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Senior Member
Sounds like you are making good progress
what sort of costs are involved in the testing ?
Is there some funding or support from Government?
I noticed Gavin's thread about EU funding
The suggestion that Commercial Beekeepers would get help replacing losses seems an odd use of funds
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There are no costs as the software is available free to download. The scanner cost me £50 from e-bay but a newer version is about £100 and a laptop/PC The only costs would be in posting the samples to members who can do the wing morphometry
As a hobby beekeeper there is no support from goverment sources.
This could be a good project that the SBA could oversee and support at little cost to the SBA. but would provide a lot of valuable information on the sub species of Amm found in Scotland
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Senior Member
Once the initial identification takes place though BIBBA say are doing DNA testing
I wondered what the cost of a project like that might be and whether it would possible in Scotland (with funding)
I think that is your area of expertise ?
Just might be worth going for it while the Scottish Gov are looking at the Colonsay reserve
Once you get their attention you don't want to have to explain the whole thing again
Sorry Jimbo I don't know of Catherine Thompson where is she based ?
Last edited by The Drone Ranger; 04-04-2013 at 10:18 AM.
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It only costs about £5 to extract DNA from a bee plus staff costs. The analysis is the problem. A DNA analyer can cost about £750,000. It would also be best to send the samples to a research lab who specialises in insect DNA analysis possibly in Europe. Then there is the interpretation of the results and what value they are to you.
Wing morphometry is a useful tool to identify potential breeding Amm colonies if this was corrilated to some Amm DNA results then beekeepers would have a simple tool to work with without having to do DNA analysis on their bees. Wing morphometry is just a good starting point but you still need to check for the other Amm traits eg body hair, white cappings etc
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Senior Member
And the trouble with wing morphometry is that you need to be very careful you are not selecting you breeder queens just on the basis of the wing venation. There is an assumption that there is correlation with AMM genetics other than wing pattern but that is just an assumption.
I think it's main use is to rule out potential breeder queens which look ok otherwise, rather than as a positive selection tool.
As Jimbo says, we need to correlate wing samples to DNA to ascertain how useful it is as a rough and ready tool. It may be a lot less useful than many of us imagine.
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