Quote Originally Posted by Eric McArthur View Post
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.