Apis mellifera mellifera(AMM) honey bees

[Eric McArthur]

Jimbo wrote:
I can see where you are going so I will give you a wee sneak preview. The Queen used was a 75% Amm. Using the Cupkit system 8 Queen cells from 10 was produced. 7 of those were used in Mini nucs and taken to 3 apairy sites. One of which you kindly offered me which had 3 colonies which were also 60-70% Amm. So thanks for that. 3 mini nucs were left there. Two mini nucs were left at the original site with two colonies and two were taken to a site near the south end of the Rosneath Peninsula with 4 hives on it but also has about 15 -20 colonies in the close vicinity owned by other beekeepers. 5 of the 7 colonies mated successfully. 3 of the mininucs gave a 95% Amm result, 1 gave I think about 75%. the other one at the south end of the Penisula gave a rubbish result. This I think is due to all the new beekeepers getting hybrid colonies from the local association which had an effect on the Amm result. (I still built up the colony and sold it on to a new beekeeper who lives miles away from me). There are other beekeepers near some of my sites who still have Amm bees in the 70 - 85% and not related to mine but at some point I would need to bring in fresh blood so co-operation with other like minded people would be good thing. At present there are about 35 -40 colonies on the Peninsula and the long term aim is to get back to native Amm bees. As I said in an earlier post using Drawwing as a tool only assists you in your selection when breeding you also need to look at the other morphometric characteristics of Amm.
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Hi Jimbo
Many thanks for the objective information Jimbo.
My question re the queen mother(s) would have probed the size of the gene pool, which you have conceded is painfully small, even considering any “potential“ lurking in the indigenous Peninsula colonies.. How many of these useful unrelated “sex determining alleles” do you reckon ‘from a past thread’ exist in your gene pool? Bearing in mind the Bienefeld work promulgated in the February Scottish Beekeeper magazine. This is a purely objective line of thought - with no intent to ‘score’ Brownie points. Is it possible to expand on this without references to my Bushman hat?
What degree of AMM was indicated in the mother of the breeder queen? Some degree of DNA sampling would be a boon – actually there is such a skill waiting in the wings for an opening in the Glasgow BKA, Simon I think is his name! The lady curator of the Glasgow Art Galleries has an excellent source of pre 1910 AMM DNA as a Standard!
This “mother” queen if still “above ground” and in possession of a high level of AMM pedigree could be a marvellous tool to flood your ‘suspect’ beekeeper apiaries with her drones in this coming season. Using the Pfefferle, ½ frame worker/drone device already mentioned in conversation with Calum in another thread and making up even 3 frame nucs using these 50/50 frames which could be transported to these out apiaries (do you have Varroa on the Penisula”?). You will have early drones which are replicates of your “batch” queens’ grandmother unless I miss my quess you have a hidden unrelated ½ generation of alleles to play with. The mind boggles – No? Non ‘party political’ critically constructive comments from Gavin/Jon would be great? This genetic material could be useful in the next generation of the ‘suspect’ apiary colonies.
By similarly flooding the Peninsula with drones from the “batch” daughter queens a latent (slightly inbred) AMM gene pool could be created quite rapidly and new female blood would find a ready-made source of (good) AMM genetic material.
I was pleased to note that you did not discard your “unacceptable” results, but sold them on, unlike a would be AMM breeder who spoke to the Glasgow BKA some years ago informing that due to the proximity of an “exotic bee” importer, he was suffering many (too many!) failures. He could still have sold these queens, which were probably perfectly good hybrids to a less discerning beekeeper and offset some of his heavy outlay!
Eric

[Jon]

My question re the queen mother(s) would have probed the size of the gene pool, which you have conceded is painfully small, even considering any “potential“ lurking in the indigenous Peninsula colonies.. How many of these useful unrelated “sex determining alleles” do you reckon ‘from a past thread’ exist in your gene pool?

