections.


However in the hands of a less informed beekeeper in a borderline area with very low beekeeper numbers, managing less than 4 hives/beekeeper in the present colony loss scenario, his situation is fraught.

I agree with that but I think it is important to emphasise that it is a special case affecting a subsection of beekeepers who have low colony numbers in an isolated area.
The other area where I still disagree with you is the part of the Scottish Beekeeper article where you suggest that halving colony numbers over subsequent winters leads to a parallel halving of the genetic material. It just doesn't work like that because of the peculiarities of haplo-diploid genetics and the fact that a queen stores semen from multiple drones which can be viable for several years.
I am not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater implying that inbreeding is not of importance to the beekeeper- but the example you gave is a misconception.

PS Agree with Grizzly, new underpants every day whether necessary or not.

[lindsay s]

Originally posted by E McArthur Colony losses
However despite the fact that untoward colony losses were incurred by many – there are a favoured few, perhaps even a silent many beekeepers who came through the winter with their colonies intact or who suffered minimal loss compared with their colleague beekeepers. It would be interesting and educational if these happy individuals would perhaps tell their story – their management system, their winter preparations and, I think most importantly; the type of area where the bees are kept; viz near the coast, location relative to sea level, foraging sources, distance from colonies to these sources - even dare I say it – the type of hive! Such information could be just what is needed to give ourselves and the bees a fighting chance of survival in future years.
I agree it's time to restart this thread.

[gavin]

Well, before we do that Eric needs some answers to his latest comments which were implying impropriety.

In reverse order:

A thread on emotion and colony losses disappeared without rhyme or reason then was reinstated after you complained. Absolutely untrue. I do remember helping you re-find a thread that you had lost sight of. Perhaps you had been unaware that they are replaced at the top of the list in the section when someone starts a new one. No-one did anything to the thread and no-one reinstated it.** This forum has had no threads pulled and no users banned (except for the recent spate of automated devices trying to get user accounts running for nefarious purposes). I'd like to keep it that way. I did worry that I might have deleted one user by mistake, but if I did she's forgiven me.

One thread was moved to another category. Yes! I did that. I did it for good reason. I carefully explained that a section had been created for the stuff that is likely to get people exercised - GM crops, pesticides and the environment. I said 'I hope that you don't mind, but ... ' It was the right thing to do. Why complain about that?

Jon has explained the automatic categorisation of users by the software. Wisnae me guv. I see that I hit 500 yesterday. It is often the case that those who post the most are just blethering rubbish much of the time .... is that me folks?!

The Fat Controller (who is steadily losing weight I'll have you know!)

** Having just seen that thread that Lindsay cited I have to admit that I did re-arrange that thread - trying to keep discussion in one place when a second thread had been started on the same topic.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly, Jon and Lindsay
Jon It is wonderful to have mysteries and sore points explained and cleared up! Many thanks! We'll let the bees sort the Math out - the thread had a good run.

Grizzly - Why the tablets? Discussing beekeeping topics is food for the soul - especially when heated! Excuse the pun - again! Regarding your underpants regime - good housekeeping practice! Keep it up or them!

Lindsay I'll second that! There is a lot of good info out there which could be collated and disseminated. I myself feel that apart from poor beekeeping practice(Varroa!) and cruel weather - location and pollen quality has a contribution to make - let the thread rip!!

[GRIZZLY]

[QUOTE=Eric McArthur;2221]Hi Grizzly, Jon and Lindsay

Grizzly - Why the tablets? Discussing beekeeping topics is food for the soul - especially when heated! Excuse the pun - again! Regarding your underpants regime - good housekeeping practice! Keep it up or them!
As I said Eric I'm in the throes of a bout of flu with sore muscles,a splitting head and high temperature.My doctor reccomends paracetamol or perhaps YOU know better and can offer a "McArthur remedy.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

I can live with that!

Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

Excellent! Let's get back to bees then ... or have a rest. Now that the football has finished I'm hoping to finish some stuff for the SBA Executive meeting on Saturday before I turn in tonight.

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly

Funny you should ask! If it were a hangover I know a marvellous cure! I hope your 'flu clears up quickly. Grim disease!
Again funnily enough I'll be in Port Partick this weekend! I could drop you off a McArthur's Hangover Cure - no charge! Normal charge for New Year use i- £5.00 per potion!
Eric

[Eric McArthur]

I agree it's time to restart this thread.

Hi Lindsay

Over to you then!

Eric

[GRIZZLY]

Hi Eric ,I could meet you in "The Port" over the weekend for that remedy if you like.Home is only 4 miles away.Let me know eh!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Lindsay

Perhps this may give you a starter for 10!

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

If anyone is interested: My colony losses over the winter/spring of 2009/10 were unacceptably high compared with previous years. These losses were incurred over 4 apiaries quite distant from each other.
There were of course common factors in all sites:
1 All colonies were subject to the less than optimum autumn of 2009
2 All colonies were headed by 2009 queens
3 All apiaries were located in areas where the bees had easy access to abundant stands of H. balsam in late summer early autumn.
4 .All colonies are located in sites at relatively moderate heights above sea level, in the West Central belt
5 All sites experienced the hard winter of 2009/10
6 All sites are generally South facing.
7 All colonies were housed in either Smith of National hives
8 All colonies were supplied with at least 6 bags of solidly granulated cane sugar or as needed up until late December.
9 All colonies, winter and summer, have full width 7.93mm high entrances.
10 All colonies over-wintered with an empty super to house the sugar; the super was topped with solid plywood crown board. No blankets, sheets, pillow cases or Uncle Bob’s waistcoat or packing of any kind was used.
11 All colonies were stood on a three brick; (two front, one rear) stand having a 4 inch air space between ground and underside of the floor board
12 All colonies were stood primarily on grass rather than slabs
13 Apart from one hive in five being fitted with a Varroa floor all the colonies were on solid floors
14 All colonies are treated 3 times with 60% formic acid: viz mid April, Mid June and late October and have been for a number of years with no adverse effects.

Co-incident with my first ‘fly-in’ encounter with Varroa in 2003, the heather beetle killed all the heather in my area.
Up until that time every year from around the mid 70s the bees over-wintered on heather honey augmented by 6 – 8 sugar bags fed at the start of September with no trouble (less than 5% losses!). No sugar syrup was fed from the earl 70s – this ’low labour’ intensive regime gave excellent results up until the demise of the heather.
The bees remained on the late summer sites after 2003 due to the demise of the heather. It was only then that I discovered what an excellent source of honey the balsam. However from that time on – still only using sugar bags I started to lose colonies at a higher level than before. Apart from the loss of the heather and the advent of the bees over-wintering on balsam nothing changed – until the dramatic weather pattern of 2009/10 when the winter came too early (mid November), stayed too long (until late February) and was extremely severe for prolonged periods of time! In previous years the bees could be seen foraging until late December during which time the were working steadily on the crystal sugar rendering it to sugar honey. The early onset of winter denied them almost 6 weeks access to the sugar bags.
These then are the simple facts of the case and I feel I know the answers to my ‘colony demise’ catastrophe. Any independent answers out there?
Unfortunately I go on holiday tomorrow – but feel free!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly
How would I know you! I would like to meet but my wife who loves me very much is very demanding of our holiday time together. Your phone number would be good! Email me at: eric@apisscot.plus.com and we’ll see how things pan out – perhaps you should be in bed nursing that flu!!

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

I noted the promotion - guess we are all just Indians now - but equal in the eyes of God!

Eric

[gavin]

Just some advance warning - if anyone wants to chip in on colony losses I'll probably move Eric's post and any replies to join the previous discussion on the topic. Like to keep things tidy. Also I'll try to sort the repeated blocks in Eric's posts if I can find some time tonight.

[Jon]

Hi Gav.
You can move this later.

Re Colony losses and winter preparation:
I definitely wouldn't blame the balsam.
It is a disaster for the environment but a godsend for the bees.
I keep my colonies near the River Lagan and it is lined with balsam for miles.
Mine collect balsam pollen and nectar from late July and continue right through until the first frosts nip the flowers, usually in October.
Last year I didn't lose any colonies although I discovered one colony was queenless in March and I had to combine it with a neighbour.
They all had 2009 queens bar one.
Several were small nucs of just 2-3 frames of bees and surprisingly they came through the winter as well.
I make sure they are well fed with sugar syrup before the ivy starts, the theory being that they will rear a last batch of healthy brood on the Ivy pollen and nectar, after mite removal.
I had colonies with 6 frames of brood including eggs in the last week of October last year.
It is a balancing act as I like to get 30lbs of stores in the box rather than 50lbs as this would leave no more room for brood.
I have already fed more than 150k sugar this year.
I overwinter all colonies in a single brood box and I further reduce this with dummies if the colony is small.
I remove all supers late August or early September.
I reckon extra space and extra stores can do more harm than good in terms of thermoregulation.
My bees are native type and seem to be quite frugal.
I insulate the roof with 50mm thick polystyrene.
I have a mixture of varroa floors and solid floors.
With regard to varroa, I use Apiguard in September and an Oxalic acid dribble in December when there is no brood.
Killing most of the mites is critical as a colony with too many mites in Spring will have a serious problem by early summer rather than Autumn which is the best time to treat.
A colony which starts the year with 100 mites will be at critical point for varroa load 3 months earlier than one which starts with 10 mites based on the assumption that mite load doubles every month without treatment.

At the moment I have 10 colonies, 17 nucs and 3 queens in Apideas.
I may well combine a few of the weaker nucs and keep more queens in Apideas.
Andrew Abrahams has successfully overwintered queens in Apideas on Colonsay.
The key factor is making sure they always have stores/fondant and ensuring that they get pollen early in Spring.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
What percentage of colonies did you lose last winter/spring? Did you experience the long, deep early winter with prolonged ambient as low as -5 C, which most of Scotland suffered? Really pleased that the H.balsam appears to be exonerated. By the way I have had a written reply from Kasper Bienefeld regarding the falling colony number - pasted below. To eliminate any bias perhaps Doris might translate - unless these themes are now dead in the water!

Regards

Eric

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

Kaspar Bienefeld

Samstag

25/9/10

Hallo Herr Mc Arthur,

herzlichen Dank für Ihre E-Mail und Ihren interessanten Artikel. Ich
halte den längerfristigen Erhalte einer Bienenpopulation von 10
Völkern für nicht möglich. Ist die komplette Isolation von Imkereien In
Schottland Realität? In der Anlage einige Papers zu dem Inzucht.

Gruß

Kaspar Bienefeld

[Jon]

Hi Eric (Herr Mc Arthur if you prefer!)

I didn't lose any last winter. I went into winter with 12.
One emerged without a queen and I had to combine it with another.
We had several weeks of minus temperatures in January where the snow never cleared.
It was quite a few degrees colder in Scotland though.

[GRIZZLY]

Is Doris going to translate this please ??

[gavin]

I think that it said something like:

'Thank you for sending me your somewhat strange article. My mates have told me that arguing with you is futile, so in the interests of humouring you and avoiding protracted correspondence, I'll agree that if you have fewer than 10 colonies you're heading for trouble if they are fully isolated. I do have trouble, though, accepting that there really is a lot of true isolation in Scotland.'

At least that is what it said when I ran it through the SBAi Bullsh*t Sensor and Automated Translator!

Do you get a chance to meet up with Eric on his travels to the balmy south west?

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi All

What a bad debater our Gavin is! Quite sad!

Eric

[gavin]

Och it was meant in jest Eric - I hope that you didn't take offense. I was certainly in jocular mood when I wrote that.

I guess that the point you wanted to make was that Professor Bienefeld thought your article interesting and agreed that 10 was a pretty precarious number of hives to be running in a truly isolated position. What were you expecting him to say?

all the best

Gavin

[GRIZZLY]

Had a very pleasant evening with Eric thank you.Talked a bit about bees-nothing contentious,showed him my hive making workshop etc.etc. I think he's quite taken with my modest set-up.

[Stromnessbees]

Hi Eric, Grizzly, Gavin, etc.

Sorry for not having been available to help with the translation: despite the tourist and beekeeping season coming to an end I still seem to be unable to keep on top of all the things that need doing.

Gavin's improvised translation is not far off, except for the extra mention that Kaspar seems surprised that there is a problem with isolated apiaries in Scotland.

To that statement I can add that in Austria bee breeders can only dream of the wonderful opportunities such isolated sites offer for pure matings. There they have to retreat to remote mountain sites, and even those are not secure, as it's very popular amongst beekeepers to migrate to the Alpenrose, a type of rhododendron, which delivers a very aromatic and precious honey - see pink flower half way down the page: http://www.alpenweit.de/oxid.php/sid/x/shp/oxbaseshop/cl/alist/cnid/13e49b79bf0d5ab53.76108223 (http://www.alpenweit.de/oxid.php/sid/x/shp/oxbaseshop/cl/alist/cnid/13e49b79bf0d5ab53.76108223) - How would you feel about using such a place as a mating site?

Doris

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Doris

Grizzly asked you to translate Bienefeld's letter to me. You asked for the full text of the correspondence in a private mail, which I sent. Please put your axe away and satisfy Grizzly. I could have translated the prose word for word without bias, which it seems I might just have to do.
Mrs Sweet, a Welsh lady, the SBA tour speaker was in Glasgow last night. She was asked a question about isolated regions in the Welsh valleys. She quoted work done by a Ph.D student in a particular wide area in Central Wales looking for honeybees. He could find none.
As an aside my original postulation dealt with an hypothetical isolated area. Think deep!
Best Regards

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly

Modest set-up indeed! I was green wit envy! Especially with the working scale model aeroplanes which you build and fly, to say nothing of the idyll where you have your home, surrounded with every conceivable, active season, round of nectar bearing plants, which you have systematically planted over time for your bees!

Eric

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
You being a scientist, I am staggered that you could even ask me such a question - and I quote "What were you expecting him to say? This beggars belief!

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
You being a scientist, I am staggered that you could even ask me such a question - and I quote "What were you expecting him to say? This beggars belief!

Eric

[Stromnessbees]

Allright, here's the verbatim translation:


Hallo Herr Mc Arthur,Hello Mr. Mc Arthur,


herzlichen Dank für Ihre E-Mail und Ihren interessanten Artikel.sincere thanks for your email and your interesting article.


Ich halte den längerfristigen Erhalte einer Bienenpopulation von 10
Völkern für nicht möglich.I consider the long term upkeep of a bee-population of 10 colonies to be impossible.


Ist die komplette Isolation von Imkereien In
Schottland Realität?Is the complete isolation of apiaries in Scotland a reality?


In der Anlage einige Papers zu dem Inzucht.In the attachment some papers regarding inbreeding.


GrußGreetings


Kaspar Bienefeld

[gavin]

Hi Eric

For the umpteenth time, no-one (certainly not me) is denying a risk of inbreeding in isolated locations with small numbers of colonies. What we have argued about in this thread is:

- the effect of a repeated halving and doubling of numbers of colonies (which you still don't seem to understand)

- the theoretical carrying capacity (in terms of alleles) of a small number of colonies

- the degree of isolation of colonies in Scotland (length of a piece of string argument, but many places are not that isolated, some are)

So:


.... and I quote "What were you expecting him to say? This beggars belief!


Perfectly reasonable question - we could argue about the exact number but why was anything he said unexpected? I get the feeling that you are just arguing for the sake of it.


Think deep!


Weren't we?

best wishes

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

Read Prof Bienefeld's lips! He is not even talking about halving, quartering or otherwise reducing colony numbers. He is quite categorically stating that 10 colonies in isolation in the long term cannot be sustained. He is also actually considering a much better colony composition than I originally postulated.

Ich halte den längerfristigen Erhalte einer Bienenpopulation von 10 Völkern für nicht möglich.
I consider the long term upkeep of a bee-population of 10 colonies to be impossible.

Quote Originally Posted by Eric McArthur View Post
.... and I quote "What were you expecting him to say? This beggars belief!
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Gavin - Perfectly reasonable question - we could argue about the exact number but why was anything he said unexpected? I get the feeling that you are just arguing for the sake of it.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Eric - I expected him to make an objective statement based on his sound scientific background as the leading German authority on honey bee genetics. Also you ask ".. but why was anything he said unexpected"? So by your own admission you are telling the present participants in this thread that you knew all along that my 10 colony postulation was right and that Prof Bienefeld could only agree with it. Gavin, I think you have gotten yourself entangled in the thread, of this thread. Time for bed!!

Doris - Many thanks for your objective translation of the Bienefeld prose!
Jon - Your statement that the temperatures in your area were less than in Scotland, coupled to your observations on H.balsam are a good start for an elimination process of what killed the honey bee last winter!

Eric

[gavin]

... that you knew all along that my 10 colony postulation was right and that Prof Bienefeld could only agree with it. Gavin, I think you have gotten yourself entangled in the thread, of this thread.

You didn't have a postulation that 10 colonies were too few. You postulated that:

- 10 colonies would have 160 csd alleles
- halving 10 colonies annually to five then doubling them again would annually half the allele count
- repeating this until the end of year 6 drops the allele count to 2
- that 'critical mass is reached!', and within six generations 'the diminution of genetic diversity would seem to be irreversible'

That you misunderstood the situation so badly and published it in two beekeeping magazines should be embarrassing enough. That you can engage in discussion with people who actually do think about such problems and still come away confused is ... well .... it isn't good.

I don't believe for a minute that Prof Bienefeld agreed with your scheme for beekeeping Armageddon. I wonder if his comments on 10 colonies were offered as general advice rather than a dogmatic statement on the minimum size of a population in the long term. It depends for one thing on what 'the long term' means. Forever is a long time, but 6 generations to complete collapse is something else.

