Apis mellifera mellifera(AMM) honey bees

[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.

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Jon
Yes, I would say it is possible to breed pure race AMM in Scotland.
The Roseneath Peninsula if secured would be a suitable candidate, as of course would many of the Western Isles. However in my humble opinion from the ‘raging non interest’ in this AMM thread any such project would be pushing against a ‘closed door’ – I’ve witnessed apathy many times in my beekeeping career but the silence here is eerie. Who will buy these Scottish AMM queens bred for their looks and wing venation with their practical attributes a poor second; not your commercial man fighting for an existence nor the cash strapped hobbyist. Unless of course these hobbyists ruin a fragile gene pool in their area where there are few beekeepers by subscribing to the systematic reduction of heterozygosis in their area by the “Annual Graft” procedure, which even Gavin has acknowledged is fatally flawed – viz: “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)”, and being forced to purchase new queens annually – the ‘BuckfastTrap’ having been sprung!
The procedure you have seemingly embarked upon – viz: “last year was the first year I grafted and I hatched about 120. I have some colonies showing 100% according to wing venation”. Lovely! These queens are all sisters of course but will their daughters be able to sustain a year on year homozygous reproductive cycle in the face of so many brothers of their successive mums? I think your line of ‘logic’ here should be ‘opened out’ lest some newcomer or badly read experienced beekeeper follows your grafting procedure, without your experience to compensate.
What you are actually simulating is the “gross error” of “breeding from the best”, which at a stroke could reduce a 20 colony ‘unrelated gene pool’ apiary to 20 colonies with sister queens in each subsequent (de)generation.
The safest way to safeguard a gene pool –- is to breed a daughter queen from each colony mother queen and replace her with her daughter each year. In this manner although slight inbreeding may occur the original gene pool is safeguarded. I think you will find that Andrew Abrahams practices a method similar to this, but perhaps keeping his queens longer.
“Breeding from the Best” will result in massive genetic loss in that particular apiary within a couple of generations due to each subsequent generation’s queens and drones being related.
Regards “ losing you” with my requeening procedure, which was heavily criticised by Bernhard Mobus and others at the time. I experimented with queens no older than a year old starting in 1979 and quickly proved that a first year queen rarely swarmed in that year. If you go to page 373 of the 1975 edition of “The Hive and the Honey Bee” – read from the top of the page and you will read that - “it would be foolish to replace a queen each year”.
However if you go to page 349, of the 1992 edition you will read – “that it is very important to requeen colonies at least once a year”.
It took me a mere 10 years from scratch to discover this phenomenon and put it to work. It took the specialist authors writing in “The Hive and the Honey Bee” around 40 years.

Eric

[Jon]

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?

ERIC

the “Annual Graft” procedure, which even Gavin has acknowledged is fatally flawed

Hard to reconcile those two statements Eric and you have repeated most of your misconceptions about inbreeding and bee genetics in that single post above.

I actually grafted from a couple of my own queens and swapped some as well. You must be aware that Ireland is not a small island like colonsay with a single beekeeper so there are drones around from many different apairies to negate your unwarranted concerns about inbreeding.

and being forced to purchase new queens annually - the ‘BuckfastTrap’ having been sprung!

Swap queens with another AMM enthusiast if necessary.

These queens are all sisters of course

More likely half sisters.

Who will buy these Scottish AMM queens bred for their looks and wing venation with their practical attributes a poor second

Who exactly is breeding bees bred for looks and wing venation? I don't know anyone who does this. The best use of morphometry is to detect a hybridised colony and reject it as a candidate for breeding.
PS groundhog day has passed.

[Eric McArthur]

Eric wrote:
Who will buy these Scottish AMM queens bred for their looks and wing venation with their practical attributes a poor second?
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Jon wrote;
Who exactly is breeding bees bred for looks and wing venation? I don't know anyone who does this. The best use of morphometry is to detect a hybridised colony and REJECT it as a candidate for breeding.
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Eric wrote:
Exactly my point – the hybrid is rejected out of hand, because it LOOKS wrong. No mention of its qualities.
Gavin, Jimbo, Chris et al - Jon needs help here, he is out of his depth!
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Jon wrote:
PS groundhog day has passed.
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Yes, we are now getting to the nub of “experience” v ”male bovine excrement

Best regards

Eric!

[Jon]

Exactly my point – the hybrid is rejected out of hand, because it LOOKS wrong. No mention of its qualities.
Gavin, Jimbo, Chris et al - Jon needs help here, he is out of his depth!

Eric.

If you want to breed hybrid bees, be my guest.
Jimbo, myself and others are interested in breeding AMM.

If you want to breed pure AMM you have to make sure there are no hybrids in the gene pool.
They are not rejected because they LOOK wrong. they often look RIGHT but the morphometric tools let you know that there has been intromission from other races.
Wing venation is a fairy good indicator, as are certain behaviours such as maintaining a smallish brood nest and frugal overwintering, pollen all around the brood area.
Jimbo did mention at the start of the thread that there is more to this than Drawwing plots.
Colour is known to be a poor indicator.
DNA analysis will be the best indicator of all.

I know you see yourself as a visionary, but it seems to me you are a little late to the party here with regard to morphometry and other indicators.

Hybrids between races often produce good strong honey producing colonies in the FI generation but all hell can break loose in the F2 due to the uncontrolled mix of the genetics.
Beowulf Cooper wrote a lot about this in his book 'Honey bees of the British Isles'
He decribed the situation where a pure AMM queen mates with exotic drones and what happens in subsequent generations.

Look up heterosis, also known as hybrid vigour.
The vigour/health is good but in the honey bee it is often expresses as increased aggression.
Ruttner wrote a lot about this in the chapter he edited in the book you mentioned above: Dadant: The Hive and the Honey Bee.

He mentioned that a cross between AMM and Carnica produced the most aggressive bees.
Are you still sure you want hybrids in the mix. I certainly don't.
Carnica is a black race of bee and crosses between AMM and Carnica are notoriously hard to spot based upon colour. the easiest way to detect these is when they meet you at the gate 100 yards before you reach your colonies.