Eric. Groundhog day was 2nd February.
A single queen can carry all or most of the sex alleles if she has mated with a good number or drones.

re number of queens, last year was the first year I grafted and I hatched about 120. I have some colonies showing 100% according to wing venation but as Jimbo says, there is more to it than that.
If you requeen all your colonies every year and graft from a new unrelated queen that is all you have to do to avoid a genetic bottleneck. I know a few people who do this with a new Galtee queen every year. You requeen all your colonies with the daughter queens of the queen you are grafting from which means that all your colonies produce pure AMM drones. The following year you graft from a new unrelated queen whose virgin daughters will mate with the drones from the daughters of the previous year's queen.

1 new unrelated queen per year which you graft from = no in breeding / no genetic bottleneck.

This is not the system I use but it works very well.

[Eric McArthur]

Jon wrote:
Eric. Groundhog day was 2nd February.
A single queen can carry all or most of the sex alleles if she has mated with a good number or drones.
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Eric wrote:
Hi Jon
I loved the simplicity of the Galtee annual requeen system. I’d be interested, however to know what size of gene pool Michael works with and if he maintains breeder queens over more than two years.
If all annual queen needs are reared from a single queen mother by grafting – does this not imply that the resulting drones, albeit a generation out of step, would all be identical. Especially if all the mother queens are obtained from the same source year on year. Thus virgins, all sisters, being mated by these drones could all carry identical alleles. – the mind boggles! I look forward to your correction of my postulation.
How many colonies do you work with in your grafting system?

Jimbo
What do you think of blanketing the suspect apiaries on the Peninsula using near AMM drone nucs as suggested (with of course the other beekeepers’ 0K!)?

[Jon]

Hi Jon
I loved the simplicity of the Galtee annual requeen system. I’d be interested, however to know what size of gene pool Michael works with and if he maintains breeder queens over more than two years.

Hi Eric.
I don't know exactly what way Micheál Mac Giolla Coda works but there are hundreds of colonies and dozens of individual beekeepers involved in the Galtee valley.
He has an AI setup and maintains several lines of bees from selected queens.
Open mating also takes place.
Check the website here.
He also uses breeder queens into the 3rd year if they have proved their worth.

I am talking about people I know in the north who buy one new queen per year for grafting.

If all annual queen needs are reared from a single queen mother by grafting – does this not imply that the resulting drones, albeit a generation out of step, would all be identical.

Fortunately this is not the case.

Imagine the queen you are grafting from has mated with 15 drones each one of which has a different sex allele.
The diploid queen has two sex alleles of her own, A and B, plus 15 more in her spermatheca which can be demoted C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T

Her daughters will carry one of her own sex alleles, either A or B plus any one of the other 15 at random.
This means that she can produce 30 different combinations of sex alleles in her Virgin daughters ie,

AC,AD,AE,AF,AG etc,
BC,BD,BE,BF,BG etc.

These virgins mate and carry sperm from different drones in their spermathecas but this is irrelvant to the drones they produce themselves from an unfertilized egg.
daughter queens are never raised from these as a new queen for grafting is brought in from outside each year.

Each daughter queen you requeen with, and there are 30 different combinations in this example, can make two types of drone. These will have either sex allele A or B plus the other sex allele carried by the queen which could be anything between C and T in this example.
A and B will occur the most frequently but if you requeen a dozen colonies you will probably get a good number of the other sex alleles as well.
requeening again in 12 months with daughters of a new queen brought in from outside mixes the combinations up again.

Gavin, if you have got over that 1:3 scoreline please correct any of that if I have got the wrong end of the stick.

[gavin]

3-1 flattered them. A couple of deflected shots that confused the keeper. They were the better team though - as they ought to be with the money they have to spend!

Your genetics is good. Each of the drones *might* carry a different allele, but in reality there will be many duplicates most of the time, so 15 is just a hypothetical figure.

In reality too there will be multi-year queens around in the apiary and in the vicinity, so mixing should be even better.

The Galtee importer knows exactly what he is doing, and the plan is good. In the process he is flooding his area with native stock from not so far away. For most of us though, we ought to be breeding our own local bees, don't you think?

[Jon]

For most of us though, we ought to be breeding our own local bees, don't you think?

I agree as it would be a shame to lose good local genetics.
I don't have a Galtee Queen myself although I was tempted to get one in September as everyone else seemed to be stocking up after the Bibba conference in Tipperary. One guy bought 20 or so to distribute to members of his BKA.
I have a daughter of a Galtee queen and a few of my own which mated with mainly Galtee drones so I have a bit of the genetics in the mix.