Your scheme would suggest that, if 10 colonies would have only 2 alleles after 6 years of this cycle, then 20 colonies would take 7 generations to get to the same point. 40 would take 8 generations and 80 colonies take just 9 generations to get to that critical point. Take this to its logical conclusion and if Scotland had 20,000 colonies (it probably has significantly less than that) then the McArthur Scheme would have the entire Scottish genepool down to 2 alleles in a mere 17 years, even if it was all in one apiary. Nice one.

G.

[Jon]

Hi Eric.

Why don't you send a copy of your Scottish Beekeeper article which mentions 160 CSD alleles to Prof Bienefeld and invite comment.
If you are right, and everyone else posting on the thread is wrong, I am sure he will back you up and you can post here for Doris to translate.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon

The offending article is what he commented on - The article in question was sent with my original mail to him! Doris has already received all the material that I sent him. Doris also has all the material he sent me in his reply - including some really interesting work on line breeding, which further confirms my 10 colony postulation. Over to you Doris!
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Gavin
Give it up! Your credibility is in tatters!

Eric

[gavin]

I think that we'll let the readers of the forum make their own judgement on that. This takes me full circle and back to the first post:

'You need a thick skin, but it does get tiresome.'

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

I can live with that too!

I anyone interested in taking the colony losses last winter to the wire - Jon's observation that balsam honey/pollen seems not to be a factor is good. That he experienced lower(by how much?) winter temperatures and had no losses is interesting - many Scottish beekeepers lost bees to isolation starvation last winter myself included -the constant low temperatures seem to have done a lot of damage. Iisolation starvation losses were an important factor in colony loss in the 70s. The Clyde Area Bee Breeders Group have been feeding sugar syrup most of the summer, (that never was, in the Wewst anyway!) and to date around 500 kilos have been fed to 20 colonies with no honey removed - except by vandals in one apiary! It is hoped that the bees suffered no trauma from this - poor show!!

Eric

Eric

[Jon]

Hi Gavin

- Jon's observation that balsam honey/pollen seems not to be a factor is good. That he experienced lower(by how much?) winter temperatures and had no losses is interesting

Eric

It was the coldest winter here for 30+ years. Several weeks with minus temperatures.
What surprised me was that I had a couple of 2 frame nucs come through last winter which suggests to me that coldness was not a major factor as colonies this size can generate very little heat.
I had fondant above the frames so they could move up to feed and no risk of isolation starvation.
I was away for 7 weeks in January and February when it was coldest and they had to fend for themselves.
Somestimes less is more.

I have fed about 200k of sugar in thick syrup this autumn so far.
One thing that worries me is that my nucs with 2010 queens are too small. For some reason thsy have not built up properly in the last two months.
In the last week the bees have switched from Balsam to Ivy.
The musty smell from the ivy has been overpowering the last couple of days.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
In the West we had intermittent, week long periods of minus 7 – minus 10C over a
6 week stretch with a short thaw of about a week in late January before the freeze returned. This freezing weather was one major critical. Low colony population was another major problem. Due to the less than perfect autumn weather, the balsam and the willow herb produced practically nothing here. My few surviving colonies dwindled to only covering a couple of frames by late March. These colonies had over-wintered on a combination of balsam and sugar bags. Astonishingly by late June these colonies, which had 2009 queens were thriving, assisted by necessary steady syrup feeding, due to the inclement spring and summer. These colonies were split and produced, at the present time a thriving colony each – again sugar fed assisted.
A number of people I have spoken to report a similar phenomenon to yours – caused by queens ceasing laying. One man I know decided to feed 1:2 (sugar - water) syrup and his queens started to lay again. The Clyde Area Bee Breeders Group bees had been fed with this syrup strength from the start of the spring and reared brood steadily. I have always fed this light syrup, which I found (to my own satisfaction!) that the bees used this syrup strength for breeding rather than storing in poor summers. Winter feed should of course be 1:1 or Ambrosia strength.
Varroa is of course another major factor in many cases of colony demise. Mite fall in the Breeder Group bees was negligible. There is also the question of the effect of anti Varroa treatment on colonies.
I started using the oxalic acid trickle method in 1999 as a prophylactic, long before I found my first Varroa infestation in October 2003. The Swiss had hardened on the 3.5% acid solution strength by this time and I wanted to prove that the bees could handle this treatment and of course check for mite infestation at the same time. I used the trickle for 4 years without problems. At that time my bees over-wintered effortlessly on copious amounts of heather honey augmented by sugar bags.
I have now graduated to formic acid – last treatment in late October – then a final blast of oxalic acid with my fumigating pipe. During the period 1967 – 73, before I started using sugar bags, I used to bite my fingernails all winter, worrying about colony losses, which were around 5% - now I bite my fingernails worrying about colony survival! Changed days! – I’m still looking for answers!

[Jon]

A number of people I have spoken to report a similar phenomenon to yours – caused by queens ceasing laying.

It's a catch 22 situation.
If you don't treat, the late brood is destroyed by varroa mites and if you treat with the likes of Apiguard, the queen often stops laying for a fortnight at just the wrong time.


Low colony population was another major problem. Due to the less than perfect autumn weather, the balsam and the willow herb produced practically nothing here. My few surviving colonies dwindled to only covering a couple of frames by late March. These colonies had over-wintered on a combination of balsam and sugar bags. Astonishingly by late June these colonies, which had 2009 queens were thriving,

I had the same problem - 2 frame colonies in March.
I also managed to build them up by June but it was a labour of love to keep them alive.

I don't know why the nucs are not building up for winter this year. I have been feeding plenty of sugar syrup and they seem to be bringing in pollen.
I checked a few and they have pollen stored.
Maybe I should have treated for varroa at the start of August instead of the start of September.
They are all headed by 2010 queens and most of them were started with 3 frames of bees in mid July.
half of the queens were mated in my own apiary and the other half were mated in Apideas at an apiary with unrelated bees - so not the famous inbreeding problem.
Some of them have chalkbrood which is likely holding back development.

[Eric McArthur]

Jon - If you don't treat, the late brood is destroyed by varroa mites and if you treat with the likes of Apiguard, the queen often stops laying for a fortnight at just the wrong time.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Eric – At the risk of teaching you to suck eggs . When you initially make up your nuc, why not treat it with whatever – bayvarol, Apiguard, oxalic acid, after all the brood on the nuc frames has emerged and before the new queen’s brood is sealed. Do the nucs have sufficient room for stores and free range laying space for the queen as nuc strength builds?
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Jon - Maybe I should have treated for varroa at the start of August instead of the start of September.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;
Eric - Your potential honey gathering colonies would benefit greatly from the 60% formic acid treatment in April – this will produce a force of bees in May which will be virtually Varroa free. This treatment takes about 60 seconds for each of three cycles. It really is so easy – just practise the method using water, to gain confidence!
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Jon- Some of them have chalkbrood which is likely holding back development.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Eric – Again at the risk of sounding ridiculous! I have proved on a number of occasions that by feeding around one and a half litres of 1:2 sugar syrup (sugar :water) to a nuc with even a quite heavy chalk brood infestation – this will clear the condition up in one cycle and it will not return. Ian Craig has witnessed this phenomenon over a period of two seasons with the original CABA Apiary Project bees! Chalk brood in a full blown colony will disappear after a couple of cycles of such a syrup strength.

[Jon]

Hi Eric.
I have never seen the need to treat for varroa in April as the mite levels are still negligible after the December Oxalic treatment.
With regard to the nucs, I probably should have treated during the broodless phase but at the time I reckoned mite levels were low.
I always make sure they are not overfed and the queen has room to lay.

I am curious about your chalkbrood remedy.
On what basis would sugar syrup clear up chalkbrood?

[gavin]

I read lately (can't remember where) that it has long been known that when there is forage coming in the bees have a heightened level of hygienic behaviour.

[Eric McArthur]

Jon - I am curious about your chalkbrood remedy.
On what basis would sugar syrup clear up chalkbrood?
Eric – As Gavin so rightly states, it has been known for many years that a chalk brood infestation in a honey bee colony will clear up quite naturally when the bees are presented with a good nectar flow – especially in early summer. This observation over time led to the correct conclusion that chalk brood , which is caused by a fungus, Ascosphaera.apis is a condition rooted in larval starvation. Some time ago I put 2+2 together and proved that this was indeed the case when I was faced with an horrendous chalk brood infestation at the inception of the CABA Apiary breeding project, in 2007. I fed sugar syrup at 1:1 to 6 massively infested nucs and augmented the syrup with a sponge containing formic acid placed on the frame tops, the formic acid turned out to be superfluous. Sugar syrup at 1:1 or 1:2 (sugar : water) alone is effective. My theory was that if the bees were presented with an artificial nectar flow the effect could be two-fold:
1 – The bees would get the required feed from the sugar
2- The water would provide them with the means to clean out the larval remains, much like a cleaner lady swabs a floor! It worked a treat!
The story was told in one the 2008 issues of the Beekeepers’ Quarterly. The BBKA actually picked up on the ploy when Norman Carreck presented his plan of action to justify the funding promised by government about a year later: stating that the sugar feeding treatment method for chalk brood would also be investigated. The funding as far as I know never materialised – any answers!
To drag my coat a bit farther: it is also an accepted fact that EFB will generally disappear from an infested colony when the summer nectar flows commence – this disease is now accepted as a fundamental larval starvation situation as well, occurring when the causative vector Melissococcus pluton dominates and denies the larvae its food.
I wrote an article which was printed later in the bq postulating that EFB could also be cleared up by feeding sugar syrup similar to chalk brood. It went down like a lead ballon.

[GRIZZLY]

I seem to have read somewhere that EFB is present in most colonies all the time in perhaps one or two cells and is not spotted because the workers clean out the dead larva.It is only spotted when infection overwhelms the rate the dead larvae are dumped out of the hive. A copious flow would ensure more than adequate feeding of the brood and reduce the signs of disease ??????.

[gavin]

Hi John

There's a lot of guff written in the beekeeping press, and its not just about the number of sex alleles in a set of colonies. You could spend your life writing rebuttals of the nonsense that gets into print, and it bugs me that this lax attitude to publishing the right stuff does a lot of damage. No-one seems to check their facts any more. Some of the more prominent people in the beekeeping community come out with this stuff even to the point of it being aired at meetings with government to plan strategies for dealing with major outbreaks of disease.

EFB is clearly a new, spreading, bacterial pathogen as far as Scotland is concerned. It hasn't yet made the jump into hobby beekeeper's colonies but has spread fairly rapidly through the commercial and semi-commercial beekeeping community in Tayside. One of the bigger commercial operations has been sitting on this for years and has now spread it to their neighbours, causing financial mayhem in the process. There have been a few scattered cases in Scotland in the past few decades but they have been dealt with and the disease never became endemic until it hit this commercial beekeeper who sat on his problems and never sought help even when the inspectors had awakened to the problems in a neighbouring commercial operation.

The disease is often on a knife edge - it can be eliminated [perhaps I should have said reduced] by the bees behaving hygienically, and colonies can be cured by a shook swarm, separating disease from brood for just a few days. On the other hand, one diseased larva can release millions of bacteria and get an infection going again. Infections can be picked up by robbing or drifting over the distances bees do this, and heavily infected comb can be infective for years (rather than the decades of AFB).

As I wrote about in the Scottish Beekeeper, there are studies (in Switzerland and Australia) that have used very sensitive tests to look for traces of bacteria in colonies in infected apiaries, in infected areas, and in historically clear areas. Yes, bacteria can be found at low levels in some colonies in apiaries without symptomatic infection but which are quite close to diseased apiaries, but areas without disease have no sign of the bacteria. That effectively scotches that myth.

In the UK the disease was endemic historically in SW England but its range has been expanding northwards over the last 30 years.

As to why Eric's suggestion to feed EFB-infected colonies went down like a lead balloon - well, Eric has no experience of the disease, doing anything other than notifying the authorities on suspicion of disease and following their instructions is illegal and ought to result in prosecution, and the favoured treatment for treatable cases does already involve the feeding of syrup. Add to that the fact that most beekeepers are already aware that keeping your bees relatively unstressed from lack of food or other disease will help them avoid active infection, and you can easily see why Eric wasn't immediately worshipped as the saviour of beekeeping in EFB-affected areas!

The view taken by your SBA respresentatives when this outbreak surfaced was that stamping it out rather than managing endemic disease ought to be the aim, even if this was an ambitious aim. There was a view expressed that the disease was already endemic, and was bubbling up simply because the right stressors had come together, but all the evidence so far has suggested otherwise. It is still a fairly restricted infection in terms of the number of beekeepers affected, and the right action ought to be able to deal with the remaining pockets of infection.

If this thread now becomes one on disease, I may move the discussion to a more relevant heading.

best wishes

Gavin

[GRIZZLY]

Thanks for that Gavin.

[gavin]

That was a bit of a rant, wasn't it?! :)

Remember that drone-free colony you mentioned before? Were you treating with formic acid? See the Varroa thread in the Diseases area.

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
I would judge your recent prose on EFB as fair comment - let’s hope the days for rants are over. For what it is worth I think it would be counter-productive to break this current thread. There appears to be quite a lot of interest in the varied subject matter judging from the number of hits, despite Jon telling the world that all his hits have been to see if the discussions have ended. The heading for the present thread comes under “Everything and Anything” – a goodly number of readers have become familiar with the location, so why break the run just because you can?. There is a lot of mileage in the EFB subject still!
Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

It is good to let the discussion flow but my concern was for people looking for it later when you might expect it to be under the appropriate heading. I suppose that the search function takes care of that.

Gavin

[gavin]

This paper by Lilian de Guzman and colleagues (http://www.culturaapicola.com.ar/apuntes/sanidad/80_conducta_higienica.pdf) confirmed the heightened hygienic behaviour of colonies well-off in terms of a nectar flow or honey stores. It confirmed observations in two previous theses. See the last 4 paragraphs in the discussion.

[Jon]

There appears to be quite a lot of interest in the varied subject matter judging from the number of hits, despite Jon telling the world that all his hits have been to see if the discussions have ended.

You have lost me there Eric. I enjoy the discussions and/or banter.

[GRIZZLY]

My totally drone free colony wasn't treated with anything except apistan.Was fairly mite free too.

[gavin]

Oh well, that's that theory down the tubes.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
I have scanned an article on the EFB theme which has a Swiss beekeeper stating categorically that crystal sugar has kept his bees free of EFB despite the incidence of the disease being on the increase in Switzerland. The piece is in "J peg" form, on 2 separate pages with a picture. How can this be inserted in a post?

Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

Compose a post, and then use the picture icon (the little picture with what seems to be a tree on it, just next to the globe with the link on it) to upload the JPG to the site using the 'From computer' tab. The site will automatically reduce the size of the image. If you look at the first post in this thread you will see the size of the image the site permits - so if the page is too big it may be difficult to read when compressed by the software for the forum.

Any trouble, just email it to me and I'll do it for you.

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon

Glad to hear that! I thought you posted a comment early in the exchange replying to a post by myself where I commented that a goodly number of folk had been hitting the thread. viz "I only looked at the thread to find out if it had hopefully ended" or some such! Apologise all round!

Eric

[Jon]

That was someone else - can't remember who. I am one of the main culprits for propagating the long threads.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
Over to you! I'll email the material and you can work your magic on it!! Contact he editor in English and ask him to put you in touch with Fritz Kropf to confirm his findings. The Swiss Bee Health dept will also have info on the case!

The editoe of the Swiss magazine is Dr Robert Sieber Email:bienenzeiting@bluewin.ch

Eric

[GRIZZLY]

At least the thread has reached a level I can understand.All this "high-falluting" academic stuff is o.k.for you university types ,I only have the equivalent of a degree in engineering-not bi-onics or whatever you name your following.Can we not keep discussions to a "kiss" level for us mere mortals?.

[gavin]

Eric wanted these images posted. The two pages of his Bee Keepers Quarterly article on EFB and feeding sugar. I've cut the second one up so that the text is more easily readable at this resolution.

G.


404

406

403

405

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

Just to recap!
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Gavin stated:
As to why Eric's suggestion to feed EFB-infected colonies went down like a lead balloon - well, Eric has no experience of the disease, doing anything other than notifying the authorities on suspicion of disease and following their instructions is illegal and ought to result in prosecution, and the favoured treatment for treatable cases does already involve the feeding of syrup. Add to that the fact that most beekeepers are already aware that keeping your bees relatively unstressed from lack of food or other disease will help them avoid active infection, and you can easily see why Eric wasn't immediately worshipped as the saviour of beekeeping in EFB-affected areas!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin

Just to recap!
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Gavin stated:
As to why Eric's suggestion to feed EFB-infected colonies went down like a lead balloon - well, Eric has no experience of the disease, doing anything other than notifying the authorities on suspicion of disease and following their instructions is illegal and ought to result in prosecution, and the favoured treatment for treatable cases does already involve the feeding of syrup. Add to that the fact that most beekeepers are already aware that keeping your bees relatively unstressed from lack of food or other disease will help them avoid active infection, and you can easily see why Eric wasn't immediately worshipped as the saviour of beekeeping in EFB-affected areas!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
Despite the time lapse since the last post in this thread I note that it is still sustaining hits. You have informed me that this phenomenon was due to phantom browsers and machine generated probes - sounds like a good story but I note that very few of the other threads have been battered quite so much - if at all! Any answers? I am snowed in at the present time and now have time to kill! At the time I didn't think your statement in the previous item of the thread about my acumen relative to knowledge of EFB worthy of a reply. With some 43 years in the craft and 38 years as a semi- commercial beekeeper producing around 2 -- 3 tonnes of honey/year and being the only bona fide bee breeder and queen rearer in Scotland; selling 4 frame nucleus colonies and queens as far South as Portsmouth and North as far as Thurso from 1972 up to 1997, when Varroa was discovered in Cockington, Devon. Realising that beekeepers were the prime cause for the rapid spread of Varroa world wide I ceased trading in bees. Check my advertisements for bees in the Scottish Beekeeper from 1972 onwards. I reckon you would have been at that time either a mere twinkle in yor dad's eye or somewhere in the primary school grades.

