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A question.
Suppose a queen mates with 15 drones and lays her fertilized eggs with say 20 fertilized from drone A, 50 fertilized from drone C, 10 fertilized from drone D and so on, Now lets assume the workers decide to replace the queen would the workers from drone C have more control over one of their sisters becoming a future Queen rather than workers fertilized by drone A. Hope this makes sense.If not Ill have another think about it.
Prof Ratnieks has some work on the internet which may be what you're looking for, I'd suggest a search for 'queen rearing nepotism'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greengage
There is also a related concept known as 'cryptic female choice'
Great thanks for that, I googled 'queen rearing nepotism' and got loads of hits with some facinating reading which I will work through. My first thought was that. I believed the first queen to emerge would kill all other queens that were in the hive and she would head the colony, but it appears not to be so as workers will feed fuly developed queens in their cells preventing their emergence, later emerging queens will be fitter to do battle with queens that may be worn out from fighting, if they have not left with a caste swarm. Then on the other side I read a discussion on egg weight being a contributory factor on selection of a new queen. You would have to wonder if all this queen rearing by humans and trying to select traits is a waste of time as a lot of the requirements by the colony for replacing the queen with a new leader are way outside our abilities to determine what are required by the colony. Also the removal of eggs from one colony and the placing of eggs in a different colony which has no relation to to bees already there and hoping they will rear a queen, may not contribute anything to the colony but may actually be a hinderance, Ill read more and be back with more questions. facinating stuff.
But as Gavin mentioned in another thread, what suits the bees may not necessarily suit the beekeeper.
Beekeepers don't want either aggressive or swarmy bees.
Another consideration is just observation of what already happens out there. Like neonics: any sign bees suffer when they are exposed (to seed-treated OSR in UK/Ireland conditions)? Nope. Any sign that grafted queens heading full colones are substandard in any way? Nope.
Another way of expressing what I was thinking. If there is a deleterious effect of the beekeeper/grafter controlling things (in terms of colony performance and behaviour), does it over-ride the benefit of selective breeding? Doesn't seem to ......
Great, I avoided my usual link-mania as this is such a wide topic, one illustration of which is your mention of egg weight; something which may tie in with the idea of keeping breeder queens in small units to reduce their egg laying rate to try and get maximum goodness in each egg...it's also a valid arguement amongst queen breeders when it comes to not over producing drones. Quality over quantity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greengage
I'm not sure that it needs to be about that. The topic is fascinating as it may hold keys which can be used by future generations. If there are mechanisms used by the bees then we need researchers trying to find out why.Quote:
Originally Posted by gavin
I'd guess that a very large proportion, possibly the majority, of queens in the UK are not reared by thoughtful selective methods guided by the beekeeper which may well account for bad temper and low yields although both of those issues can most certainly be the fault of bad management at a later date.
I would not know if grafted queens are substandard but I have heard of grafts not being successful or being rejected so could this have anything to do with nepotism or could it be linked to the pheromone given off by the larvae ( read somewhere this could also be hunger scent) or could the scent from the nasonov gland from the worker who is selecting the larva to be fed royal jelly and going on to be a future queen.
"we observed that some workers presented their
Nasonov glands after inspecting larvae that were offered to queenless colonies in
artificial queen cups." see page 18. 2.2.1 introduction second paragraph
http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertatio...al-kahtani.pdf