The trick is to get enough local beekeepers singing from the same hymnsheet. Jimbo's project on Rosneath seems to be headed the right way.
I was only giving the example to show that a limited number of colonies does not inevitably lead to inbreeding as long as you know what you are doing re. the queen you graft from.

The Galtee valley is several miles wide and is flanked by two mountain ridges and all the beekeepers in the valley are committed to the Galtee ideal

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Gavin/Jon
I have read all that you both have written - posts 22 and 23.
You have both strayed off piste and even kicked your football into touch.
The thread posed the question:
Is it possible to breed pure race (genotype) Apis mellifera, mellifera (AMM) honey bees commercially in MAINLAND Scotland"?

The last two posts 22 and 23 actually discuss a “Dead End” scenario of re-queening colonies every year, which is a useful ploy to maintain vigorous queens and at the same time inhibit swarming. The method does not particularly lend itself to breeding unrelated queens since the queens produced in the grafting process are all sisters, even super sisters since as Gavin so correctly implies (viz: Each of the drones *might* carry a different allele, but in reality there will be “many” duplicates most of the time). I’d wager “most” rather than “many”.
I actually pre-empted this re-queening procedure, but in much more practical terms than the method described by Jon, by some 13 years relative to the accepted wisdom of “queen residence” in productive colonies advised in the “Hive and the Honey Bee” up until 1997.
My book on the subject, was written in 1984 and reviewed in “IBRAs "Apicultural Abstracts” at the time. The book was also reviewed in An Beachaire. It is in the Moir, the National Library in Edinburgh and also in the Bodliean.

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Gavin wrote:
The Galtee importer knows exactly what he is doing, and the plan is good. In the process he is flooding his area with native stock.
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Eric wrote:
Jimbo
What do you think of blanketing the suspect apiaries on the Peninsula using near AMM drone nucs as suggested (with of course the other beekeepers’ 0K!)?
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I seem to be on the same wavelength with my “drone flooding” idea.
It might be worthwhile purchasing a few Galtee queens for any Scottish project – to accelerate the development of the AMM breeding project – Margie has already broken the psychological barrier with the ‘up the jooks’ beeless brood comb foray!

Eric

[Jon]

Is it possible to breed pure race (genotype) Apis mellifera, mellifera (AMM) honey bees commercially in MAINLAND Scotland"?

Well if the Galtee group can do it on mainland Ireland I don't see why the same thing cannot be achieved in mainland Scotland.

The last two posts 22 and 23 actually discuss a “Dead End” scenario of re-queening colonies every year, which is a useful ploy to maintain vigorous queens and at the same time inhibit swarming.

Only if you are thinking just of yourself or your own local group as opposed to the wider beekeeping community in Scotland. If you have a few groups of beekeepers using AMM stock, and half decent records are kept, there is no reason why swapping queens between groups should not be a very effective strategy for mixing up the genetics within local AMM bees.

I actually pre-empted this re-queening procedure, but in much more practical terms than the method described by Jon, by some 13 years relative to the accepted wisdom of “queen residence” in productive colonies advised in the “Hive and the Honey Bee” up until 1997.

Sorry Eric, you have lost me there and I own a copy of Dadant's 'Hive and the Honey Bee.'

Each of the drones *might* carry a different allele, but in reality there will be “many” duplicates

But of course you will remember from the inbreeding thread that a closed population of bees only gets into difficulties re. pepperpot brood when the number of sex alleles falls to six or less - and this is not even a closed population as we are talking about mainlanland bee breeding whether Ireland or Scotland.
If you requeen a dozen colonies under this system you would be extremely unlikely to create a drone population with 6 or less alleles unless the queen you are grafting from mated with a very restricted number of drones. I mentioned that Micheál Mac Giolla Coda has an AI setup so I dare say this is all under control. Anyway there are hundreds of colonies in the Galtee project so open mating should be good enough.
Someone like Nellie can probably work out the statistical probability. Come to think of it Gavin should be a whizz at this sort of thing.