Did you ever take up my suggestion to contact Dr Robert Sieber about the crystal sugar feeding (not treatment!) used by Kropf, which appeared to inhibit EFB in his colonies, despite the condition being on the increase in Switzerland - if you go back a few years in the SB you will find that I have actually done quite a bit of translation from the Swiss and German Bee Press on the disease. You obviously must know that before this sad outbreak of EFB in the commercial apiaries that the disease was on the point of being removed from the "Notifiables" by the DEFRA (now FERA!); a point I made in the EFB article which you missed in your need to condemn the postulation. Your "white" at my "black" does you no great credit. Kropf and myself have proved to our own satisfaction that crystal sugar, accessible to the bees in late winter /early spring inhibits EFB. History is littered with rubbished ideas, contemporarily outwith accepted wisdom, which later become the accepted norm. Schirach, Mehring, Dzierzon, Gerstung, Janscha, von Frisch, Sprengel, Wegener, are but a few examples of the better known 'pariahs' of yester year. It is not only good to think, it is also good express ideas which are novel and often unacceptable. Karl von Frisch was treated like a "Crazy", when his book on the language of the bee was first published - Society ultimately bestowed the Nobel Prize on him for his pioneering work. I hope we can continue to exchange Polemics as time goes by perhaps without rancour and with honesty! It is good to talk!

Eric McArthur

[Pete L]

Hi Eric
i'm sure its just a slip of the pen so to speak,but we first had varroa down here in Devon in 1992,not 97.

[Pete L]

With regards to actually spotting efb infected larvae,they seem to be easier to detect/find when there is a good honey flow.
Reason being that during a honey flow many more bee's are very busy with this work, and larvae can be neglected/under fed a little more,thus making detection easier as more die in the cells,and less housework going on to remove them as fast. During quiet times,and with plentiful stores in reserve, there is likely to be far more bee's with not much to do but housework, and feeding the often reduced amount of larvae far better...so most will survive as they are being well fed/cared for,plus infected larve removed much faster by the large force of semi redundant bee's.
Just to add our local bee inspector of a great many years experiance also,prefers to check colonys during a good flow,and finds more cases of efb at these times than any other, in reasonably strong colonys.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Pete I

Right, Many thanks! Sorry about that! 1997 was the year the mite crossed the border to be found ‘officially’ at Canonbie in Southern Scotland. I stopped selling bees in 1992. Your reported experience with EFB is just what the doctor ordered. Much has been written about the condition at a scientific level, but so-called similar, ’anecdotal’ observations when highlighted and reported by other lay beekeepers can widen the accepted knowledge. I wonder if there are more out there! Until the recent ‘avoidable’ EFB outbreak up here last year, EFB was very thin on the ground!

Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

Yes, I did say that many of the 'views' of posts are from automated devices of one kind or another. Consider this.

Doris' thread on Drone Congregation Areas - 33 replies, 814 views.
Jon's on Inbreeding/Diploid drone risk - 32 replies, 640 views.
My thread on Colony Losses - 70 replies, 2,137 views.
My thread on CCD explained? - 25 replies, 570 views.
Nellie's Bee Genetics 101 - 13 replies, 245 views.
My thread 'Yet another puzzle' - 159 replies, 3,054 views

Express these as 'views per post' and you get, in order:

25, 20, 31, 23, 19, 19

There will be a certain number of views by machine, and a certain number by interested people. So by that measure the thread on Colony Losses got the most interest then Doris' thread on DCAs and the one on CCD the next. The 'Yet another puzzle' thread scored poorly. I didn't pick these to make a point, they were just taken at random. I guess that the visits by automated deviced accumulate over time but are otherwise even across posts, whereas the visits by real people indicate their interest in the thread.

Thanks for your comments on my age. You were being kind and underestimating: I was at Secondary School in 1972.

I wouldn't put sugar feeding for EFB control in quite the same bracket as von Frisch and his breakthrough. The reality is that I am not that interested. If your colonies are under stress from a poor summer, they ought to be fed for multiple reasons. If things are going well, you shouldn't feed as it will contaminate honey crops. If you observe good hygiene and everyone is doing everything they can to damp down and hopefully eliminate disease in the area, the chances are that your bees will remain free of the disease. As this is a relatively new disease in Scotland and is found in the bees of a limited number of beekeepers in one area then eradication has to be the target.

So no, I haven't contacted Dr Sieber. I have quite enough to do at the moment!

best wishes

Gavin

[EmsE]

I just thought I'd help out with the number of viewings for this thread. With it being 17 pages long I've had to break of several times (falsely inflating the viewing count ) whilst reading it- and it has grown by a few posts since I began just after lunch!- That's me being shouted at again for hogging the computer;)

[Eric McArthur]

Hi EmsE/Gavin

I think a second computer is in order! Must be a lot of slow readers with family members queuing up for their session out there - last count was 3100 plus.
Gavin, who knows, crystal sugar might just be the breakthrough that the boffins have been looking for – then again it might not be! Perhaps if the postulation was tested ...! Another postulation that was rejected as not ‘worthy’ of testing was “whole colony” trials, to test the effects of, not sub lethal amounts of pestricides on bees, but the effects of administering these substances at levels below ‘detectable’ to whole colonies. Recent work on such trials was reported by Dennis van Engelsdorp in an interview in a recently produced French film, not yet released in the UK. Van Engelsdorp and his co-workers administered imidacloprid at ‘homeopathic ‘levels to colonies in a test apiary over extended time: these colonies just dwindled away! CCD? Time will tell!

Eric

[Jon]

Van Engelsdorp and his co-workers administered imidacloprid at ‘homeopathic ‘levels to colonies in a test apiary over extended time: these colonies just dwindled away! CCD? Time will tell!
Eric

Would be interested in seeing a link to that Eric. Dennis Van Engelsdorp usually publishes through the normal peer reviewed channels.

[gavin]

Hi Eric

I still think that the best way to deal with EFB is to eradicate it when it appears - by shook swarms or destruction - and that feeding sugar is usually something for autumn and spring and not ideal as a routine treatment.

Like Jon, I'd appreciate hearing more about this new work with imidacloprid. Most of us are effectively administrating low doses of imidacloprid to our bees as most oilseed rape seed is dressed with the stuff - yet I don't see large-scale dwindling. And most of the stories that get passed around turn out to be false and maybe this is another. Or maybe not, but if you can pass on how to find out more we can check it out.

all the best

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin/Jon
As a matter of fact Peter Stromberg has a copy of the film on DVD. I sent it to him a few days ago asking if he might arrange a showing of the film for the Glasgow/CABA in December. The film is called “The Strange Disappearance of the Bees” directed by Mark Daniels and produced by ARTE France, Telfrance, Galofilms in association with RTBT, TSP, TV 5 Monde and CBS Television. There have been a number of such documentaries but this film report is the most detailed and exhaustive yet, the scientific coverage is awesome. As an aside our own Willie Robson, Chain Bridge Honey Farm is featured in the film which is around two and a half hours “short”.
By a mere coincidence last week I received a book which I was asked to review, titled, “The Systemic Insecticides – A Disaster in the Making” by a Dutch toxicology expert, Henk Tennekes. Tennekes is the Toxicology Consultant for Experimental Toxicology Services (ETS) Netherlands BV. He can be contacted at : www.toxicology.nl. The book costs 29 Euros. This book totally dwarfs Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. The statistics are horrendous as page by page the demise of the flora and fauna of the natural ecosystems of Europe and the UK is systematically documented. Natural ecosystems have been steadily ravaged for over the past 60 years by agro chemical over use. Rachel Carson was the first to go into print about the burgeoning, destructive situation – focusing in DDT. As the natural eco- systems on which all of us depend become more and more fragmented and polluted by the new wave of ‘no till’ and ‘pesticide overkill agriculture’, we are staring at a Disaster in The Making and most of us are looking at it with our eyes wide shut.
I recommend this book not as a pleasurable read but as a wake-up call to anyone who wants to look at a ‘no future’, unless the present pesticides regime is not halted.

Eric McArthur

[Jon]

The statistics are horrendous as page by page the demise of the flora and fauna of the natural ecosystems of Europe and the UK is systematically documented. Natural ecosystems have been steadily ravaged for over the past 60 years by agro chemical over use.

I grow a lot of my own food on an allotment and I don't use chemicals apart from Bordeaux mix for Spuds other than sarpo. I don't spray earlies either.
It tends to be hit or miss sometimes with an organic approach. Last year I had a brilliant crop of sweetcorn and was able to freeze over 100 cobs but this year I had practically none. Same with Gooseberry, very poor crop this year. Got a bumper crop of parsnip though and not a bad year for apples either. Sometimes you get a pest like Gooseberry sawfly and if it is not caught in time you find a row of leafless bushes.
The soil has got infested with white springtail after a couple of wet summers and the only treatment I can find for it is a product made by our friends in bayer Cropscience and I don't want to touch it.
I am happy to assume the risk of a failed crop as I can make up the shortfall in Tesco.
What about commercial growers managing thousands of acres?
Organic works well on a small scale but larger scale production is not so easy? I have tinkered with permaculture and biodynamic stuff over the years and I now believe that some of the benefits are overstated. One woman I know argued with me that it was possible to feed a family of four from 9 square metres under a permaculture system. (in a tropical climate but still a ridiculous claim)

Not everyone has an opportunity to grow their own, and I have grown tired of suggesting that the best thing to do with a lawn is dig it up and make a vegetable garden.

Anyway, back to bees, did you know UK colony numbers have increased from 40,000 to 120,000 in the last 30 months. Some of that will be attributable to the wave of new beekeepers but it still sounds like a success story. I find it difficult to reconcile that statistic with current press coverage on bee decline but apparently it is true.

Beekeepers I know who monitor varroa and treat when necessary are not losing colonies.
I noticed on biobees.com that Phil Chandler recently stated that he was on the point of losing all his bees for the third time in ten years.
He's not alone in that as most people who don't treat end up losing their bees. It is a noble intention but rarely seems to work unless you are Michael Bush.

A lot of the anti pesticide campaigners are also beekeepers who are ethically opposed to chemical treatment of varroa and I was wondering if this subset of beekeepers is in fact suffering far higher colony losses than beekeepers in general - and shouting the loudest to the press.
In this day and age it is hard to attribute bee loss to the increased use of pesticides if at the same time you don't treat for varroa. (Eric, I know you treat for varroa so that is not aimed at you)

[Eric McArthur]

Hi All

Gavin
How can you make possibly justify such a statement when hundreds of colonies have been lost in Scotland in the past few years. Some beekeepers have lost virtually all of their colonies in recent years. You yourself have reported loss year on year. In England heavy losses have been suffered year on year. The winter 2009/10 also took a heavy toll on colonies in England, according to a recent conversation I had with an English Bee inspector. The BBKA lost all of its colonies mysteriously a couple of years ago. Folk can continue to deny that there is a problem, folk can deny that such and such a factor is or is not involved – but the stark reality is: bee colonies are dying in unprecedented numbers, all vested interest obstruction should be abandoned, such that there is a concerted, sustained and constructive approach to finding a solution to the situation.


Hi Jon
I am in admiration of your objectivity. I don’t mind ‘being got at’ if the criticism is constructive and not just ‘character assassination’. I reckon your good and poor harvests mentioned could be put down to the farmers curse –‘weather’. Do everything right and the weatherman still has the final say! Beekeeping falls into the same category! The springtail problem is a function of damp soil as you know Seemingly a covering of sphagnum moss and good soil drainage can be useful in eliminating this pest which is distant relative of our arch enemy Varroa destructor.
Regarding organic farming and permaculture. Cast your mind back to the history of days of yore prior to the avalanche of agro-chemicals which started some 60 years ago and which can be documented as being the start of our present ecosystem degradation – DDT et al. Percentage loses to our food production methods of farming of crop rotation and fallow in the traditional pre pesticide were much the same as they are today – all that has really happened is that the land and our environment has suffered and the multis have grown fat!
The remark made about the conversation relative to the success of the small well husbanded garden plot is very plausible - a well researched articlee on Soil Degradation based on an article in National Geographic qualifies this; viz – “There was a famine in Holland during 1944 – 45. One Dutch family survived on a minute plot of plaggen soil; land enriched by generations of careful cultivation. This family are grateful to their ancestors’ care of the land; without this care the whole family might have died”.
Farmers and the general population have been conned by the agro chemical multis for many years about the need for increasingly more powerful, poisonous substances in order to feed the world. It is time we woke up to the reality of good soil management and rid ourselves of this ‘unwarranted’ pesticide dependant agricultural system that has been foisted on to our food production procedures, which have resulted in the rise of uncontrollable weeds and pollution of waterways and ground water.
If anyone is interested in the full Soil Degradation article just send me an email!
I am delighted to hear that there has been such a great resurgence of colony numbers recently – I hope that these are ‘home bred’ bees and not imported exotics.
You are of course correct about the need to treat correctly against Varroa – this is something within beekeeper control. By keeping the mite numbers to a low minimum – no more than 1 mite falling on the insert every two days around the end of November, which amounts to approximately 35 – 50 mites in the hive. The damage threshold of 1000 mites has validity for the active period but a colony entering the winter with such a burden is doomed. By keeping mite levels low the incidence of viral infections will also be greatly reduced.
The recent American research about the level of brood rearing in winter confirms the danger – this work proved that between 35 – 50% of the bees in an overwintered colony in early March are bees which were reared from late December onward.

Regards

Eric

[Jon]

but the stark reality is: bee colonies are dying in unprecedented numbers


UK colony numbers have increased from 40,000 to 120,000 in the last 30 months.


I am delighted to hear that there has been such a great resurgence of colony numbers recently – I hope that these are ‘home bred’ bees and not imported exotics.

Hi Eric
Not all of them are home bred but most of them will be. I saw the figures for imported queens recently and it was thousands per year rather than tens of thousands.
If I come across it again I'll post the data.

The thing is, in the UK bees are not dying in unprecedented numbers. (as a percentage of total colonies) They seem to be doing rather well which sits uneasily with the press coverage and the talk of pesticides killing all the bees.
Clearly pesticides in high doses are bad for bees but the issue is whether they are causing colony decline and I don't see the evidence for that in the UK. Perhaps it is different elsewhere but most of the key researchers such as van Engelsdorp and Jerry Bromenshenk don't think so. I don't buy into the conspiracy theories about scientists being in the pocket of 'Big Ag' either.
The general public even seem to think we have ccd here due to the nature of the press reporting.
Scotland has had a couple of bad years with the EFB/AFB outbreak but when that gets undercontrol colony numbers should increase again and that's not the fault of pesticides either.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
Have a look at the DVD I mentioned earlier van Engelsdorp is not in the same boat as Bromenschenk, who has been largely discredited due to his work being funded by Bayer. Re the bee imports it is reassuring to note that beekeepers generally are not BNP orientated.
Over a period of many years I have corresponded and interfaced with a number of individuals who ‘rank’ in the UK beekeeping hierarchy. It is quite easy to ascertain who is who in even general conversation by making reference to topics related to either GM or pesticides; the reaction when criticism of GM crops or pesticides is mooted the conversation/correspondence either dies abruptly or it is greeted with “people who make such criticism would not know good (vested interest) science if it was stuck up their noses” or some such! If reference is made to the criminal behaviour of Monsanto in such issues as the Schmeiser or Pusztai cases or the specially funded ($10 million dollar!) Monsanto department whose sole function is to sue farmers who like Schmeiser had their fields invaded by Monsanto GM ‘volunteers’ – weeds to you and I; their denials are a dead giveaway. The same people will defend the continuing development and widespread use of ever more virulent and poisonous chemicals to augment the already failing products on the market. The classic case is Monsanto’s Roundup, without which the target GM crop is useless. Weeds soon developed resistance to this herbicide so Monsanto reinforced the original formula with atrazine, a substance already banned in Europe because of its dangerous effects on us; Viz - Atrazine use had already been banned or restricted in a number of EU member states. Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France and Norway have banned it while Austria has cancelled its licence and Belgium and Slovenia have restricted its use. Simazine was already banned in Norway, Belgium and France. This ban will now be extended to all member states of the EU. This is called the Precautionary Principle. The substance damages the endocrine system of animals –H.sapiens is an animal!
Regards
Eric

[Jon]

I'll try and get a look at that dvd


van Engelsdorp is not in the same boat as Bromenschenk, who has been largely discredited due to his work being funded by Bayer

Eric. I think you should check that out. There was a smear campaign launched against Jerry Bromenshenk by the usual suspects, who fed stuff to journalists who should have known better. I have followed his postings in IBL for some time and he is no lickspittle of Bayer. My own opinion is that he is 100% on the side of bees and beekeepers.

I am no fan of Bayer myself, and I am wary of the implications of GM, but one thing I have learned is that there are as many charlatans in the anti GM/pesticide camp as there are working for corporate interests.
The trick is to filter who is being objective and who is working for their own vested interests/hobby horse.

My own gut feeling is generally to support those who are against corporate interests, but I feel let down by many who have adopted tactics just as dubious as those they are fighting against. Having done some personal research and reading, I find that a lot of the ant pesticide campaigning is well intentioned but often complete drivel.

[Jon]

Just to highlight the point I made in the last paragraph above.

This US article is an overview of the ccd issue.
It was part of a mailing I received earlier today from Edinburgh & Midlothian Beekeepers' Association.

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/nov/06/decline-honey-bees/

It summarises the recent study by Jerry Bromenshenk towards the end.

