Example of hybridization

[Jon]

I remember you posting about that cranky colony.
This one is in a 7 frame nuc at the bottom of my garden.
Maybe need to be careful when it gets a bit bigger.
I have another at the allotment with yellowish bees and that queen is going into her third year and the colony has always been docile.
I have half a dozen colonies I would like to requeen for various reasons and with a bit of luck I will have a few mated queens by the end of May.
Taking into account what Gavin suggested above, it would be daft to let a colony produce dodgy drones as I have plenty of other drone colonies which I am confident about including one headed by the daughter of a Galtee.
There are enough of those in the area anyway.
You get the odd colony which makes bees rather than honey but these are really useful for producing the brood to make up nucs with better queens.

Gavin in your (M*B) example above would this not produce 75% black worker offspring if black is dominant and it looks to me like 75% have yellow bands, certainly much more than a quarter.
Is colour not a polygenic trait anyway?

[Jon]

Is it right that dark colour is dominant to pale? I remember seeing some bees that were dark until you peered closely at them, when the underlying patterns could be seen. If so, your Buckfast-looking workers would have to be from a hybrid queen crossed to Buckfast (or ligustica)-like drones.
Gavin

Hi gav. Did you dig up anything re. colour?
I found this paper if you want to cast your eye over it.

http://www.apidologie.org/index.php?..._2_ART0008.pdf

Woyke (1978) summarised the literature
on the heredity of colour patterns. From
his experiments, he concluded that the inheritance
of colour patterns in the honey
bee is governed by 3 major allelic genes
having their expression modified by 6-7
polygenes with alternative alleles for light
and dark.

What does modified mean here - is it switched on or off, or do we need the fruit bowls and chairlifts if not the full alphabet!

[Jon]

I found the Woyke paper.
He says:

Production of two distinct groups of haploid drones by the hybrid
queens can be explained by the existence of two major allelic: genes :
one resulting in the yellow group and one in the black group. The major
genes are modified by several modifiers. The results presented above
showed clearly, that the yellow color is dominant over the black one.
Thus the yellow major gene is designed as Y and the black one as ybl.

http://jerzy_woyke.users.sggw.pl/hercol.pdf

Does this mean that if a pure amm queen crosses with one or more yellow drones some yellow banding will always appear in the offspring as yellow is dominant over black?

Gavin? Jimbo?

[gavin]

Yeah, rather late, it does. Thanks for persisting with this one. Yellow is indeed dominant, so a dark brown pure Amm queen mating with drones from a pure yellow colony will make workers with yellow coloration. The proportion will just depend on how many drones and what contribution of sperm. My post in March was garbage.

There are other genes that influence body colour in bees, but the yellow/dark brown one is the big one.