I suspect that the best answer to that one is to say - come to the November meeting and you'll find out from the person looking into them. If you can't we'll discuss it here afterwards.Originally Posted by Eric McArthur
I suspect that the best answer to that one is to say - come to the November meeting and you'll find out from the person looking into them. If you can't we'll discuss it here afterwards.
Hi Eric,
Who mentioned Imidacloprid?
Time you had that holiday. Have a good one
Best wishes
Jimbo
Hi Eric
Must be confusing me with someone else.
I read the Irish forum but don't post on it.
I'll start one of these days though.
Itchy trigger finger.
All hail Gavin and his almighty potatoes.A Gavinite?!! Come off it Eric ....
I think that was propaganda from anti bbka folk.I heard that the BBKA apiary lost all its bees recently - and imported replacements because they could not get bees locally.
There was a thread about this on the bbka site last year and Roger Patterson clarified that this was not the case.
The bbka , like most associations, has an anti import policy.
I think you are wrong in your assumptions here. If there is a good variation in csd alleles, it doesn't matter where the drones come from."Breeding from your best colony is not a problem when the drones in the general population local to it carry all or most of the csd alleles. (adopting italic convention)
You would need to demonstrate that the local drone population carries less than 6 csd alleles before suggesting that this strategy would lead to an inbreeding problem".
Not when all the drones are from your own colonies and a limited number of nearby apiaries with only a couple of colonies, over time!!
You need to have the data re. the csd alleles in the population.
Last edited by Jon; 09-09-2010 at 11:01 PM.
Hi Eric,
To answer your question. No I don't know the location and I don't know if they have varroa. I did a second independent check on the morphometry and got the same answer as the original morphometry test. I also have a sample of the bees waiting for DNA extraction with a view to confirm the morphometry results by genetic analysis
I think there are a couple of issues here worth clearing up so questions for the geneticists:
1. If you graft from your best colony you are not producing virgin queen clones!
Anyone who has reared queens will have noted that sister queens can look quite different from each other.
In the example above, with say a queen carrying 15 different csd alleles in her spermatheca,
the larvae she produces could be ac, ad, ae etc, or bc, bd, be.
ie, maybe 30 different permutations.
When you graft you could be selecting larvae with many different combinations. The queens have different fathers.
I can see how this would increase the frequency of 'a' or 'b' in the gene pool in the short term but the next queen selected would almost certainly carry a 2nd csd allele which is neither 'a' nor 'b'
2. What are the implications at the csd locus in a population with queens which live for several years vs a population with early supersedure of queens?
If I understand this right, early supersedure would mix up the combinations more quickly.
If you take the same ab queen example, all her offspring will carry either 'a' or'b' plus one other csd allele.
If early supersedure takes place, this potentially brings all the other csd alleles into play more quickly.
Last edited by Jon; 10-09-2010 at 08:41 PM.
Hi Jon,
I'm the Biologist so I will leave this one to the real Geneticist.
Jimbo
We learned at the BIBBA conference from Jacob Kahn that bees seem to be making a deliberate selection when choosing a larva to develop into a queen. If I understood him correctly he had studied a population and found that the distribution of traits in one generation did not follow the mathematical probability distribution that could have been predicted from the previous generation. This suggested to him that the bees are skewing the results by selecting certain larvae over others. If this is possible, presumably they could be capable of manipulating the csd allele population similarly. For example they might be attracted to larvae carrying different csd alleles to themselves.
Jacob Kahn's observations made me wonder if we should develop queen rearing systems that afforded the bees some degree of choice rather than foisting our chosen grafts onto them. It would not surprise me if they were capable of making better choices than us. I just choose the larvae that seem to be about the right size so it would not be difficult for the bees to make a better fist of it than me.
Rosie
Last edited by Rosie; 10-09-2010 at 12:39 PM.
They can of course chose not to proceed with a graft which is offered to them.Jacob Kahn's observations made me wonder if we should develop queen rearing systems that afforded the bees some degree of choice rather than foisting our chosen grafts onto them.
Sometimes I check a couple of hours after introduction and a lot of the larvae have already been removed at which point I regraft.
It's hard to say whether they were damaged of maybe actively discarded on some other criteria.
That Jacob Kahn lecture came early in the day and I was sitting at the back keeping an eye on Doris, Torquil and Roger Patterson.
I have a queen in a nuc which was mated at the end of June and is laying well.
I have removed a supersedure cell on 6 different occasions, the first after about a week and the last a few days ago.
they seem determined to replace her but on the face of it she is laying well.
Jurgen Tautz has suggested that workers can tell the difference between full sisters and half sisters in a colony. Maybe they can do that with larvae as well.
Last edited by Jon; 10-09-2010 at 01:08 PM.
Interesting comments Jon and Mr Rosie with the partially white 'Tache.
Jon, your deductions above were perfect, I'm proud of you. I can see that you have been scribbling on the back of an envelope.
The only thing I could add is that there will be, of course, thousands of genes that differed in the two gametes that fused to make the queen, so there are almost an endless set of possible differences between each virgin queen. Not just at the csd locus.
G.
There's me, promoting this forum (including screenshot) in my talk at the Irish conferece and recruiting new members, and then I come back to this!
Very hard to get into this thread now, but the topic is very relevant to our situation in Orkney and I actually did take notes of Dorian Pritchard's talk, details later.
In defence of Roger, I have to point out that his remark of genetics having been dreamt up on an April 1st was obviously a joke, which earned him a number of laughs and a friendly response from Dorian.
Re. the situation in Orkney:
beekeepers in Or
.jpg
The red dots are the approximate locations of colonies up to this summer, the blue ones are new locations for 2010.
We have about 80 colonies, of which +/- 25 are in or around Kirkwall. The rest is scattered around the mainland and several islands. We don't want to import bees/queens to avoid getting varroa and other nasties.
I am not too worried about the inbreeding situation on the mainland, but the outer isles, some with single hives, definitely need a plan to avoid the problems of inbreeding.
I have bred queens this summer, but not for requeening, only for increasing the number of colonies. I don't want to produce too many daughters from one queen alone, as otherwise her genes would be overrepresented in the local genepool.
Like Jon I grafted a lot more larvae than I expected the bees to rear, giving them a certain amount of choice.
I had come across Eric's calculations previously and found them too simplistic.
Gavin, your example with the fruitbowl needs a lot of refinemet, too, for a start: I imagine that the fruitbowl represents an isolated apiary, but there is no pairing of traits.
I thought of my own analogy, which involved a chairlift carrying skiers in different coloured skisuits, who randomly have to share seats but get eliminated if they share with a matching suit...
One factor in case reports that doesn't get enough attention is the duration of a bottleneck:
A small number of unrelated colonies introduced to an island where they immediately can multiply is probably going to thrive, but the same small number introduced to an island where the number of colonies is kept low will lead to failure in the long run.
How much does it cost to determine the csd loci of one queen? Is it feasible to have our population analysed?
Doris
Last edited by Stromnessbees; 11-09-2010 at 05:19 AM.
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