Drone Congregation

[The Drone Ranger]

I'm hoping to make a couple of nuc's from my last surving hive, and have been wondering about the effects of potential inbreeding if the new queens mated with drones who were her "brothers". So I have been looking into the subject of drone congregation areas and read the 2010 thread on DCA's on this forum.

Has anyone any knowledge of a "DCA Map" for Scotland, South Lanarkshire?

Is "inbreeding" likely to be a problem?

There is no chance of you having to worry about inbreeding when you split your hive

If you had 30 hives and you bred 30 queens from your best hive then re-queened them all from it
that's the sort of thing that can lead to problems.
Hence the care that good breeding projects have to take to avoid this

[mbc]

I read background to bee breeding by Atkinson and he was obsessed by sex alleles and inbreeding and so I lost sleep worrying about the problem before I realised it is fairly irrelevant to situations where queens are open mated and only really becomes an issue with a closed breeding population. Phew !