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  1. #41
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    I know this Jon.

    I suspect that starting from the ground up is the way to go esp if you want to try and have influence at the Scottish Government level.

    However and of course there is aye a but what level of proof is now required so that one knows 100% that the material being used is correct?

    PH

  2. #42
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Wing morphometry should be quietly dropped.
    DNA work is getting cheaper all the time.
    I gave samples from some of my colonies to the students at Galway and Limerick who are doing projects part funded and supported by NIHBS.
    There are now hundreds of microsatellite markers identified with each of the various subspecies which can indicate if there has been hybridisation.
    The guy I spoke to at Limerick said he hoped to test for about a dozen markers, or more if he has the budget.
    He extracts the DNA from the bee's leg.

    I hope to get some feedback before grafting starts this year.

    If you test bee wings somewhere where noone has ever done morphometry and the samples have 100% Amm wings I would be fairly confident the bees are indeed Amm but otherwise the results will be corrupted by the selection artifact described by R Moritz in his paper 'Limitations of biometric Morphometry'. There is a link to it on the NIHBS website on the section with references about bee breeding and bee genetics.
    I have sampled the wings of approximately 100 of my own colonies over the past few years and am as disappointed as anyone that this simple technique is actually of very limited use. If you start with pure Amm it would be useful for identifying the odd hybrid caused by an adventurous ligustica drone but if you start with mongrels or hybrids you are wasting your time trying to pick out the Amm. Might as well try and unmix 2 tins of soup.

    You guys need to get the Native Scottish Honeybee Society up and running. We have about 600 members in NIHBS which is respectable enough in just over 2 years.

  3. #43

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    I'm wondering whether I should go ahead and write to the SBA magazine with an invitation to all interested parties to an inaugural meeting for a proposed society? Gavin and I mentioned the possibility a while back and talked maybe about having a meeting in Pitlochry as a central venue. I could book somewhere and we could see who turned up. Gavin and everyone else interested - would you be up for that??? If so I could start another thread to guage interest......

  4. #44
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    We got about 100 at the inaugural meeting of NIHBS.
    You need 3 or 4 people who will push things on at the start once the idea is up and running.

    Irish native honey bee society inaugural meeting.jpg

  5. #45
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jon View Post
    Might as well try and unmix 2 tins of soup.
    Interesting analogy, the late great John Atkinson uses a similar analogy in his book, background to bee breeding, but with different coloured rice rather than soup, to describe the converse, how it's possible to "fix" a useful gene in a population with an outcross, and then to get rid of any unwanted genes that came with the outcross with a series of backcrosses. He calculated that after six backcrosses less than 1% (1/128)of the outcross genes remain, and "it is usually pointless to go beyond this because individuals within a breed vary so much."

  6. #46
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Yes but the problem with wing patterns is they don't correlate closely with the underlying genetics.
    If you are trying to fix an easy identifiable trait, that may be possible in a few generations if it is controlled by a single gene, but from what I know about bee genetics, it seems most traits are polygenic so they are not going to be easy to fix. The individual genes could be scattered over different chromosomes.
    Even something like abdomen colour, how black or how yellow, is controlled by 3 major groups of genes and a whole series of modifying genes. Jerzy Woyke is the nerd on this sort of stuff. Gavin Ramsay Esq. can clear it all up for us.

  7. #47
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    I have been measuring wings from colonies in Scotland for a number of years
    Some of these colonies are in fairly isolated areas with very little breeding intervention by the beekeeper other than swarm control. The beekeeper is not using wing morphometry for selection
    The results. I have show there is quite a few areas that still have pure Amm mainly from the West Coast and the Islands
    The recent article in the Jan SBA magazine by Ewan Campbell where he used the Dral genetic test using mitochondrial DNA has shown that the markers are as expected for Amm from one of these Amm areas
    I agree with Drumgerry now is the time to set up a group to look at protection and improvement of our native bees
    Some of the aims of such a group could be to further survey the Scottish bee population
    Look at obtaining funding for one of our Universities to do further DNA work on the populations
    To lobby government and provide information to politicians (its ironic that that the government gave Colonsay protection for the native Amm but put imported bees from a commercial company
    On the roof of their parliament)To set up a national bee breeding site and and assist with local bee breeding groups
    I think such a group could still work with the SBA but at present there is no enthusiasm within the Organisation to protect the native bee but a specialised group could



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  8. #48
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    Well folks there is only one way to find out. Good luck.

    PH

  9. #49
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
    I have been measuring wings from colonies in Scotland for a number of years
    Some of these colonies are in fairly isolated areas with very little breeding intervention by the beekeeper other than swarm control. The beekeeper is not using wing morphometry for selection
    The results. I have show there is quite a few areas that still have pure Amm mainly from the West Coast and the Islands
    That's where wing morphometry has some use Jimbo, in a virgin area with little evidence of historic hybridisation.
    The idea of using it somewhere like Southern England to identify the most Amm like bees where the bee population has been a mixture of subspecies for decades is where it has no validity at all.
    That's what Kate Thompson found - no link between percentage Amm wings and presence of Amm microsatellites in the samples she collected from feral colonies.

  10. #50
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    I Agee with you I think England is a lost cause
    There is too much hybridisation but Scotland is different
    We need to set up some sort of protection for the native colonies we do have
    There is also the problem of the varroe free areas We can get good Amm material from these areas but unable to help any groups set up in a varroa free area with Amm material without the risk of introducing varroa

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