Compare and contrast the objective tone of the article with the first post in the comment section - obviously posted by a single issue fanatic who can only see bee problems through the prism of neonicotinoid pesticides. He posts a rant and then indicates that he didn't even read the article as he knew he wouldn't like the content.
Guys like this may be well meaning but in the long term they are bad for bees as they divert time and energy towards dead end studies.
I had a PM earlier today (not from Gavin) which pointed out that Bonmatin who is a poster child of the anti pesticide campaigners received 790,000 euro to study pesticide involvement in bee health over repeated studies, whereas another researcher, Magali Chabert, was refused 43,000 Euro to look at factors such as IAPV. Go Figure as the Americans like to say. It is looking very likely that a virus, maybe an iridovirus, in combination with Nosema ceranae and the arrival of varroa may well be the cause of ccd.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
I was just about to respond to your defence of Jerry when your extremely interesting mail arrived!
My bone of contention with Jerry is that he ditched a promise to act as an expert witness in a case against Bayer - then some time later presents his paper on the fungal/viral combinations – not a dickey bird about pesticide involvement – not is his mandate from Bayer obviously.
Jon we all cherry pick but the historical record relative to pesticide use is undeniable. Since just after WW2 when pesticides, which were really a spin off from chemicals developed by the Nazis(and which are still controlled by similar minds!) to kill innocent people, there has been a steady decline in biodiversity, which has now developed into something quite disturbing. Carson started the ball rolling and opened eyes. Hennekes book and others compound the issue - there are alternatives to these lethal substances and if we want to have a sustainable food supply system we will have to alter our priorities. I wonder what the Anti GM/pesticide charlatans have to gain - except perhaps saving the world. The pro GM school mostly have some vested interest in the issue!
Eric
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;
ember 9, 2010 18:38:00
Listen to MP3 of this story ( minutes)
Alternate WMA version | MP3 download
MARK COLVIN: In case you didn't have enough to worry about think about this. Bees which pollinate a third of the world's crops are under threat. The cause is something called colony collapse disorder. Millions of bees have mysteriously died but no one's yet absolutely certain what causes it.

The conservation biologist Dr Reese Halter is the author of The Incomparable Honey Bee and the Economics of Pollination. I asked him on the line from California what was understood about colony collapse disorder.

REESE HALTER: Well I think in biology Mark there's a number of things colliding. Certainly the massive overuse of pesticides comes to mind first and foremost. We are pounding over five billion pounds of pesticides into the biosphere each year, in particular the neonicotinoids which are known killers. Climate change is causing the flowers to flower earlier and the bees to miss the timing. There are a number of diseases, bacteria and fungus and mite.

And I think that the bees are just overloaded with all kinds of problems and they're acting as the canary in the coal mine to tell us that the food is laced with poison and we'd best beware.

MARK COLVIN: There was an article in the New York Times the other day that suggested that the bees were dying because of a combination of a fungus and a virus.

REESE HALTER: Interesting that you mention that, indeed.* And my answer, my response to that is flummery! There's no such one virus fungus that is killing hundreds of billions of bees around the globe. It's a combination of many things.

MARK COLVIN: But they did find the virus and the fungus. Are you suggesting that that's a result of, not the cause of colony collapse?

REESE HALTER: Exactly right. And we knew of the virus fungus a year plus before the New York Times article came to light.

MARK COLVIN: Are you suggesting that the chemical companies are very powerful in this and that they're suppressing information?

REESE HALTER: Hugely. Hugely. We know that billions of bees died in France from these neonicotinoids.

What happens is that the bees mimic to a T the symptoms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. And they stopped eventually using the neonicotinoids in France and immediately the number of bee deaths relaxed.

They are known to, they are absolutely unequivocally known to decimate all bee populations and that would be 20,000 known species on planet Earth.

[chris]

And they stopped eventually using the neonicotinoids in France and immediately the number of bee deaths relaxed.
.

Hi Eric. Just to *fix* my position, I'm involved in organic farming. The sentence above is false.It was Henri Clément (president of the national beekeeping union) quoted in the Figaro newspaper in February 2007. He has since retracted it, but with much less media coverage. Also, neonicotinoids are still being used in France. Just Gaucho and Regent had theit licences removed for specific applications.
Regards, Chris.

[Jon]

My bone of contention with Jerry is that he ditched a promise to act as an expert witness in a case against Bayer - then some time later presents his paper on the fungal/viral combinations – not a dickey bird about pesticide involvement – not is his mandate from Bayer obviously.

That's one of the lies that has been put around about Jerry Bromenshenk by People like Phil Chandler and the rest of the angry brigade and is exactly what I mean by the use of the term 'charlatan'
He has stated himself that he was not called to give evidence in that case. No more no less than that.

I think it is wrong to repeat things like that without evidence.


then some time later presents his paper on the fungal/viral combinations – not a dickey bird about pesticide involvement – not is his mandate from Bayer obviously.

The thing about funding from Bayer is also a lie and is easily checked out if you want to check it. He has explained the situation himself over and over again.
Again, I don't think allegations like that should be made without evidence.
Have you read bee-L over the past couple of months. That should get you up to speed as Bromenshenk posts there himself.


not a dickey bird about pesticide involvement
Do you think bee research should only look at pesticides and none of it at anything else such as viruses and other disease factors? That seems to be what you are saying. Eric - are you so absolutely sure that bee problems are caused by pesticides that you think there is no need for other research? I'm certainly not.
I would not close any doors.

Who is this Reese Halter? As far as I can see he is some kind of author/media guy who talks about neonicotinoid pesticides all the time.
What research has he published and where has he published it?
I have listened to some of his interviews in the past and he seems to be a well meaning media tart like David Beckham.
In what way is he qualified to opine on bees any more than you or I.


What happens is that the bees mimic to a T the symptoms of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

That's one of the most ridiculous combinations of words I have ever seen in print. Would anyone care to proffer an explanation!

PS
This was the original libelous article:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/08/news/honey_bees_ny_times.fortune/index.htm

And this was the response from Jerry Bromenshenk: (from Bee-L)

(1) the onion seed pollination work was done for a large U.S. company,
there was no grant received from Bayer,

(2) the acoustic recorder is better at pesticide detection than pathogens
- the latter part of the development is an ongoing research project still
being funded by USDA.

(3) we weren't asked by NYT to disclose our funding sources, it wasn't
brought up, and there was no need since this information is required by PloS
ONE before they will even review a paper. You can find it on the PloS ONE
site.

(4) Bee Alert Technology, Inc. is a technology transfer company that is
legally recognized as an independent company in the State of Montana,
affiliated with the University of Montana. It is MT State Board of Regents
Approved and has been since the early 2000s. Intellectual property agreements
are in place, stipulating issues such as patents, IP rights, licensing, and
if we ever make any money - which seems a LONG way off, the University
receives an established royalty for research and education.

This all came about because of changes in Federal Law ensuing from the
1980 Bayh–Dole Act or University and Small Business Patent Procedures Act.
This is _United States_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States)
_legislation_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law) dealing with intellectual
property arising from _federal government-funded research_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Researc...unded_research) . Adopted in _1980_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980) , Bayh-Dole is codified in _35 U.S.C._
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_3...ed_States_Code) _§ 200_
(http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/35/200.html) -212_[1]_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Do...te_35USC200212) , and implemented by 37 _C.F.R._
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of...al_Regulations) 401_[2]_
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh–Do...dnote_37CFR401) . Among other
things, it gave U.S. universities, small businesses and non-profits
_intellectual property_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property) control
of their _inventions_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention) and other
intellectual property that resulted from such funding.

The Fortune article presents an assortment of lies and half-truths by a
reporter who left another magazine before it folded. Unfortunately, this
article has spawned a copy by New Yorker Magazine that added an even more
inflammatory headline and chose to emphasize some of Ms Eban's more outrageous
claims of what she alleges I said.

The NEW version of this fiction appears at:
_http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10/bee_mystery_unsolved_lead_inve.html_
(http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10...lead_inve.html)
and it also encourages reader comment, as does Fortune.

The only good thing about all this is that it can still generate a smile,
courtesy of friends - such as the proposed title sent to me “Fortune’s
Misfortune – Smearing Scientists Is Liable To Be Libel “.

Thanks to all. Jerry

PPS
Eric

Did you see this earlier thread on Sbai about bromenshenk's work.. I don't think you posted on it.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?332-CCD-explained

[gavin]

That's one of the most ridiculous combinations of words I have ever seen in print. Would anyone care to proffer an explanation!
[/URL]

Is this the point where I'm supposed to come in? I was hoping to leave this debate to you and Chris, you seemed to be doing so well.

OK then, media tarts were mentioned (in the same sentence as Beckham, in case you were thinking of making that link Jimbo) ... and bees with unpleasant human neurobiological conditions. Did someone mention neurobiology?! We've been here before:

[url]http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?276-France-5-Who-killed-the-bees (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?332-CCD-explained)

Last time I looked the video was still available on the second link but had been cut so that the times given are no longer correct. I wonder if Reese Halter has more experience of bees than CC does. There is a blog picture of him in front of some hives, so I guess that he does.

[Jon]

This is the problem I have with the pesticide debate.

If anyone publishes anything which does does not support the hypothesis that pesticides cause current bee problems in general and ccd in particular, the character assassination starts, and the libel, and the accusations of being in the pocket of Bayer and 'Big Ag' I find that level of argument purile and completely pointless. It does not get you anywhere nearer the truth of the matter.

On the other hand, someone with little or no science backgound with an axe to grind against multinationals gets endlessly quoted without having done any research or having a shred of scientific evidence to support what he says.

Personally I find this embarrassing, as I have always considered myself to be a leftie environmentalist suspicious of the motives of the likes of Bayer but I am equally embarrassed by the tactics of those who oppose Bayer and co.

[gavin]

I've been called a supporter of 'Big Ag' and in the pocket of the agrochemical companies so often that I'm almost starting to believe it now. The reality is very far from that. I can't expect Eric to believe that though.

My passion is trying to make sure that people pay attention to the evidence. There is masses of evidence out there now on this question, and I just hate the idea of people spending energy, time, and yes research funds working on something and in ways that just don't make sense when you look at what is already well known and well documented.

This isn't just playing games. If mankind throws away tools it needs to keep up food production when the world really needs that production then additional people will starve in the decades to come. The rest of us will manage somehow. What happens when you have important and influential communities failing to acknowledge the evidence that biodiversity is being devastated and our planet's climate is nearing tipping points? If we can't properly assess the evidence for all these things and use the clarity that science can deliver with a clear head, despite all the vested interests, hobby horses and stubborn thinking, and adjust the way we do things, then we are doomed as a species.

[Jon]

we are doomed

It's funny how you can't read that phrase without hearing it in your head with a scottish accent. I blame dad's army.


What happens when you have important and influential communities failing to acknowledge the evidence that biodiversity is being devastated and our planet's climate is nearing tipping points?

It seems to me that the climate change deniers are now the majority. Pub talk trumps science yet again.

If you want to find evidence of prejudice and bias you will find it more easily in the mouths of zealots and bigots.
Listen to the asides made by the 'interviewer' in this podcast. Bernie Doeser the interviewee does his best to stick to what he knows in the face of a barrage of asides, snide comments and leading questions.

Those who have a view on experimenter bias might want to focus on the wording of the url!!

http://biobees.libsyn.com/revealing-interview-with-dr-bernie-doeser-should-a-bee-keepers-association-endorse-pesticides-

[gavin]

I blame dad's army.


That's odd (and ironic), I don't think that there was one of Eric's editorials during his tenure in the chair at the Scottish Beekeeper when I didn't think of Private Frazer.

[AlexJ]

Since just after WW2 when pesticides, which were really a spin off from chemicals developed by the Nazis(and which are still controlled by similar minds!) to kill innocent people, there has been a steady decline in biodiversity, which has now developed into something quite disturbing.

Eric, as a new beekeeper not from a scientific (biological or environmental) background I have found the debates on the SBA forum very informative, sometimes amusing and I'm sure often challenging to those engaged in the banter. From my brief forays into related sites I believe the level of debate and manner in which it is conducted much more productive than elsewhere. However, the above does nothing for rational debate and certainly turns me off from considering throwing my tuppence worth in.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Alex
Easy to stand on the sidelines and pontificate. Read below. If the prose below does not give you cause for pause - I wonder at your objectivity Watch this space.

5. Corporate Crimes
5.1. Bayer and War Crimes
Chemical Weapons
Bayer is implicated in the development of chemical weapons. During WW1 Bayer was involved in the development and manufacture of a range of poisonous gasses used in the trenches, including chlorine gas and mustard gas.[211] As part of IG Farben, Bayer were also involved in the development of the next generation of chemical warfare agents, toxic organophosphate compounds. Tabun was first examined for use as an insecticide in late 1936 in a program under the direction of Dr. Gerhard Schrader at the Bayer facility at Elberfeld/Wuppertal. An accidental exposure of Dr. Schrader and a laboratory assistant to Tabun vapors made it quite clear that this compound had potential military applications.[212] Tabun was then mass produced by IG Farben during WWII although it was never used as a weapon. Schrader was also responsible for the discovery of related, but more toxic, nerve agents including Sarin and Soman.[213] Whilst working on chemical weapons Schrader discovered the chemical compound E 605, the principle ingredient in the pesticide parathion. After the post-war dissolution of IG Farben, Schrader continued to develop pesticides for Bayer. After World War II, Bayer and other companies began to introduce a large number of organophosphorus compounds, including parathion, into the marketplace for insect control. The difficulty with organophosphates (OPs) is that they are neurotoxic due to their effects on acetycholinesterase, and unfortunately this enzyme occurs in humans as well as in insects.[214]

The links between chemicals developed as 'pesticides' with chemicals suitable for weapons has continued at Bayer. In 1989 it was revealed that Bayer hold a patent for a compound chemically identical to the VX gas used by the US military. The compound was discovered by Gerhard Schrader, and was patented in Germany in 1957, and in the US in 1961. Bayer claim that the compound was developed as a potential pesticide and that the US military application of the compound has nothing to do with them.[215]
Bayer, IG Farben and World War II: Slave Labour and Deadly Gas
Bayer (along with BASF and Hoechst) was an original member of the IG Farben group. During WWII, IG Farben built a synthetic rubber and oil plant complex called Monowitz close to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Inmates worked as slave labour for IG Farben,[216] and when they were too weak to work they were killed in the gas chambers. IG Farben subsidiary Degesch manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used in the concentration camp gas chambers.[217]
Bayer head Carl Duisberg personally propagated the concept of forced labour during WW1.[218] The company placed itself under a large burden of guilt due to its heavy involvement in the planning, preparation and implementation of both world wars. The International War Crimes Tribunal pronounced the company guilty for its share of responsibility in the war and the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship.
On 29 July 1948, sentences for mass murder and slavery were handed down at the Nuremberg trials to twelve Farben executives. The longest sentence of only seven years was dealt out was to Dr. Fritz ter Meer, a top executive and scientist on the IG Farben managing board.[219]
After the war, IG Farben separated into three giant corporations: Bayer, Hoechst and BASF. On 1 August 1963, Bayer celebrated its 100th anniversary at the Cologne fairgrounds. The opening speech was delivered by Dr. Fritz ter Meer, not only out of prison but - a convicted mass murderer -elevated to the position of Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Bayer.[220]
More than eight million people had to do slave work for the Nazi war industry, and none ever received compensation from the companies or the government. David Fishel, one of the few survivors of the camp, sued the companies for compensation. When he was 13 he was forced to work for IG Farben carrying 50-kilo bags of coal and cement when he weighed only 75 pounds.[221]
Bayer, IG Farben and Human Experiments[222]
IG Farben also conducted experiments on humans. Eva Mozes Kor, among the 1,500 sets of twins experimented on by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, claims that IG Farben monitored and supervised medical experiments at the Nazi concentration camp where she was interned. She claims the experiments involved toxic chemicals that IG Farben (Bayer) provided. In some of the experiments, the lawsuit states, prisoners were injected with germs known to cause diseases, "to test the effectiveness of various drugs" manufactured by IG Farben. Mengele conducted genetic experiments there in an effort to create a super race of blonde, blue-eyed Aryans who would be born in multiple births. Both Kor and her sister survived their 10-month ordeal in the concentration camp and were liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945. They were nearly 10 years old. According to Irwin Levin (Kor's Lawyer), IG Farben paid Nazi officials during World War II for access to those confined in the camps and collaborated in Nazi experiments as a form of research and development. The lawsuit sought unspecified punitive damages and the recovery of profits it maintains IG Farben (Bayer) earned as a result of such research.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Drugmaker Bayer AG has agreed to settle about 200 of 2,000 cases in which plaintiffs alleged that the use of Trasylol to control bleeding during their heart surgeries caused injuries such as kidney failure and fatal heart problems.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Magnevist®: As of February 1, 2010, there were approximately 310 lawsuits pending and served upon Bayer in the United States involving the gadolinium-based contrast agent Magnevist®. Three other manufacturers of gadolinium-based contrast agents in the United States also have been named party to the same or similar lawsuits. Additional cases are anticipated.

[Jon]

If the prose below does not give you cause for pause - I wonder at your objectivity

..and sometimes I wonder about yours!!

Bayer's origins are well known and a matter of historical record and are nothing to be proud of.
What do you suggest in 2010? Wind up the company and jail the current management because of what went on in the 1930s and earlier?

Do you really, but really Eric, believe that the current management of Bayer have similar minds to the Nazis, as you suggested in an earlier post.
I am quite happy to believe that Bayer is working for certain vested interests but it would be good if you could explain that Nazi thing as it is quite an allegation to throw at a company, especially a modern German company. You are a German speaker and you must know what that particular accusation means to anyone from Germany.

All pharma companies get sued when products go wrong and there are worse companies out there than Bayer. Remember Union Carbide? Now part of Dow Agro. The victims at Bhopal got a pittance of compensation.

So anyway, all ears about that Nazi thing.

