Not sure why two generations on is too far - can you explain? If true, then there is little hope for any of us!
We had a black bee in this area with all the right features of A.m.m. in terms of colour, size, shape, tomenta, comb building, cappings etc. However, they were a bit aggressive. mtDNA was found to be ligustica - but not a trace of yellow on them.
Carnica would have wide tomenta. 751 did not and there was no yellow either.
Peter Edwards
It comes back to Steve's question in post 122. If you have a mixed F2 population of 'pure' amm and hybrids which superficially look the same, how do you tell them apart with regard to selecting queens for breeding especially when there are no obvious colour clues?
Keeping a pure race pure is going to be very difficult unless all your neighbours keep the same race or you use II.
Once genetic material gets mixed up it cannot easily be unmixed.
You can select for the correct traits -which will give you something which looks and behaves like the original - but we are back to the Moritz paper here.
You must be familiar with Mervyn's system for keeping AMM pure. He requeens all his stock every year with daughters of his current year queen and at the end of each season buys a new Galtee queen from which he grafts the following year. His requeened colonies which are F1 Galtee produce a mixture of workers depending upon what his grafted queens happened to mate with on the wing, but their drones are pure Galtee. Once you let it go to F2 you are into a lottery re. the DNA in the eggs produced by your F2 queens and you cannot guarantee the purity of your drones.
My ambitions are not a lot higher than getting the appearance and behaviour right. The only other things I am aiming at is to get them to breed true and have them capable of mating with AMMs from outside the area without getting hybrid aggression. I hope to test the latter next season.Originally Posted by Jon
I doubt if anyone has pure bees now in any case - including Carnica, Ligustica and Galtee breeders.
Steve
I would tend to agree with you but some are probably fairly close to the original.
I always remember those videos from the 1930s which showed French AMM being installed in apiaries around Scotland.
The point you make about breeding true is the crucial one.
I did not knowingly have any Galtee genetics in my apiary until last year but my queens in Apideas have crossed with Mervyn's drones at his mating site and the Galtee daughter I grafted from this year has crossed with my own drones without any signs of aggression so far.
We desperately need a service whereby we can get our bees DNA tested with fast results so that we can use the results as part of our assessments. Although project Discovery is a great initiative I don't think it will help individuals a great deal. I remember Dave Cushman once predicting that beekeepers would be able to carry out DNA testing themselves one day.
It's interesting that Peter mentioned black bees that turned out to be Ligustica. I had something similar about 5 years ago. I knew they had mated with Buckfast/Greeks but they were as black as anything I had seen. There is talk on here of yellow being dominant but I don't think it's all that simple.
Steve
According to the Woyke paper yellow is dominant and Woyke is one of the big names in bee research over the past few decades.
http://jerzy_woyke.users.sggw.pl/hercol.pdf
I brought it up in this thread last year.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...ighlight=woyke
It's not simple in that there are various genes involved but it does seem fairly clear cut that yellow is dominant.
Hi Peter
I may have been a little hasty there. That's code for: I was wrong! Any individual which is a hybrid will give rise to only hybrid derivatives. On the other hand, a queen of a pure race which mated with some pure and some other drones will give a mix of pure and mixed progeny. Select the pure ones and you will be OK. There is still the potential for pure Amm daughter queens to emerge as long as every generation mates with at least some pure drones, and especially if the Amm line is selected for against the hybrids.
Interesting. Suggests that it was an Aml x Amm hybrid which had backcrossed to Amm a few times. Or that the DNA test was less conclusive than claimed.
Quite a few plants (oaks spring to mind) show a pattern of cytoplasmic DNA (mitochondrial, chloroplast) variation that is completely different to the nuclear DNA and visible trait distribution. One possibility is that one oak species colonised an area then others came in and replaced it not by physical displacement but by successive rounds of hybridisation until to all intents and purposes it was the second species.
I wouldn't have put it past bees to have done the same thing, giving slightly different Amm types in different areas. This takes us back to DNA and Amm. How will anyone know that they have a real reference population of pure Amm for a given area? Without using extensive sets of historic specimens all you can do is to compare modern samples to modern reference populations. Colonsay and Galtee for example. Are they completely pure? Are they representative of 'good' Amm from other areas, or was there always some differentiation into lowland, eastern, heath, highland, western types? Doris told us about less dark types in Austria, the 'heath' bee was always regarded as particularly dark, but what of Warwickshire or lowland Perthshire Amm?
Lots of things to think about, including that gale out there that might once again have knocked hives over ...
G.
Here are 4 more.
57 is properly sampled but the other 3 are from dead bees I collected at the front of each colony after midweek spring cleaning.
54 is a nice colony.
This queen came from a supersedure cell I rescued in 2010.
It made no attempt to swarm this year and was a strong colony most of the summer.
I used it as a queenright cell raiser for a few weeks.
I grafted a few from it but mostly grafted from 57 this year as it is unrelated to any of my other colonies.
64.jpg 54a.jpg 70.jpg 57a.jpg
My gran used to read tea-leaves for people. She spent time in various jobs at least one in a catering environment, and in her spare time would meet her friends for cups of tea and cake in other ones, where she made sure that the roles were reversed. I suspect that it was in her customer role where the tea-leaf reading came into its own. She started doing it as a joke but as the years passed everyone - perhaps her included - started to think that it had some predictive value. Isn't it sad that tea usually comes in little paper (or even plastic) pounches these days? Another dying tradition.
So, at this unique time of year I'm thinking of family, past, present and even future. And tradition. Let's ensure that gran's skills and her sustaining of tradition (I'm assuming that she had an elderly relative who did something similar in her childhood) are not entirely lost. I'm going to start interpreting these plots.
Maybe I should try doing it after a drink. Perhaps even something stronger than tea. However, for now, in Jon's plots I can see a house (a big broad bungalow), a snowman (with, I think, bees buzzing around his head - although they could be flies), and a large conifer leaning across a fence and spreading branches across a garden. The last one is beyond me for now. I may try again after a drink this evening. What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as anyone's. Maybe there is something big about to happen at houses or a specific house, that it involves models of rotund gentlemen, and that winter trees are part of the picture? Ideas anyone?
May you all enjoy whatever solstice festivals you take part in.
Gavin
Using my crystal ball, as we only have tea bags in our house. I can make out the letters M- - RS B-R for Col 54. The others I can't see anything.
Have a great Christmas holiday and hope that all your colonies make it through the winter.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks