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Thread: Your gallery of 2D plots

  1. #121
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Here are photos from the apidea.

    scrub-queen-daughter-q75.jpg

    Scrub queen to the left of the worker. Similar size but note the longer leg and the reddish colour. This queen hatched in September and never mated.

    workers from 75.jpg

    74 workers scanned. All dark with no yellow banding at all.

    frozen-bees-apidea.jpg

    Not enough bees in the apidea to be viable
    Last edited by Jon; 10-12-2011 at 05:31 PM.

  2. #122
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    I am with you with all that Jon. The problem I have is once you have done your grafts and produced queens - some pure and some hybrids - how can you be confident that you are able to tell which is which and breed from the pure one next time?

  3. #123
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Hi Steve
    It will always be a percentages game to some extent unless you are grafting from a known pure amm queen such as a galtee.
    I don't graft from any queen which has any yellow offspring or any queen with a ropey looking scattergram as I reckon that is asking for trouble even if the colony is even tempered.
    It would be different if I didn't have better queens to chose from as I would have to take more risks and then be very strict about culling yellow daughters or any showing aggression.
    I know they say that colour is a poor guide to discriminating bee races but I cannot see how yellow banding in amm indicates anything other than hybridization.

    If you graft from a hybrid queen it is very unlikely you will get back to amm, I think due to Mendel's Law of Independent Assortment, as the eggs she produces are bound to carry hybrid dna irrespective of the sperm this queen has in her spermatheca.
    In this sense it is clearly better to start from a pure race queen!
    The queen I grafted from the most this year was a galtee daughter I got from Mervyn.
    The scattergram was not 'perfect' , ie some wings outside the amm limits..

    col57a.jpg galtee queen.jpg

    ..but there were no yellow bees at all among her workers and the scattergram showed a distinct cluster indicating uniformity. I hatched at least 100 daughters from this one and every one was black. Temper seems to be very good so far. The mother of q57, the one in the picture, was a galtee mated in Tipperary.

    I suspect that Galtees do not have a DS way to the left and I still have not got a sample for morphometry from a pure Galtee mated in Tipperary.

    If you look at the scattergrams I have posted, 44 and 45 are sisters, daughters of 31. 44 has a scattergram 100% yet 45 is at 32%. In the case of 45, more than half the workers have yellow banding. In this case I am quite confident the yellow came from the drone side.

    The other thing is that after 150 years of imports in GB and Ireland I think it is inevitable that there has been some introgression of dna from other races into AMM and that is a fact we have to live with.

    And to finally attempt to answer your question!!

    The problem I have is once you have done your grafts and produced queens - some pure and some hybrids - how can you be confident that you are able to tell which is which and breed from the pure one next time?
    In the example I gave with ligustica drones, yellow is dominant over black so half the grafts are likely to give queens with some yellow banding and would be easily distinguished. With carnica or dark mongrel drones it must be far harder to separate out possible breeder queens. Serious breeders use II to get around all this. We have some plans in this area for next year.
    Last edited by Jon; 10-12-2011 at 07:18 PM.

  4. #124

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    [QUOTE=Jon;7732]Hi Peter
    That looks quite similar to some of mine.
    What is the geographic origin of the queen?

    Orkney. I understand some there are from the 'Maud' strain on the mainland several years ago and that some were also imported from Colonsay (not sure when).
    Peter Edwards

  5. #125

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    When I changed MorphPlot to accomodate your < -10 DsA, I also allowed for 100 wings (Dave Cushman said you should do 90, so I thought that 100 was a nice round number.

    Seems enough to me (I am not into killing the whole colony - I dislike killing 30 or so!), but if you want to produce a version to do 1000 then you are welcome to modify it!
    Peter Edwards

  6. #126
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    Hi Peter,

    I have scanned wings for various beekeepers in Scotland. I had 3 colonies from Orkney. 2 were strong Amm but 1 was hybrid. Mull I have scanned so far 4 colonies all good Amm with a further 3 colonies to check. Colonsay was scanned and as expected was Amm. There are a few other areas on the mainland where Amm is showing up eg Wester Ross and further in Sutherland. All these areas are still, as far as we know, varroa free and would be worth protecting especially the Islands. Where else in the world is there varroa free areas and Amm bees? The Central belt is more hybridised but there are areas where Amm is showing up eg Kilbrachan and my own area Rosneath. Samples from these areas were passed on to Catherine Thomson for DNA analysis but I have had no results back yet. I am also certain there will be other areas of Scotland with Amm colonies we just have to find them.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 11-12-2011 at 10:40 AM.

  7. #127

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    Hi Jimbo

    I think that Kate has now finished all her field work and should be starting her DNA work now (or very shortly) as I think the funding for it has just been sorted out. She did a very good presentation at the Central Association Stratford weekend.

    Perhaps we will then know what all those 'out of the red box' plots are really telling us.
    Peter Edwards

  8. #128
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Peter View Post
    Seems enough to me (I am not into killing the whole colony - I dislike killing 30 or so!), but if you want to produce a version to do 1000 then you are welcome to modify it!
    Hi Peter
    Wasn't thinking of butchering them all at once but might be interesting to sample bees from a colony over a season to make a cumulative plot.
    In the winter you can find a sample of a couple of hundred dead ones on the floor sometimes after a cold spell.
    Catherine has samples from a couple of my colonies as well including that one which had a very negative DS.

    Jimbo, were you not going to do some DNA work of your own?

  9. #129

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    Jon
    >In the winter you can find a sample of a couple of hundred dead ones on the floor sometimes after a cold spell.

    Not sure that I would choose those as they could be drifters (up to 30% of bees in a colony can be drifters); I always take young nurse bees from the centre of the nest.
    Peter Edwards

  10. #130
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Hi Peter
    I know it's not ideal but no other choice at this time of year.
    I have seen that 30% figure quoted before somewhere but I find it hard to believe under average conditions.
    Maybe if you have a queenless colony beside a queenright one you could get a figure like 30%.

    I am interested in finding out how strict you have to be with regards to sample taking.
    If I have time I will collect samples from a few floors over the next week or two and then compare these samples to samples of young bees taken next may.
    There may be a big difference but my gut instinct is that there wont be.

    There is a lot of faffing about re. morphometry such as Roger's Bibba articles scanning a wing 10 times and noting slight changes to the left or right with DS, or marginal up/down with the CI.
    I can't see what difference it makes in terms of selection of breeder queens even if there is a measuring error of plus or minus -0.5 in DS. The difference between a set of Carnica wings and a set of AMM wings is massive so tiny errors in measurement due to manual placement of the points on the vein junctions is neither here nor there imho.

    Have you read the Moritz paper which seriously questions some of the basic tenets underlying morphometry?
    I don't think there is enough in it to invalidate wing morphometry as a useful tool but there is enough in it to prevent a sensible man from betting the farm on it.

    http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf

    They have spent over 40 years in Germany trying to replace AMM with Carnica.
    The German Carnica have 'perfect' Carnica wing venation yet the underlying genetics and other morphometric characteristics independent of wing venation have been found to be a mix of Carnica and AMM.
    Wing venation has been one of the main selection criteria in Germany for decades.
    The paragraph titled 'Biometrical analysis' on page 58 cuts to the chase.

    This is the main point Richard Bache kept banging on about in the morphometry debate on the old bbka forum and this paper certainly should be given due consideration for those who use wing morphometry as part of the selection process.

    It would be interesting to have your thoughts on this.
    Last edited by Jon; 11-12-2011 at 05:15 PM.

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