Where does the information above come from? It's good to give references as the source often lets you know if the information is likely to come from an impartial or respected source. Sometimes the anti pesticide campaign seems to be based upon an ability to cut and paste from things like wikipedia as opposed to using properly referenced sources.

[Eric McArthur]

I've been called a supporter of 'Big Ag' and in the pocket of the agrochemical companies so often that I'm almost starting to believe it now. The reality is very far from that. I can't expect Eric to believe that though.

My passion is trying to make sure that people pay attention to the evidence. There is masses of evidence out there now on this question, and I just hate the idea of people spending energy, time, and yes research funds working on something and in ways that just don't make sense when you look at what is already well known and well documented.

This isn't just playing games. If mankind throws away tools it needs to keep up food production when the world really needs that production then additional people will starve in the decades to come. The rest of us will manage somehow. What happens when you have important and influential communities failing to acknowledge the evidence that biodiversity is being devastated and our planet's climate is nearing tipping points? If we can't properly assess the evidence for all these things and use the clarity that science can deliver with a clear head, despite all the vested interests, hobby horses and stubborn thinking, and adjust the way we do things, then we are doomed as a species.

I've been called a supporter of 'Big Ag' and in the pocket of the agrochemical companies so often that I'm almost starting to believe it now. The reality is very far from that. I can't expect Eric to believe that though.

My passion is trying to make sure that people pay attention to the evidence. There is masses of evidence out there now on this question, and I just hate the idea of people spending energy, time, and yes research funds working on something and in ways that just don't make sense when you look at what is already well known and well documented.

This isn't just playing games. If mankind throws away tools it needs to keep up food production when the world really needs that production then additional people will starve in the decades to come. The rest of us will manage somehow. What happens when you have important and influential communities failing to acknowledge the evidence that biodiversity is being devastated and our planet's climate is nearing tipping points? If we can't properly assess the evidence for all these things and use the clarity that science can deliver with a clear head, despite all the vested interests, hobby horses and stubborn thinking, and adjust the way we do things, then we are doomed as a species.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Hi Gavin Your love affair with GM/Monsanto is quite clear to read in your masses of prose on the subject. How can you make such statement on the importance of biodiversity (above0 when by its very nature the GM crops and GM trees which you are in favour of promote monoculture on a devaststing scale? To say nothing of the massive loss of biodiversity of the beneficial soil dwelling organisms as a result of the burden of pesticides being dumped into the soil year on year.
The prose below tells just who the criminals that are messing with the environment. If you are happy to be associated with such people. It must comment on your values!
ERic
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Dumping of toxic waste in the UK
Between 1965 and 1972, Monsanto paid contractors to illegally dump thousands of tons of highly toxic waste in UK landfill sites, knowing that their chemicals were liable to contaminate wildlife and people. The Environment Agency said the chemicals were found to be polluting groundwater and the atmosphere 30 years after they were dumped.[68]
The Brofiscin quarry, near Cardiff, erupted in 2003, spilling fumes over the surrounding area, but the local community was unaware that the quarry housed toxic waste.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;
A UK government report shows that 67 chemicals, including Agent Orange derivatives, dioxins and PCBs exclusively made by Monsanto, are leaking from one unlined porous quarry that was not authorized to take chemical wastes. It emerged that the groundwater has been polluted since the 1970s.[69] The government was criticised for failing to publish information about the scale and exact nature of this contamination. According to the Environment Agency it could cost £100m to clean up the site in south Wales, called "one of the most contaminated" in the UK.[70]
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Indonesian bribing convictions
In January 2005, Monsanto agreed to pay a $1.5m fine for bribing an Indonesian official. Monsanto admitted a senior manager at Monsanto directed an Indonesian consulting firm to give a $50,000 bribe to a high-level official in Indonesia's environment ministry in 2002, in a bid to avoid Environmental impact assessment on its genetically modified cotton. Monsanto told the company to disguise an invoice for the bribe as "consulting fees". Monsanto also has admitted to paying bribes to a number of other high-ranking Indonesian officials between 1997 and 2002. Monsanto faced both criminal and civil charges from the Department of Justice and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Monsanto has agreed to pay $1m to the Department of Justice and $500,000 to the SEC to settle the bribe charge and other related violations.[71]

;';;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;
Monsanto Fined $700 Million for Poisoning People with PCBs
ANNISTON (Alabama)
Deal reached in PCB trials
By Jessica Centers
Star Staff Writer
08-21-2003
Lawyers for more than 20,000 plaintiffs in federal and state trials over PCB pollution in Anniston reached an agreement Wednesday with the companies accused of chemical contamination.
The $700 million settlement, announced in federal district court in Birmingham, would resolve all outstanding Anniston PCB litigation.
The terms of the global settlement were agreed to by attorneys in both the federal court case, Tolbert v. Monsanto Co. et al., and the state court case, Abernathy v. Monsanto Co. et al. The judges in both cases presided over the hearing together.
From the 1930s to 1970s Monsanto produced PCBs at its plant in western Anniston. The chemicals, now banned, have been linked to a range of health effects, from learning disorders to cancer.
The $700 million settlement would include $600 million in cash payments. Costs for cleanup, prescription drug and other programs would put the total past $700 million.
Of the $600 million cash settlement, Monsanto would pay $390 million within seven days of the court order while Solutia would pay $50 million over 10 years in equal annual installments. The remaining $160 million would be provided through Monsanto¹s, Solutia¹s and Pharmacia Corporation¹s commercial insurance, also within seven days of the court order.
The settlement was split in half between the two cases, meaning $300 million for the federal court case, which has about 17,000 named plaintiffs, and $300 million for the state court case with 3,500 plaintiffs.
The lawyers¹ fees for each case were set at $120 million.

[Eric McArthur]

That's odd (and ironic), I don't think that there was one of Eric's editorials during his tenure in the chair at the Scottish Beekeeper when I didn't think of Private Frazer.

Hi Gavin /Jon

I can see that there is a lot of conferring in the background - with some measure of back stabbing! I am flattered. What editorial are you referring to? Read my reply too Alec and be damned glad of the sacrifice people like Private Fraser and the Allies Forces made in making your world safe during WW2! Shame on you!!

Disgusted

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
The word Nazi has become a generic word for evil. The BNP are not German! Yes, Bayer et al should be wound up and the criminals responsible for the grevious bodily harmm being done in their name the two modern items quoted are not even the tip of the tip of the iceberg. For deeper reading try the archives of the Nurmberg Trials. Check out the Monsanto iceberg tip in the reply to Gavin.

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Eric. Just to *fix* my position, I'm involved in organic farming. The sentence above is false.It was Henri Clément (president of the national beekeeping union) quoted in the Figaro newspaper in February 2007. He has since retracted it, but with much less media coverage. Also, neonicotinoids are still being used in France. Just Gaucho and Regent had theit licences removed for specific applications.
Regards, Chris.

Hi Chris
The film "The Strange Disappearance of the Honey Bee is worth a look there is a lot of great independent science in it - the film is "Made in France". Have you read the Secret Study into the impact of GM crops on conventional agriculture and organic farming commissioned by the EU a few years ago? As an organic farmer/gardener?? you should know its contents. Dr Barry McSween, a supposewd 'neutral' was given the job of conducting the investigation. He reported back to the Commission stating that the results were too damning of GM and that the report should only be distributed on a need to know basis! Dr "Barry" was sacked later! Not for his recommendation, but because his degree was a fake and he had close links with the GM industry. Does that speak a "positive" for the pro GM lobby?

Eric

[AlexJ]

Hi Alex
Easy to stand on the sidelines and pontificate. Read below. If the prose below does not give you cause for pause - I wonder at your objectivity.

Eric/All,
No pontification, rather an observation that the angry blunderbuss approach to debate seldom engenders an environment that fully supports all viewpoints. Especially when much of the content is irrelevant to the topic i.e. the link between chemicals of mass destruction and agriculture. While you’re quite correct in principle you’ve missed the fact that large scale conflict stimulates scientific and engineering development whether we like it or not - rocket propulsion, computing (both hardware and software) and nuclear power are testimony to that fact.

However, by straying of topic you are likely to lose objectivity in making your argument. I for my part will continue to develop my knowledge of chemical usage in agriculture, and their affects on honeybees, which includes a variety of viewpoints. For instance the last report I read concluded that further work is required to identify the link between neonicotinoids and honey bee mortality/performance,

A meta-analysis of experiments testing the effects of a neonicotinoid insecticide (imidacloprid) on honey bees. James E. Cresswell, Ecotoxicology Nov 2010

The problem being that these viewpoints or comments are unlikely to be fully discussed when you personalise the issue in a fog of ancillary and tenuous information.

As for the conspiracy theory - not guilty on any of the many levels articulate in your posts. With personal and ongoing links to the armed forces, I'm somewhat concerned at the direction you're taking this post in terms of 'making your world safe' to others/me? In that vein I'll make this my last post on this matter and await a more focussed and considered thread to discuss the topic.

[Jon]

Eric. You are cutting and pasting masses of information but not referencing any of it.
Graham White used to do exactly the same on the bbka site, screeds and screeds of it, in a cut and paste steeplechase, and when challenged on accuracy, or references, he just got angry.
You are making masses and masses of of allegations, many of them potentially libellous, and when challenged you ask people to go and watch a DVD.
If you make an allegation you have to back it up and if it is shown to be wrong you should retract.

This is exactly the type of pointless posturing I am trying to draw attention to with regard to taking the debate to a higher level.
You need to fight for what you believe in with facts, rather than diatribe, insults and innuendo.
It's easy to hurl abuse but everyone stops listening after a while as you get pigeonholed as a ranter.
It's important to move away from that to get taken seriously.

So is Chris's allegation above false? I don't know so would be glad if you could point out why he is wrong and you are right with regard to the neonicotinoids and bee deaths in France.

PS Private Frazer didn't suffer fools like Mainwaring and always tried to make him justify his position.

[gavin]

Hi Eric

Please think before you post. If you are going to get personal you will lose even more support from folk watching. I'm going to tire of this very quickly, so I'll try to be brief.

> Hi Gavin Your love affair with GM/Monsanto is quite clear to read
> in your masses of prose on the subject.

Is that right? I dislike Monsanto and the move towards the centralisation of control of the food supply into the hands of a few global giants. In the last decade there have been encouraging moves in the other direction. The only place I have seen my imaginary support of Monsanto raised was in private and insulting emails from you which were as laughable then as these views are now.

GM? A promising technique to supplement traditional breeding which has the potential to do things like move disease resistance from wild relatives of the potato into crop varieties in a couple of years rather than the 30 or so that it has taken before such techniques. If we are going to permanently ditch such techniques because of safety concerns of some kind then hard questions really have to be asked of the evidence on which such opinions are based.

Alex: many thanks for that. Once the forum has quietened down we ought to calmly discuss that paper and similar issues. I wasn't aware of it until now.

Oh and Eric, Private Frazer was a fictional character.

Gavin

[gavin]

PS Private Frazer didn't suffer fools like Mainwaring and always tried to make him justify his position.

I'm not asking who you think resembles Mainwaring.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr_v_SqJNjA

There is a prime candidate for Sgt Wilson though .....

PS I'm sure that Mainwaring didn't mean it and was thinking affectionately about his platoon!

[gavin]

Maybe this was the more obvious one:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V3SqxUomwk

[Neils]

http://www.smiley-faces.org/smiley-faces/smiley-face-popcorn.gif (http://www.smiley-faces.org)

Don't have anything constructive to add, but it's gripping stuff.

[Jon]

Oh and Eric, Private Frazer was a fictional character.


What!!!

You'll be telling us the Lone Ranger and Tonto are fictional characters next.
I know the tooth fairy is just a con though.

I have to admit I went to You tube yesterday evening after the first mention and sat laughing like an eejit at some of the clips.
Good job I was on my own apart from the dog and anyway, dogs put up with any old nonsense as long as they are fed and walked at regular intervals.

There was a very nice tribute to John Laurie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHfJJgGP7ss)as well. Can you believe he died in 1980?

[Eric McArthur]

Eric. You are cutting and pasting masses of information but not referencing any of it.
Graham White used to do exactly the same on the bbka site, screeds and screeds of it, in a cut and paste steeplechase, and when challenged on accuracy, or references, he just got angry.
You are making masses and masses of of allegations, many of them potentially libellous, and when challenged you ask people to go and watch a DVD.
If you make an allegation you have to back it up and if it is shown to be wrong you should retract.

This is exactly the type of pointless posturing I am trying to draw attention to with regard to taking the debate to a higher level.
You need to fight for what you believe in with facts, rather than diatribe, insults and innuendo.
It's easy to hurl abuse but everyone stops listening after a while as you get pigeonholed as a ranter.
It's important to move away from that to get taken seriously.

So is Chris's allegation above false? I don't know so would be glad if you could point out why he is wrong and you are right with regard to the neonicotinoids and bee deaths in France.

PS Private Frazer didn't suffer fools like Mainwaring and always tried to make him justify his position.

Hi Jon
Try: http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Bayer:_Corporate_Crimes#Bayer_and_War_Crimes
But prepare sandwiches!!
Gavin knows where to access the film. I didn't make it!! You view it and comment! By the way WW2 was no fiction!
Gavin
I note the "Go advanced " facility is no longer with us! Any answers!
Eric

Regards

Eric
Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Alex (you wrote)
However, by straying of topic you are likely to lose objectivity in making your argument. I for my part will continue to develop my knowledge of chemical usage in agriculture, and their affects on honeybees, which includes a variety of viewpoints. For instance the last report I read concluded that further work is required to identify the link between neonicotinoids and honey bee mortality/performance
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;

I am pleased that you are intent on improving your knowledge about chemical usage in agriculture. I have been on that road for some time! It is the motives of the people who control the application and marketing that really worry me! Too bad about war being the dynamic fo rgood 'positive' change; the slave labourers and Jews etc might have a diferent slant on that view!
"Go advanced" seems to have been emasculted, tried twice! I wonder why?
Regards

Eric

[Jon]

Go advanced is still there. You have to hit the 'reply' button first.

Eric. I agree with you that Bayer has a shocking history and recent practice which can be dubious.
But.... proposing to wind up the company is not feasible and anyway there are many other pharmas with similar dodgy records such as the Union carbide/Dow agro example I posted earlier.
I think the list you posted earlier is from corporatewatch.org. I also found it on cannabisculture.com but couldn't possibly comment!
Monitoring, supervision and regulation of this type of company is the way to go in my opinion, allied with swingeing penalties when they step out of line.
That is why we have regulatory bodies although the lumpen proletariat tends to complain about regulation as being some kind of intrusion into their lives.
Proposing to wind up Bayer is nonsensical and anyway, not everything Bayer and the pharmas does is bad.
I would not like to be living in the pre antibiotic, pre modern medicine era, where you might have got a slug of whiskey as an anaesthetic or a decorative pattern of leeches placed at strategic points of your body.

Look. There are things I would love to see happen ( in my dreams ) such as seeing the authors of the Iraq war Bush and Blair explain their actions in the Hague but it ain't gonna happen so it is a waste of breath.

You need to pick your targets and focus.
The ranting only alienates those who may well be sympathetic to your ideas.

I have an open mind on pesticides causing current bee problems although the evidence tends to suggest otherwise.
Have you an open mind towards the idea that pesticides may in fact play a minor role in bee problems?
I am always shocked at the vitriol dished out towards the likes of Jerry Bromenshenk.
All he has done is to present evidence which does not support the idea that Neonicotinoids are the main problem.

Is that impossible to contemplate - that pesticides may not be the main issue.
Have you so much invested in this struggle over so many years that you cannot conceive that it may not be true.

If someone qualified to do so produces a killer study tomorrow (not David Beckham) linking neonicotinoids to bee problems I will be perfectly happy to appraise and amend my current views and it won't take a fizz out of me.

The thing is, you go with the evidence or you go with preconceptions.

[chris]

"Go advanced" seems to have been emasculted, tried twice! I wonder why?

Eric

Hi Eric. I think it only works if you want to add a nice friendly smile.;)

[gavin]

"Go advanced" seems to have been emasculted, tried twice! I wonder why?


If I felt that we were at the point where I had to censor you I would do it properly. People have sometimes told me of erratic behaviour of the forum software. I can't explain it, and I've never been denied the use of 'Go Advanced' that I can remember.

G.

[Eric McArthur]

If I felt that we were at the point where I had to censor you I would do it properly. People have sometimes told me of erratic behaviour of the forum software. I can't explain it, and I've never been denied the use of 'Go Advanced' that I can remember.

G.
Hi Gavin
Still no "Go Advance" Cramping my style! Censorship never even crossed my mind!

Eric

[gavin]

You don't get this screen if you hit 'Reply'?

485

Apologies for misinterpreting your comments.

G.

PS Click the thumbnail for a bigger one

[Eric McArthur]

You don't get this screen if you hit 'Reply'?

485

Apologies for misinterpreting your comments.

G.

