Your gallery of 2D plots

[drumgerry]

My first scattergram and my first experience of using Draw-wing and Morphplot. A small sample but probably not worth scanning a bigger one if these results are anything to go by. I grafted from this queen last year and had hope she was reasonably pure AMM. It looks like I couldn't have been more wrong. And it looks like her daughters won't be worth much as foundation stock for my journey back to AMM.

I'd be interested to hear any and all comments.

Bees_sample.jpg

[gavin]

More Amm than anything (wing pattern-wise). Not pure, but hey, you can't have everything.

And Jessie Smith says she sees a ballerina, arms aloft in a big loop.

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[Peter]

Most wings fall well within the CI limits - there is potential there. Might be worth going back over the wings and checking the positions for points 6 and 18 to be sure that your DsA is accurate.

[Jon]

Gerry, if you want to check your use of drawwing I can send you some scans and you can compare them to my results to see if we coincide, or I can check yours.

[drumgerry]

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm having difficulty placing the points in the exact places. Point 6 is especially difficult to be exact with Peter. I'd be interested to hear more on the potential this queen and her daughters have. I do have a better candidate lined up to graft from this summer and whose daughters will be my main drone provider in 2014.

Jon - could I send you by email my .dw images of the individual wings for you to check?

[Peter]

Agree on point 6 - and 18. The idea is that they mark the ends of a line drawn across the cell at its greatest width, i.e. the two points should be as far apart as possible. Not easy with the curved ends, and the problem is that a slight error in either of these points causes a large error in DsA. When you draw the perpendicular line down from the line 18-6 it is rather like a T-square and a slight movement at either of the ends at the top of the T causes a much greater movement at the bottom.
CI is much easier to get right.

[drumgerry]

Tried to follow your advice Peter and enlarged the image to the max before placing the points as accurately as possible. Also scanned a few more wings to get a larger sample. Here's what Draw-wing and Morphplot came up with

Scattergram1.jpg

[Jon]

Gerry, I did those 15 wings you sent me.
I had to move point 6 on quite a few but the result does not look too dissimilar to yours.

gerry.jpg

[gavin]

Looks like a similar spread to the previous effort. Far from the other races, and close to Amm. (and you've confused the spirit of my gran!)

One thing though - I'd strongly recommend that you don't raise lots of queens from a mother queen whose daughters are raising the drones for you. You are certain to see inbreeding problems that way.

The csd locus (sex determination gene) is crucial to avoiding diploid drones which will be manifest by a patchy brood pattern and a weak colony.

Mother: AB
Possible variants in the population: A B C D E F G HI J K L M N O P (approx)

Your favourite queen's daughters will make drones of the following type: A or B

Mate them with daughters of your favourite queen and the workers will be:

AA or AB or BB in a roughly 1:2:1 ratio. Half (the AAs and BBs) will make diploid drones.

In other words if your new queens mate with only your own drones then half of the worker brood will be stuffed (ie eaten very early when they spot that things have gone wrong). Bad move. I'd use your less pure queen for grafting ... unless you are certain that there are quite a few apiaries near you.

Actually, I boobed. The Favourite Queen will be carrying more varied sperm which diversifies the genetic of her daughters to some extent, but not her sons. And the upshot of that is that daughter queens mating with the drones of other daughters will produce fewer diploid drones, possibly a lot fewer than I suggested. Even I (ha! not so surprising .... ) get confused.

Still not good practice though.

[gavin]

OK, she's got it now after seeing Jon's as well. Various stills from the ballerina in the Elbow song .....



I may have just spoiled this little game. That lady can do just about every scattering of points DrawWing can come up with!