PS Click the thumbnail for a bigger one

Hi All
With almost 4000 hits, despite Gavin’s attempt to minimalise the interest in this thread (see page 17 - 2nd item) as far as I am concerned it achieved moderate success as a forum for exploring important issues. That I was a majority of 1 in most of the issues was refreshing and most stimulating for me. I have inserted some information on Monsanto, which puts them in the same league as Bayer – if anyone is interested.
However the thread itself was started on a fraudulent claim, and Gavin knew that at the time. Its roots lie in the Yahoo Irish Forum, where a number of years ago I posted a thread, my first thread, asking if anyone had any views on the potential problems of inbreeding in Scotland’s honeybees. Far from being interested in exploring the postulation at that time Gavin proceeded to do a demolition job on even the possibilty of inbreeding. He was joined in this demolition by all of the Irish Forum members who deigned to participate in the thread. I would be delighted to hear from any of these people via the SBA Forum with their denial of the above statement. The truth is not a pleasant quality to some/many?
Inbreeding is now accepted as a very important issue in honey bee breeding today. The offending mail was actually a reproach to Gavin in the light of a new paper article on the dire straits of Scotland’s isolated bumble bees, which are threatened with extinction – Reason? Inbreeding!
I raised the Inbreeding possibility at a Glasgow and District meeting months later with Ian Craig and Peter Stromberg present; their reaction was initially negative but on further discussion they agreed there could be something in the idea. The CABA Breeding Project had its roots in the concept of inbreeding.
I don’t know how much the ‘input box will take – could be tricky!
Eric McArthur
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=210
MONSANTO
A Corporate Profile
www.monsanto.com
________________________________________
Corporate Crimes
Monsanto have an impressive history of committing corporate crimes [40]. Recent Monsanto crimes include:
BST
BST or rBGH marketed by Monsanto as Posilac is a genetically engineered hormone designed to make cows produce more milk. Large amounts of research indicate that BST use has serious implications for the health and welfare of dairy cattle, including making cows more prone to mastitis and sores [41].
Because of evidence that BST milk may cause breast cancer, colon cancer and prostate cancer in humans, it is banned in Europe. Monsanto is trying to overturn the ban [42].
Contaminating our food with GM crops
As the market leaders in GM crops it is Monsanto who have been largely responsible for contaminating the global food chain with GM crops. The long term health effects of eating GM crops are as yet unknown.
Contaminating our environment with GM crops
The long term effects of Monsanto’s GM crops on the environment are as yet unknown. In areas where RoundUp Ready crops are being grown commercially, herbicide tolerance is being spread to neighbouring crops and wild plants by cross pollination. Rather than reducing the amount of chemicals used in farming RoundUp Ready crops are locking farmers into a chemical dependant farming system [43].
Several scientific studies have suggested that the Bt technology utilised by Monsanto in their Bollgard, YieldGard and NewLeaf insect resistant crops may kill ‘non-pest’ insects such as the Monarch butterfly [44].
Developing world
Having encountered increasing opposition to GM technology in the developed global north, Monsanto have put more energy into pushing their products in the developing global south. An example of this being the attempt by Monsanto/Mahyco to rush their Bt insect resistant cotton through the Indian government’s regulatory process and on to the market. The decision on allowing commercial growing of Bt cotton was postponed for a year in the face massive opposition from Indian farmers and NGOs all over the world [45].
Terminator Technology
Monsanto holds a patent for 'terminator' technology. Terminator technology involves the genetically engineering of plants to produce sterile seeds thus forcing farmers to buy new seed every year, rather than saving their own seed from year to year. Monsanto has said it will not use this technology but still holds the patents and may use it in future [46].
Corporate Bully Boys
Monsanto don’t like the thought of anyone publicly disagreeing with them or worse still pulling a fast one on them. Where their GM crops are being grown commercially Monsanto have paid a small army of private investigators to check whether farmers are growing their GM crops without permission. Monsanto have successfully sued a Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser for supposedly planting GM oil seed rape without a license agreement. Percy claims that he has never planted GM crops on his land and that any GM crops on his land are a result of cross pollination from GM crops grown on neighbouring farms. He is launching a counter suit against Monsanto [47].
In 1997 2 TV journalists Steve Wilson and Jane Akre who had been making a documentary on the dangers of Monsanto’s BST were fired by their employers Fox TV. Fox TV had come under pressure from Monsanto to change the content of the documentary, when Wilson and Akre refused to be muzzled they were sacked [48].
In 1998 Monsanto took out a wide ranging SLAPP (Stategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) against activists from Genetix Snowball. At the time Genetix Snowball were engaged in a campaign of accountable, non-violent direct action against GM crops. The injunction was designed to intimidate members of the public into not taking direct action against Monsanto’s UK GM field trials [49].
In 1998 the environmental journal the Ecologist was due to publish a special edition attacking Monsanto. However, the Ecologist's printers - Penwells of Saltash, Cornwall, destroyed the 14,000 print run without notice fearing liable action from Monsanto [50].
Climate Change Co-option
Monsanto have seen the potential for new markets for their GM products within the mechanisms of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on climate change [51]. Since 1998 Monsanto has been one of the principle corporations attempting to hijack the UN climate change negotiations for its own ends. Monsanto claims that its products offer high tech solutions in the battle to reduce CO2 emissions. Monsanto hopes to gain carbon credits in two ways.
1. Monsanto claims that wide spread use of RoundUp Ready crops will reduce the need for ploughing thus keeping large quantities of CO2 locked in the soil.
2. Monsanto hopes to be a major provider of GM trees for forestry ‘carbon sinks’ (large areas of forests planted to soak up CO2 emissions). Monsanto are close to commercialising RoundUp Ready trees and are rumoured to be developing carbon absorbing trees and plants.
________________________________________

Monsanto
• Overview
• Products and Projects
• Who, Where, How Much ?
• Influence / Lobbying
• Corporate Crimes
• Links, contacts & resources

[Eric McArthur]

People say if farmers don't want problems from Monsanto, just don't
buy their GMO seeds.

Not so simple. Where are farmers supposed to get normal seed these
days? How are they supposed to avoid contamination of their fields
from GM-crops? How are they supposed to stop Monsanto detectives
from trespassing or Monsanto from using helicopters to fly over
spying on them?

Monsanto contaminates the fields, trespasses onto the land taking
samples and if they find any GMO plants growing there (or say they
have), they then sue, saying they own the crop. It's a way to make
money since farmers can't fight back and court and they settle
because they have no choice.
.
And they have done and are doing a bucket load of things to keep
farmers and everyone else from having any access at all to buying,
collecting, and saving of NORMAL seeds.

1. They've bought up the seed companies across the midwest.

2. They've written Monsanto seed laws and gotten legislators to
put them through, that make cleaning, collecting and storing of seeds
so onerous in terms of fees and paperwork and testing and tracking
every variety and being subject to fines, that having normal seed
becomes almost impossible (an NAIS approach to wiping out normal
seeds). Does your state have such a seed law? Before they existed,
farmers just collected the seeds and put them in sacks in the shed
and used them the next year, sharing whatever they wished with
friends and neighbors, selling some if they wanted. That's been killed.

In Illinois which has such a seed law, Madigan, the Speaker of
the House, his staff is Monsanto lobbyists.

3. Monsanto is pushing anti-democracy laws (Vilsack's
brainchild, actually) that remove community' control over their own
counties so farmers and citizens can't block the planting of GMO
crops even if they can contaminate other crops. So if you don't want
a GM-crop that grows industrial chemicals or drugs or a rice growing
with human DNA in it, in your area and mixing with your crops, tough
luck.


Check the map of just where the Monsanto/Vilsack laws are and
see if your state is still a democracy or is Monsanto's. A farmer in
Illinois told me he heard that Bush had pushed through some
regulation that made this true in every state. People need to check
on that.

4. For sure there are Monsanto regulations buried in the FDA
right now that make a farmer's seed cleaning equipment illegal
(another way to leave nothing but GM-seeds) because it's now
considered a "source of seed contamination." Farmer can still seed
clean but the equipment now has to be certified and a farmer said it
would require a million to a million and half dollar building and
equipment ... for EACH line of seed. Seed storage facilities are
also listed (another million?) and harvesting and transport
equipment. And manure. Something that can contaminate seed. Notice
that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are not mentioned.


You could eat manure and be okay (a little grossed out but
okay). Try that with pesticides and fertilizers. Indian farmers
have. Their top choice for how to commit suicide to escape the debt
they have been left in is to drink Monsanto pesticides.

5. Monsanto is picking off seed cleaners across the Midwest.
In Pilot Grove, Missouri , in Indiana (Maurice Parr ), and now in
southern Illinois (Steve Hixon). And they are using US marshals and
state troopers and county police to show up in three cars to serve
the poor farmers who had used Hixon as their seed cleaner, telling
them that he or their neighbors turned them in, so across that 6
county areas, no one talking to neighbors and people are living in
fear and those farming communities are falling apart from the
suspicion Monsanto sowed. Hixon's office got broken into and he
thinks someone put a GPS tracking device on his equipment and that's
how Monsanto found between 200-400 customers in very scattered and
remote areas, and threatened them all and destroyed his business
within 2 days.


So, after demanding that seed cleaners somehow be able to tell one
seed from another (or be sued to kingdom come) or corrupting
legislatures to put in laws about labeling of seeds that are so
onerous no one can cope with them, what is Monsanto's attitude about
labeling their own stuff? You guessed it - they're out there pushing
laws against ANY labeling of their own GM-food and animals and of
any exports to other countries. Why?

We know and they know why.

As Norman Braksick, the president of Asgrow Seed Co. (now owned
by Monsanto) predicted in the Kansas City Star (3/7/94) seven years
ago, "If you put a label on a genetically engineered food, you might
as well put a skull and crossbones on it."


And they've sued dairy farmers for telling the truth about their milk
being rBGH-free, though rBGH is associated with an increased risk of
breast, colon and prostate cancers.

I just heard that some seed dealers urge farmers to buy the seed
under the seed dealer's name, telling the farmers it helps the dealer
get a discount on seed to buy a lot under their own name. Then
Monsanto sues the poor farmer for buying their seed without a
contract and extorts huge sums from them.

Here's a youtube video that is worth your time. Vandana Shiva is one
of the leading anti-Monsanto people in the world. In this video, she
says (and this video is old), Monsanto had sued 1500 farmers whose
fields had simply been contaminated by GM-crops. Listen to all the
ways Monsanto goes after farmers.

Do you know the story of Gandhi in India and how the British had salt
laws that taxed salt? The British claimed it as theirs. Gandhi had
what was called a Salt Satyagraha, in which people were asked to
break the laws and march to the sea and collect the salt without
paying the British. A kind of Boston tea party, I guess.

Thousands of people marched 240 miles to the ocean where the British
were waiting. As people moved forward to collect the salt, the
British soldiers clubbed them but the people kept coming. The non-
violent protest exposed the British behavior which was so revolting
to the world that it helped end British control in India.

Vandana Shiva has started a Seed Satyagraha - nonviolent non-
cooperation around seed laws - has gotten millions of farmers to sign
a pledge to break those laws.

American farmers and cattlemen might appreciate what Gandhi fought
for and what Shiva is bringing back and how much it is about what we
are all so angry about - loss of basic freedoms. [The highlighting
is mine.]

The Seed Satyagraha is the name for the nonviolent,
noncooperative movement that Dr. Shiva has organized to stand against
seed monopolies. According to Dr. Shiva, the name was inspired by
Gandhi’s famous walk to the Dandi Beach, where he picked up salt and
said, “You can’t monopolize this which we need for life.” But it’s
not just the noncooperation aspect of the movement that is influenced
by Gandhi. The creative side saving seeds, trading seeds, farming
without corporate dependence-–without their chemicals, without their
seed.

“All this is talked about in the language that Gandhi left us as
a legacy. We work with three key concepts."

"(One) Swadeshi...which means the capacity to do your own thing--
produce your own food, produce your own goods...."

“(Two) Swaraj--to govern yourself. And we fight on three fronts-–
water, food, and seed. JalSwaraj is water independence--water freedom
and water sovereignty. Anna Swaraj is food freedom, food sovereignty.
And Bija Swaraj is seed freedom and seed sovereignty. Swa means self--
that which rises from the self and is very, very much a deep notion
of freedom.

"I believe that these concepts, which are deep, deep, deep in
Indian civilization, Gandhi resurrected them to fight for freedom.
They are very important for today’s world because so far what we’ve
had is centralized state rule, giving way now to centralized
corporate control, and we need a third alternate. That third
alternate is, in part, citizens being able to tell their state, 'This
is what your function is. This is what your obligations are,' and
being able to have their states act on corporations to say, 'This is
something you cannot do.'"

“(Three) Satyagraha, non-cooperation, basically saying, 'We will
do our thing and any law that tries to say that (our freedom) is
illegal… we will have to not cooperate with it. We will defend our
freedoms to have access to water, access to seed, access to food,
access to medicine.'"

[gavin]

Dear All

The internet forgets nothing. At the risk of encouraging Nellie to become overweight with the amount of popcorn he must be getting through ....

Eric's opening gambit back in December 2007 on the Irish List:

------------------------------------------------------------------
> Hi
>
> Is there anybody out there who is 'in denial' regarding a pending
> inbreeding crisis in the honey bee population of Scotland?
>
> Eric McArthur

------------------------------------------------------------------

My cheery and joking reply:

------------------------------------------------------------------

> Re: [IBNewList] Inbreeding
>
> Yes, me!
>
> Crisis? What crisis?!
>
> (Anyone remember Supertramp?)
>
> Welcome aboard Eric.
>
> G.
------------------------------------------------------------------

Then my more considered one after some banter about cooking:

------------------------------------------------------------------

> Re: [IBNewList] Inbreeding
>
> Hi Eric
>
> The meal was cooked to perfection, thank you!
>
> Inbreeding within apiaries probably is, and always was, a
> problem some of the time. Maybe with the loss of ferals,
> and the thinning out of useful forage on the landscape,
> then there is a chance that mating is less often between
> unrelated stocks than in previous times. But is it less
> frequent enough to make much difference? The wise beekeeper
> will both select the better stocks and swap genetics between
> apiaries, and that should cure any problem of inbreeding.
>
> Or are you saying that there are just not enough bees around
> to keep enough diversity going?
>
>> Especially as most beekeepers still insist on breeding from
>> their 'best' but diminishing 'unrelated' colony numbers.
>
> Working against any selection applied (and probably applied
> by a minority of beekeepers) is the bees' propensity to mate
> across quite wide areas. If inbreeding was a big problem, the
> first way in which it would be manifest would be the 'spotty
> brood' we were discussing recently. Do you think that spotty
> brood is increasing?
>
> all the best
>
> Gavin
------------------------------------------------------------------

That's me joining the cut-and-paste steeplechase now, sorry, I'll not do it again. But Eric just wrote this:


Far from being interested in exploring the postulation at that time Gavin proceeded to do a demolition job on even the possibilty of inbreeding. He was joined in this demolition by all of the Irish Forum members who deigned to participate in the thread. I would be delighted to hear from any of these people via the SBA Forum with their denial of the above statement. The truth is not a pleasant quality to some/many?


I'll leave the reader (and those automated devices) to work out for themselves whether my response was appropriate and measured, or in denial and doing a demolition job on the very idea of inbreeding.

There are real consequences of taking concerns on inbreeding to extremes. Let's say that everyone in the West agreed with Eric's crusade and contributed bees to a shared apiary, then took stocks back to their glens and islands the year after. Was someone going to check properly the races being mixed and if not what damage would that do to isolated populations of native stocks? Would people in Varroa-free areas hold back from the great crusade? Did someone bring in bees with Nosema ceranae caught from a nearby beginner with bees from dodgy internet sources?

I was thinking of looking forward to an apology Eric, but I'd probably be wasting my time.

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin
I've had my say on the inbreeding issue and some besides. We have been at loggerheads for some time and have expressed differences of opinion and view points on particular subjects close to both our hearts; the historical origins of which we are both well aware. Strong opinions are my weakness, as is the need to express them. If you agree, we'll do a deal; you cease dealing in 'half truths' when my name comes up as happened at the 2008 AGM and at some meetings(there are spies everywhere!) and in print. Fair criticism I am happy with - back biting - no! I will be happy in my turn to apologise for any offence that I have caused you in my need to respond. Fair comment on expressed views without rancour.
Let's sit back and let history be the decider in the seriousness of inbreeding in Scotland's bees, shall we?

Best regards
Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

I'm not sure that sitting back and letting history decide is the best way. I like to think that we - as a beekeeping community - ought to be able to understand the issues and take appropriate action to prevent problems happening. I do mean appropriate action, as over-reaction usually has consequences of some kind. Getting the appropriate action right means arriving at a proper understanding which happens after open debate and open minds and a proper look at the evidence.

So you are offering a deal which comprises you apologising if I 'cease dealing in half truths when your name comes up as happened at the 2008 AGM and at some meetings and in print'. Remarkable, truly remarkable.

The 2008 AGM was quite a turning point for many people. I can assure you that you did not come out of it with an improved reputation, and the reason was nothing I said or did other than just be there and be up for election. Since then I'm pretty sure that I have been very restrained about what I have said to others about you. There was no need, they saw it for themselves and talked about it themselves. Now the readership of this forum are seeing something similar. I'd be delighted to stop all this unpleasantness and return to bees and beekeeping though!

all the best

Gavin

[Eric McArthur]

HI Gavin
Being my own man I don't have any hang-ups about what other folk think of me. Apart from my family, my other major and satisfying interest has been the well-being of the honey bee and I have tried to express this in my prose, for which from our many encounters you have little time. I have mostly been outside the mainstream of popular Scottish beekeeping thinking and make no apologise for that. Bernard Möbus was a vociferous critic of my writing in his hey day in the 70s and 80s. Later after Berhard returned from France, after his stroke, having still been a reader of the Scottish Beekeeper during his exile, while I was editor; we were both among the many who attended the funeral of Bill MacKenzie in Dyce. I was approached by one of the mourners, who informed me that Berhard wanted to see me - I was surprised to say the least. Berhard at that time had great difficulty in speaking, but he was still as sharp as ever. I waited for him at the kirk door with Les Webster, he came over to me, said nothing, but took both my hands in his, as a friend, his eyes in mine. He left the funeral reception early and came to me again and we shook hands silently and parted. I never saw Berhard again, but the memory of that day transcends anything that can befall me at the hands of any other beekeeper, young, old, erudite or lay. I am writing this in public lest as a private missive it finds its way into the public domain later for whatever reason. I will add that I have read apicultural literature widely, challenged my peers and many who would be my peers and not come off too badly, except at that AGM, where two of three perfectly reasonable and cogent proposals fell. I had nothing to gain from them - for anyone interested look at the March 2009, Scottish Beekeeper, page 63. With that said let us continue to do our best for the honey bee with the assistance of the magazine and the SBA Forum, which apart from the odd criticism is a credit to the SBA and yourself! One minor crit - the clock needs fixing!

Regards
Eric McArthur

[Jon]

One minor crit - the clock needs fixing!


Even a broken clock happens to be right twice a day though!!

Eric, the key thing here is to engage in serious debate rather than personality bashing and then we will see progress. Have you looked at some of the stuff which has come out of the recent native bee/morphometry weekend in Fife? I think there is real potential there to spread the word about the virtue of the native bee and we are all on the same wavelength on that score.

[gavin]

Thanks Eric.


Even a broken clock happens to be right twice a day though!!


Here I'll have to admit that Eric was right and - in this case with this particular clock - you are wrong! I think that Eric means that when you read the forum without being logged in, it is still on BST. Once you log in it corrects itself back to GMT. Why it should do this is beyond me, and it seems to be beyond the administrator of another beekeeping forum I sometimes visit. The other one I sometimes go to is so secretive I can't see what time it thinks it is until I log in, which kind of defeats the point.

G.

[Eric McArthur]

Even a broken clock happens to be right twice a day though!!

Eric, the key thing here is to engage in serious debate rather than personality bashing and then we will see progress. Have you looked at some of the stuff which has come out of the recent native bee/morphometry weekend in Fife? I think there is real potential there to spread the word about the virtue of the native bee and we are all on the same wavelength on that score.
Hi Jon
Tell me more and source references

Eric

eRIC

[Jon]

Hi Eric.

Here's the link.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon

Thanks for that!
Looks like a worthwhile project - More pics of comb would have been good! Will have a good read through!!

Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi All
As Mark Twain once famously said - “The report of my death was an exaggeration!” Likewise, the implications of my demise in the foregoing prose! In more modern terminology - “The show is not over till the fat lady sings”! As I said to Jon in a recent reply – “We all like to cherry pick in “issues”. Gavin is no exception like - I said, we are all guilty of bias.
My opening gambit in the Irish Forum was to focus attention. It worked! The discussion ran from 17th December – 28th December 2007 and then it petered out due to lack of interest.: much as Jim McCulloch’s Morphology Project on the Roseneath Peninusla seems to have done. Apathy is a very powerful force!
As I stated in my reply to Jon – in relation to the Fife Project - it was a pity that few pictures of sealed brood combs seem to have been taken during the run up to the extremely important morphology seminar. The only pic I noted was of Margie’s Wester Ross sample comb which seemingly did not warrant comment by the assembled group , despite exhibiting quite marked “pepper potting” – I’d estimate due to circa 20 -25% inbreeding. I digress!

Returning to my controversial opening remark to the Irish group, Gavin quite as expected “cherry picked” and who could blame him. But then although he conceded that inbreeding was a possibility in an individual apiary – he was unable to extrapolate the individual apiary to other, not too many individual apiaries throughout the land.
Gavin’s reply was not as benign as it first appears when the implications of the “Supertramp” song are scrutinised.
Another aspect of Gavin’s rejection of an inbreeding problem was his failure to comprehend the significance the inclusion of the word “pending” in 2007. Look around you today – beekeepers UK wide, especially in Scotland are scrabbling around fruitlessly to find home bred bees to get into beekeeping and this in a time scale of only 3 years from my ’pending’ inbreeding postulation. Fewer colonies – fewer “unrelated” breeding opportunities – increased imbreeding .
In England by Jon’s statement that the population level had shrunk to 4000 colonies, even as I was writing in 2007 is confirmation that I was not so wide of the mark. With a beekeeper population of around 10.000 and probably more; the average number of colonies per beekeeper works out, even employing my questionable math, at some (+/-) 4 colonies / beekeeper– any reassuring re-establishment of viable population levels has sadly had to be augmented by” thousands of imported bee” - (not my words!).
I have to concede that my use of the word “demolition” in my original prose commenting on the reactions of the Irish Group member who responded to my inbreeding postulation might have been a bit heavy, but nonetheless they were certainly not interested in facing the reality of the “pending” situation – now with us; threatening with the loss of our residual A.m.m and acclimatised native stock due to the massive exotic importations in the attempt to meet the native honey bee shortfall. The unhappy reality (for these bees!) is that many of the imports will probably be ‘ one season’ bees as occurred many years ago when Leslie Church, the new man at the ‘Under New Management’ Heather Hills Honey Farm, in the early 80s imported 500 NZ queens which keeled over almost to a man, sorry queen, in the ensuing winter. Church’s tenure was every bit as short after that!

To pick some cherries:

16th Dec 2007
Hi Eric
....if inbreeding was a big problem, the first way in which it would manifest would be the
‘spotty brood’ we were discussing recently. Do you think that ‘spotty brood’ is increasing?
Gavin
.................................................. .......
Hi Gavin
Relative to your text under: these isolated areas are becoming more numerous and the gene pools in the West are shrinking as we speak.
Eric
.................................................. ............


From Chris Slade
In a village a couple of miles from me, Toller Porcorum, until the war everybody in the village except the vicar was related to everybody else.
.................................................. ............
Hi Chris
I guess they have spotty brood too.

Gavin
.................................................. .........................
Hi All
The number of beekeepers in Scotland is relatively small, colony numbers are being devastated by Varroa et al year on year!

Eric
.................................................. ...............
Hi Eric
..and numbers are being devastated by cars! And eaten by house martins! But, thank fullybees reproduce sufficiently to overcome...

Gavin
.................................................. ....................
Anyway enough of the cherry picking.! The internet as Gavin rightly states does not fib!
Anyone interested in the full story can get it at ; irishbeekeeping@yahoogroups.co.uk
This home page has a year/month calendar block which gives access to all of its posts in an historical time scale. By joining the group which is of course free the interested individual has access to a whole host of interesting world wide beekeeping information. Once eligible just click on December 2007 and go to the posts starting 16th - 28th.


Eric

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

[Jon]

In England by Jon’s statement that the population level had shrunk to 4000 colonies, even as I was writing in 2007 is confirmation that I was not so wide of the mark.

The only thing I remember posting about colony numbers is that there has been an increase from 40,000 to 120,000 in the last 30 months according to figures from the BBKA.
Where did you get the 4000 from?

If we are going back to discuss inbreeding again and stepping off the pesticide express for a moment, can I ask if you have read the paper by Beye et al yet. It was mentioned near the start of the thread and is crucial if you want to understand why the article in the Scottish Beekeeper magazine is totally inaccurate and misleading.
It is imperative to understand the implications of csd locus in a haplodiploid species if you are going to talk about potential inbreeding in honey bees.
If you think that Beye is confused about this, and there are 160 sex alleles as mentioned in your article rather than the mere 19 he has noted, please elaborate.

[gavin]

From Chris Slade
In a village a couple of miles from me, Toller Porcorum, until the war everybody in the village except the vicar was related to everybody else.
.................................................. ............
Hi Chris
I guess they have spotty brood too.

Gavin
.................................................. .........................


Thanks - I had forgotten about that one. It was a cracking one-liner, wasn't it?! :D

G.

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

The Rosneath breeding project did not die of apathy it only changed its priorties and direction.
We have achieved most of our aims that were set back in 2007 by the group.
We now have our isolated mating site, compliments of MOD Estates after 2 years of meetings to cut through the red tape. The main issue was the soldiers on training excercise might get stung!
We also work in association with Peaton Hill Community Nature Reserve which gives us access to funding,so far over £20,000 from SNH this year plus funding and support from commercial companies eg Tillhill Forestry, West Coast Cutters, Rolls Royce to name a few.
We were also part of a MOD conservation award submission by Peatonhill nature reserve with our work on native bee conservation being part of the submission.We won the top silver otter award beating other conservation projects throughout the UK The award reception was held in London where I got the chance to talk to the under secretary of state and other members of goverment about the plight of our native scottish bees.
We have now selectively bred our local bees with over 90% Amm traits and improved the characteristics,despite the problems of new beekeepers in our area being give hybrid nuc's from local associations and other local bee breeding projects.
Our next 3 year management plan is now to work closely with our local associations to assist in breeding projects and to help train new beekeepers in breeding methods if required. Even if it means having to get up and talk at your own association in Glasgow as I don't like doing public speaking.
At the last meeting of the group, where 10 members turned up last Sept, it was agreed that the Amm stocks be increased and that queens will be distributed to the beekeepers within the group before offering stock to outside bee breeding projects. The local beekeepers still support the project and are still willing to submit samples for analysis although a lot of them lack basic experience as they are mainly new beekeepers.
We also have an agreement in principle with the University of Glasgow for developing a DNA test to check the genetic purity of our bees in relation to our morphometry results. This work will be carried out within the next 6 months with possible support coming from the Nuffield Foundation.
We work with other groups and breeders with similar aims so that we can exchange genetic material if inbreeding becomes a problem, which it is not as, we currently have over 35 colonies mostly unrelated with a lot of genetic diversity, even if it comes from outside hybrid colonies.
So I am so sorry if you think our project died of apathy! Maybe we should be more vocal and shout about what we do instead of just getting on with it.
By the way how is your CABA bee breeding project doing. I have not heard much about it recently.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi gavin

It was rather! Not particularly constructive, but topical!

Eric

[Jon]

Hi Eric.
there are villages in Ireland where everyone seems to have ginger hair and freckles.
Spotty brood indeed.
Beye calls pepperpot brood 'shot brood' if you check out the reference.

[Eric McArthur]

The only thing I remember posting about colony numbers is that there has been an increase from 40,000 to 120,000 in the last 30 months according to figures from the BBKA.
Where did you get the 4000 from?

If we are going back to discuss inbreeding again and stepping off the pesticide express for a moment, can I ask if you have read the paper by Beye et al yet. It was mentioned near the start of the thread and is crucial if you want to understand why the article in the Scottish Beekeeper magazine is totally inaccurate and misleading.
It is imperative to understand the implications of csd locus in a haplodiploid species if you are going to talk about potential inbreeding in honey bees.
If you think that Beye is confused about this, and there are 160 sex alleles as mentioned in your article rather than the mere 19 he has noted, please elaborate.

Hi Jon
Sorry about the 4000 as I said math is not my strong suite! I like the healthier 40 000 figure much better, however it is a mere shadow of the colony numbers in the 80s when I visited Harry Wickens during the Advance Study course for the NDB - there has been a marked decline in indigenous honey bee numbers since that time. Your current number 120000 I think is nearer that hey day figure; pity it was swelled to this level by the thousands of imports you mentioned.
.................................................. .......................
Hi Eric
Not all of them are home bred but most of them will be. I saw the figures for imported queens recently and it was thousands per year rather than tens of thousands.
If I come across it again I'll post the data.
.................................................. .............................
The statement pasted under was made by Gavin in the last post on page 1 of the present thread.
.................................................. ..............................
In *one* colony in a well-mixed apiary you could in theory have all 16 alleles (possibly even twenty) as the queen carries two alleles in each of her own cells and maybe another 15 in her spermatheca.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Your comment:
The misconception is that losing half the colonies equates to losing half the genetic material and this is not the case.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;

Your comment misunderstands the significance of the initial 10 unrelated colonies in my original postulation. For each colony to be unrelated the isolated apiary colonies would require to be artificially selected and assembled from different remote apiaries. They would not have the chance to interbreed before their first winter. Thus of the 10 initial unrelated colonies the loss of 50% would indeed amount to the loss of a 50% loss of genetic material.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;
You wrote;
If you read some of the papers by Beye et al you will see how this works.
...................................
I would be pleased to have references for Beyeet al.

Eric

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

[Jon]

Your comment misunderstands the significance of the initial 10 unrelated colonies in my original postulation. For each colony to be unrelated the isolated apiary colonies would require to be artificially selected and assembled from different remote apiaries.

You are repeating the misconception with the above. That's just not correct.

Beye has published loads of papers.
Use Google scholar as a lot of them are free access.
Another researcher Amro Zayed has also published useful stuff in this area.

[Eric McArthur]

You are repeating the misconception with the above. That's just not correct.

Beye has published loads of papers.
Use Google scholar as a lot of them are free access.
Another researcher Amro Zayed has also published useful stuff in this area.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;
Gavin wrote this in the last post of the first page of this thread. He is justifying my postulation!
.................................................. .......................................
In *one* colony in a well-mixed apiary you could in theory have all 16 alleles (possibly even twenty) as the queen carries two alleles in each of her own cells and maybe another 15 in her spermatheca.
.................................................. .................................................. ...............................

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jimbo

Great to hear from you! Pushed for time - will give you the Full Monty tomorrow! Keep up the good work - impressed!

Eric

[Jon]

Gavin wrote this in the last post of the first page of this thread. He is justifying my postulation!

In *one* colony in a well-mixed apiary you could in theory have all 16 alleles (possibly even twenty) as the queen carries two alleles in each of her own cells and maybe another 15 in her spermatheca..

No he isn't. He is pointing out that you are completely wrong!!!
Eric, you nead to read up on this. You are just completely misunderstanding how the genetics works here.
As they say you can lead a horse to water....

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jimbo
Good to hear from you. I was extremely impressed with your last mail and absolutely delighted with the success of your project. It really has taken off. The misunderstanding relative to the continuity of the group was due to the ‘past tense’ statement in the” Difficulties” visual aid; “Group RAN out of enthusiasm". You hit the nail right on the head: throw your bushel away and report regularly in not only the Scottish Beekeeper magazine but Bee Craft and the American/Canadian Bee Press as well. Reporting in our National magazine is extremely important. Successful rojects such as yours stimulate beekeepers to greater things and this can only make us all better beekeepers. What you have achieved in the way of recognition can only be beneficial to the honeybee and to the greater good of beekeeping at large by putting Scotland on the world beekeeping map.

The Full Monty as promised!
Regarding the CABA Apiary Project; an article on the history of the CABA Project appeared in the 2009, December issue of the Scottish Beekeeper. I had already decided to pull back from ‘hands on’ prior to this, as the article states, to perform merely an advisory role in the project. The project sadly ceased to function as The CABA Apiary Project in the spring of 2010 – due to severe losses as a result of Isolation Starvation. I took full responsibility for the situation having continued to use my 36 year tried and tested ‘Sugar Bag’ feeding method. The winter 2009 came too soon, was too cold for too long and the bees were denied access to the sugar bags very early for a number of reasons. The apiary site ownership changed hands in mid August and the bees had to be relocated, the formic acid boards were unfortunately not removed after the last treatment in mid September and the sugar bag feed was placed in error on top of them – the bees never got to the bags until late October, when the error was discovered. In the majority of the ‘normal’ previous 36 years’ winters the bees could be seen gathering pollen up until late December. Winter 2009/2010 proved to be a disastrous exception to this rule. Never too old to learn! Peter Stromberg resigned from the Project in the spring of 2010.
A meeting was held at my home on 18th April, 201; to seek a way forward. The new Project was renamed the ”Clyde Area Bee Breeders Group” and a new committee was elected – I was back with ‘hands on’with a vengeance. Starting in late May 2010, with 5 colonies and the help of the East and West Dunbartonshire communities, who donated around 700 kilos of sugar to sustain the project (that is another story!); we had grown to a total of 22 colonies by the end of July. Ian Craig and Kathy Friend, Glasgow, having donated a nucleus colony each to help the project along. A couple of colonies were lost due to interference later – however at this present time there are 20 colonies associated with the Group overwintering – 8 are in private hands, doubled from the 4 initially ‘lent’ to the group and 12 which have been husbanded with great effort by Willie McNiven, Glasgow and myself over most of the summer. Without the invaluable, constant input of Willie and the access to adequate sugar feed due to the poor summer the project would never have gotten off the ground. The fate of the new project is however in the balance due to lack of interest, apart from Willie McNiven and myself; this factor could pale into insignificance if the present weather continues into early spring as happened last year – but all the colonies are bursting with stores this winter. Time will tell! This got a bit long, sorry Gavin!
Eric

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
How does that figure? We all now know, due to the intensity of this issue that the queen bee has 2 of the alleles in her cells, read Gavin! We also know that the spermatheca, the spermatozoa storage organ contains the drone sperm. It is understood that each drone possesses one allele.
Now consider a situation from the halcyon days of beekeeping - pre Varroa, which I, as an old codger was privy to. Up to the early 90s in Scotland anyway the number of beekeepers, managed bee colonies and feral colonies was very large by today’s standards – where today, we have lots of would be beekeepers and not so many bees around. In summer then there were literally thousands of drones flying – all looking for not quite so numerous virgins. The competition to mate was fierce! The queen could achieve full capacity with ease – as Gavin states with 15 or even 20 sets of unrelated alleles. In my hypothetical postulation - by taking one colony from each of 10 apiaries remote from each other and re locating them in a totally isolated region my 160+ complement of alleles would be achieved.
Now as previously stated elsewhere this hypothetical apiary of 10 colonies is set up during the late summer, each colony does not interface with its neighbours; overwinters intact but by spring the following year 5 colonies have died. At a stroke without striking a blow the 10 colony (160+ allele) apiary is reduced to a 5 colony (80+) allele apiary. Even my math can handle that – what happens to the gene pool from then on is in the lap of the gods and the subjective onlooker!

There is ongoing government funded work proceeding in Germany on honey bee genetics at this present time involving Professor Dr Kaspar Bienefeld, who in my opinion is a genius in the genetics and statistic field.
To date using the most modern digital comparative statistical analysis involving data collected over the period 2003 to 2009 from over 32 072 honey bee colonies, breeders and mating stations: Professor Bienefeld has produced a modern breeding evaluation system which uses the genetic relationship between all recorded colonies, not just sister colonies, titled “Best Linear Unbiased Prediction”, the BLUP system. The findings from this system have already called into question the value of line breeding and has already been used to prove conclusively that chalk brood is an inherited condition – up until now this belief has been anecdotal; science has now done its work. The potential of this new system is such that using Breeding Value Assessment beekeepers are able to shop around for queens with specific characteristics; Varroa tolerance, honey hoarding qualities. gentleness and other characteristics almost like shopping in a supermarket. Science fiction? No science fact! You and Gavin and the other boffins in this forum probably know about the system already and as Bernhard used to say – “It is old hat”! The translations of Professor Bienefeld’s work can be found at:
http://www.moraybeedinosaurs.co.uk/Varroa/chalk_heritable.html - for anyone interested.

Eric

[Jon]

Eric.
You need to read the references as you are misunderstanding how this works.
There are 19 different sex alleles. There cannot be more than 19 let alone 160.
That's like arguing that there are 160 letters in the our alphabet rather than 26.
If you take 1000 sets of scrabble you will end up with tens of thousands of letters but there will only be 26 different ones.
For 26 letters think 19 sex alleles. There cannot be more than 19 no matter how many rampant drones you let loose with your virgin queens. The number is finite - 19 -no matter you have 10 colonies or 10,000 colonies on your island.
The key to this is the concept of diversity at the csd locus, rather than the concept of volume, which I think, although not entirely sure, is your misunderstanding of it.

If you have ten completely isolated colonies you may well with luck have all those 19 sex alleles in the gene pool.
Losing 5 colonies out of 10 does not equate to losing half the alleles.
A single queen may well hold 12-15 of the 19.
Another queen may have the same number of different alleles, including one or two which the previous queen does not hold in her spermatheca. The next queen will have a different combo of sex alleles.
Each queen also has two in her own DNA as well as the different alleles she carries in the sperm in her spermatheca.
It is quite possible that you can lose 5 colonies without losing a single sex allele from your isolated gene pool. (I am starting to think of fruit bowls and ski lifts here)
research from the likes of Dorian Pritchard has demonstrated that a population only gets into difficulties when the number of distinct alleles drops to 6 or less.
There is also Japanese research based on mathematical modelling which demonstrates that the distinct alleles tend to reach equilibrium in a population, as an allele which becomes scare will immediately have a selective advantage due to the reduced risk of pairing with another one the same. (this avoiding diploid drones/pepperpot brood, what zayed calls diploid drone vortex)
This stuff has been known for a long time. I think Beye's initial paper was in 1994 although there will probably be a geneticist around in a minute to correct me. I was never on a forum with so many gene geeks.

[Eric McArthur]

Eric.
You need to read the references as you are misunderstanding how this works.
There are 19 different sex alleles. There cannot be more than 19 let alone 160.
That's like arguing that there are 160 letters in the our alphabet rather than 26.
If you take 1000 sets of scrabble you will end up with tens of thousands of letters but there will only be 26 different ones.
For 26 letters think 19 sex alleles. There cannot be more than 19 no matter how many rampant drones you let loose with your virgin queens. The number is finite - 19 -no matter you have 10 colonies or 10,000 colonies on your island.
The key to this is the concept of diversity at the csd locus, rather than the concept of volume, which I think, although not entirely sure, is your misunderstanding of it.

If you have ten completely isolated colonies you may well with luck have all those 19 sex alleles in the gene pool.
Losing 5 colonies out of 10 does not equate to losing half the alleles.
A single queen may well hold 12-15 of the 19.
Another queen may have the same number of different alleles, including one or two which the previous queen does not hold in her spermatheca. The next queen will have a different combo of sex alleles.
Each queen also has two in her own DNA as well as the different alleles she carries in the sperm in her spermatheca.
It is quite possible that you can lose 5 colonies without losing a single sex allele from your isolated gene pool. (I am starting to think of fruit bowls and ski lifts here)
research from the likes of Dorian Pritchard has demonstrated that a population only gets into difficulties when the number of distinct alleles drops to 6 or less.
There is also Japanese research based on mathematical modelling which demonstrates that the distinct alleles tend to reach equilibrium in a population, as an allele which becomes scare will immediately have a selective advantage due to the reduced risk of pairing with another one the same. (this avoiding diploid drones/pepperpot brood, what zayed calls diploid drone vortex)
This stuff has been known for a long time. I think Beye's initial paper was in 1994 although there will probably be a geneticist around in a minute to correct me. I was never on a forum with so many gene geeks.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Varying degrees of
Apis mellifera ligustica
introgression in
protected populations of the black honeybee,
Apis mellifera
mellifera
, in northwest Europe
ANNETTE B. JENSEN,
*†‡
KELLIE A. PALMER,
*†
JACOBUS J. BOOMSMA
†
and BO V. PEDERSEN
*
*
Institute of Biology, Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen,
Denmark,
†
Institute of Biology, Department of Population Biology, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100
Copenhagen, Denmark

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;


Table 5 Multilocus microsatellite variability in the eight A. m. mellifera populations and the single A. m. ligustica population analysed.
Values are averages SD. N is the mean sample size across all loci, n is the mean number of alleles per locus, HO and HE are the observed
and expected average heterozygozities, FIS is the inbreeding coefficient. DK = Denmark, IE = Ireland, NO = Norway, SE = Sweden,
UK = United Kingdom
Population Subspecies N n HO HE FIS
Colonsay; Scotland (UK) A. m. mellifera 48.91 1.64 4.5 2.8 0.447 0.260 0.448 0.267 0.003
Whitby; North Yorkshire (UK) A. m. mellifera 47.73 1.56 6.6 4.2 0.433 0.213 0.444 0.242 0.024
Sheffield; Yorkshire (UK) A. m. mellifera 48.18 2.64 6.4 3.1 0.535 0.234 0.525 0.230 −0.018
East Midlands; Derbyshire (UK) A. m. mellifera 28.36 2.62 4.5 2.6 0.425 0.275 0.399 0.265 −0.066
Ireland; Leinster and Munster (IE) A. m. mellifera 46.82 2.56 5.4 3.7 0.376 0.249 0.391 0.243 0.037
Flekkefjord (NO) A. m. mellifera 50.73 4.15 5.0 2.8 0.383 0.273 0.395 0.258 0.031
Hammerdal (SE) A. m. mellifera 29.36 0.81 3.9 2.5 0.391 0.293 0.409 0.275 0.044
Læsø (DK) A. m. mellifera 45.64 2.16 5.6 2.9 0.498 0.219 0.498 0.209 0.007
Jutland (DK) A. m. ligustica 42.27 2.65 6.9 3.4 0.663 0.164 0.693 0.165 0.043
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Hi All
Well I have just had a really great genetics lesson today and despite the fact that I have egg all over my face I am really delighted. I could not get into Beye’s literature but have read the title pasted and could not put the work down. I think a lot of readers will have learned something from this marathon thread as well – main thing tho’ when the penny drops in a confrontation/discussion – yield!
I take a bit of cold comfort from what I have just learned – if the number of alleles is relatively small as illustrated in the table pasted; Colonsay 4.5; Jutland 6.9. Then would not the probability of inbreeding increase as colony numbers fell, anyway? I’ve had a good run for”your” money and had a lot of fun during the course of the thread. I hope others have enjoyed it also! I don’t reckon my misconception of basic bee genetics will make one whit of difference to the ultimate end game relative to Amm and the longer established hybrids survival, que sera, sera!
PS; The love letter was for you Jon for your ”concern” at my collapsing in the snow.
Eric.

[gavin]

PS; The love letter was for you Jon for your ”concern” at my collapsing in the snow.
Eric.

Don't say that! I don't want you to frighten away one of the forum's most dedicated contributors.

Jon: well done! Your persistence seems to have succeeded where I had given up.

So, the Colonsay bees are slightly inbred perhaps at least according to that microsatellite data. Not surprising as they have been isolated for decades and were built up from a relatively small number of colonies. Does it matter? Andrew sometimes drops by here, so maybe he can tell us whether or not he sees significant pepper pot brood problems.

I presume that you are aware that the microsatellite allele data are for a completely different place on the genome than the csd gene. If the microsatellite data reflects what you might find at the csd gene, then the numbers of alleles might be a bit lower than the 19 in the best populations, but there may still be enough to keep the population vigorous.

Trog's contribution on another thread suggests that there are a relatively small number of colonies on her area of Mull (maybe 10 or so?) yet the bees are still healthy there.

G.

[Jon]

Hi Eric.
Just to clarify, there are only 19 'sex' alleles, ie the ones which are potentially responsible for producing spotty brood due to two of the same alleles producing a diploid drone which is inviable and leaves the gap in the brood when the bees remove it.
There are many other genes controlling things like colour, aggression, foraging behaviour and 101 other traits in the honey bee.
The spotty brood is a specific issue to do with the sex alleles at the csd locus.
The study above is looking at the degree to which native bees have been 'contaminated' by genetics from Italian bees.

[Jimbo]

Hi Gavin,

I have samples of Andrews bees in my freezer for DrawWing anaysis So far I have checked 2 of his colonies and they are not what I would have expected. The two colonies show similar results. If the other samples show the same results could it be that the bees have been in isolation so long they now have reached a stage of genetic equilibrium.
I can see a busy weekend ahead doing the DrawWing on the Colonsay bees

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

Andrew gave an excellent presentation at the bee course in Fife where he gave examples of how he overwintered his apideas in such windy and difficult conditions and how he raised his queens. At no point did he ever mention any problems about spotty brood. He did give an indication about the areas of Scotland where his original colonies came from. The areas were vast eg some came from the north others from the south and from the east. There was no chance the colonies were in any way related. This was also in pre-varroa days

[Jon]

Andrew did a good presentation on overwintering Mini-nucs at the Bibba Conference in Tipperary as well.
How long have they been in isolation on Colonsay?
With 35 colonies you should be able to avoid inbreeding problems assuming the mix was drawn from unrelated colonies as you indicated.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

I never thought to ask him how long the bees have been on Colonsay, but at a guess along time as Andrew has been keeping bees for a long time. Gavin or John might know

[Jon]

We need to drag the man away from his oysters to post a few words!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon,

I never thought to ask him how long the bees have been on Colonsay, but at a guess along time as Andrew has been keeping bees for a long time. Gavin or John might know

Hi
Sorry to butt in on a 'private' conversation. Andrew has been on Colonsay with bees for at least 30 years. I spoke to him and Bernhard Möbus at an SBA Conference in Perth about queen bees laying over the winter aroind 1982! He mentioned at that time that the had commenced with some 50 colonies. He of course is the man to know!!
Eric

[Jimbo]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for answering that. I knew Andrew had kept bees for a long time but I did not know how long on Colonsay

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Eric.
Just to clarify, there are only 19 'sex' alleles, ie the ones which are potentially responsible for producing spotty brood due to two of the same alleles producing a diploid drone which is inviable and leaves the gap in the brood when the bees remove it.
There are many other genes controlling things like colour, aggression, foraging behaviour and 101 other traits in the honey bee.
The spotty brood is a specific issue to do with the sex alleles at the csd locus.
The study above is looking at the degree to which native bees have been 'contaminated' by genetics from Italian bees.
.................................................. .......
Hi Jon/Gavin/Jimbo/Chris
I understand the function of the genes in their having particular differentiation functions to perform, but I was not aware that these gene would have numerous alleles. Does this then have a bearing on the loss of vigour and vitality, which is of course an important characteristic in the immune response?
Is the mosaic/gyandromorph condition for example a result of allele duplication or meiosis? I am on a learning curve here!

Eric

[gavin]

Hi Eric

> I understand the function of the genes in their having particular
> differentiation functions to perform, but I was not aware that
> these gene would have numerous alleles.

Most genes will come in various versions, but the 19 for the csd gene is an unusually large number. I personally suspect that if you look around with sensitive enough tests you would find more. There are reasons why populations keep a large number of variants of this gene. More normal genes may come in 2, 3, 10, 12 different variants. Usually there is selection for the 'best' variant of any gene in any one environment. In the case of the csd gene the whole population is fitter if it carries a lot of diversity for this gene. (Yes, inbreeding is the reason!)

> Does this then have a bearing on the loss of vigour and vitality,
> which is of course an important characteristic in the immune
> response?

General vigour does result from an individual having two different variants of each of a range of genes. The csd is of course a special case and an individual *needs* to have two different variants to be functionally female.

> Is the mosaic/gyandromorph condition for example a result of
> allele duplication or meiosis? I am on a learning curve here!

Probably not, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

all the best

Gavin

[GRIZZLY]

How long is this thread going to rumble on - seems to be the only active thread on the forum !!!

[chris]

How long is this thread going to rumble on - seems to be the only active thread on the forum !!!

That's because it has grown so many tentacles. One of Eric's genetically modified threads.

[Jon]

I hear the latest version of vBulletin has Roundup Ready threads where one application will reduce a thread to about a third of its size when all the repeat sequences wither back. Apparently it does no harm to bees but can reduce the habitat available to wafflers and pasters.
Someone accidently sprayed biobees.com and all that was left was a small conspiracy theory which took up 2k of disk space.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon/Chris

So the thread has become an octopus -and not a red herring.
Eric

[Jon]

No red herrings here, but I saw quite a shoal of them over at Moray Dinosaurs when I was browsing there the other day.
Apparently they can survive for years on a diet of pure speculation!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon

So long as the speculation is pure! No worries! Critical comment on Bienefeld's work? There is more - he has funding to change breeding concepts in Germany!

Eric

[Jon]

If I may be permitted to shake one of Eric's tentacles (careful with the spelling!!) I found this little paper which has some nice tables to do with brood viability and inbreeding. It was one of the references to a paper which Pete.L drew my attention to yesterday. There are some nuggets of very useful information about general colony growth in the introduction. For example a colony which triples in size shows an 8-20 fold increase in foraging behaviour.
It's not as heavy going as stuff by Beye et al but there are still a few squiggly formulas.

http://www.genetics.org/cgi/reprint/96/1/263

I noticed this paragraph:


It is interesting to note, however, that the mean viability of 2N brood (V) for
all reproductive females in the population is dependent only upon the number of
alleles maintained:

There are tables looking at permutations between number of alleles in a population vs number of drones a queen mates with on p269 -p270.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
Just home at 9pm after a lovely meal with the family. Couldn't put the paper down - meat and drink! The science was almost better than the meal!
Many thanks for that pull on my t... (I will not use the word lest a typo occur!). The prose on the alleles and the case for the natural selection pressure of one locus and multiple sex alleles for the honey bee as opposed to more than a single locus in other hymenoptera was really elegant It just gets better. I really envy you guys who studied genetics formally!
A few landmark statements from the paper:

Group selection need not be invoked. The fitness
of a given female genotype is a function of the number of sex alleles in the
population, the number of matings by an individual female and the specific
parameters that determine the relationship of brood viability to individual
fitness.

Inviable brood occupies needed brood nest area in rapidly expanding
colonies. The net result of brood mortality due to homozygous sex alleles
is a decrease in N,, and a decrease in b. This will lead to a slower rate of colony
expansion, with fewer colony divisions during a season in multivoltine populations,
a lower production of reproductive males, a lower seasonal food productivity
and decreased ability to survive unfavorable seasons.
.................................................. .
(I was actually involved with a beekeeper on Islay in the early 70s, whos bees exhibited just these symptoms!)
.................................................. ................
This individual selection model may also be useful in explaining the widespread
occurrence of multiple insemination in other social Hymenoptera. If we
assume a multiple-locus model for sex determination (CROZIER19 77), then the
case for the honey bee is simply a variation where there is only one locus with
multiple alleles segregating in the population. When two or more loci are segregating,
an individual must be heterozygous at one or more of them to be a female.
Selection will still favor multiple alleles at each locus and multiple mating;
however, the associated genetic load will be reduced. I

[Richard Bache]

[Back on 11th September, Rosie mentioned Richard Bache on this thread. The thread was locked when Richard wished to reply, not sure why, but here is his response which he posted on another thread and has asked me to move here ..... G.]

Sorry to post on the wrong thread, but this seemed the most appropriate as the one I was hoping to post on has been locked.
I was googling my own name and found it on this site and thought I brief clarification was required. The post in question is here http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?301-Yet-another-puzzle&p=2095&viewfull=1#post2095.

Richard Bache seems to assume that if something has not been scientifically proven then it doesn't exist. Although I have not personally witnessed AVM I know at least 2 and I think 3 who have actually seen it. Beo Cooper was a professional entomologist and I very much doubt that he would have made it up in the first place. Peter Edwards reported that last season he had a whole batch of near native virgins mate at 5 degrees C. I very much doubt if they found a drone assembly at that temperature. Most research has been done with exotic strains of bees so science has little information to offer AMM enthusiasts.So, to clarify, I have little doubt that Apiary vicinity mating does occur. There have been several records, described in sufficient detail to make me confident that it does occur. However, why it occurs is a mystery to me. Does it occur when a drone congregation area is close to an apiary? Is it part of a spectrum of mating behaviour where the DCA model is at one end and the AVM is at another? Does it depend on air temperature or other climatic conditions? Is it exclusive to AMM (there has been some suggestion that it isn't: see my posting here http://www.britishbee.org.uk/forum/showpost.php?p=40376&postcount=8). And does it confer any survival advantage and does it risk inbreeding? Unfortunately few people have seen it, fewer have written about it and even fewer still have done so with sufficient information to ascertain why it occurs. So, to sum up, Yes I think it does occur, but as Jon seems to imply (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?301-Yet-another-puzzle&p=2094&viewfull=1#post2094), I have no idea why it occurs.
best wishes

Richard

[Eric McArthur]

Hi
Interesting! Can happen had queens mated and laying by 7th May in Fine springs!
Question Gavin - this morning this thread told mw I was not authorised to submit a post Any answers? I am pleased to be authourised now!
Eric

[Jon]

There can also be very late matings. A nuc I sold to a BKA member this year superseded its queen in September and the new queen did not start laying until the second half of October.