# Comments from Tom Glenn



## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

I was reading this webpage today on the Glenn Apiaries website. For those that haven't read it it's a good read. The entire website is a great read for any beekeeper. 

http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/beekeeping21st.html

This year I am really making an effort to understand more about bee genetics and queen rearing. As I've been learning more, I'm realizing that having the skill to rear a queen isn't anywhere in the same skill level as understanding the genetics and rearing a queen. It's kind of like a farmer who has a fruit tree that he's grown and doesn't realize the importance of pollination to produce an optimal crop from that tree and wonders why he produces 1/10th the crop as the farmer down the road who used bees to pollinate his crop. But it's even worse for a beekeeper because you can buy the best queen money can buy to raise virgin queens with and if those virgins go out and mate with drones that pass on non-desirable traits and the beekeeper doesn't understand that, he/she will be wondering what happened and possibly even blaming the provider of their breeder queen(s). It also leaves beekeepers who aren't knowledgeable in the dark when understanding the value of what they are buying in a nucleus hive or even a package of bees. The queen in that nucleus or package can be the determining factor of it's real value. High performance or junk. 

Back to the particular page I mentioned earlier.................it's a good description of hobby beekeepers who can afford to let nature take it's course with their bees and of beekeepers who depend on their operation to be profitable. It helps to understand why large operations can't afford to take on the same risk as a hobby beekeeper who doesn't depend on his/her hives to make a living. But, with a better informed beekeeping super community as a whole we can improve the overall quality of bees around us. Like Tom says in his comments, even if we don't want to raise queens then raise more drones from our best stock. Influence the quality of the honey bees around us in a positive way. 

Having said that, I think one of the best things that could be done in our industry would be for beekeepers to be exposed to more information about bee genetics.........and queen rearing, but not without the understanding of bee genetics too.


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## JWChesnut (Jul 31, 2013)

Glenn's Minnesota Hygienic Queens were my absolute favorite queens of all time. The traits faded in time, by generation three, but getting a new box of cages in the mail from Fallbrook was like kid-in-a-candy-store time. 

His queens made my first trials of experimental TF keeping more successful than anytime since. His attempts to secure natural survivor bees off the California Channel Islands inspired my effort to find reduced and isolated populations to test against disease resistance.

A real tragedy his breeding program has been dispersed.


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## Dan the bee guy (Jun 18, 2015)

Still the best site to learn about VSH for any new beekeeper


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

If anyone understands the color-coded heredity picture-explanations on his site, I could use some clarification. I think I need to draw several great, big bees and substitute the colors for written names of actual traits in order to get it, but maybe there is a simpler explanation.


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## Stephenpbird (May 22, 2011)

kilocharlie said:


> If anyone understands the color-coded heredity picture-explanations on his site, I could use some clarification.


Could you provide a link to which one you mean?


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

JWChesnut said:


> Glenn's Minnesota Hygienic Queens were my absolute favorite queens of all time.


Maybe they do better in California than in Vermont. I found they were beautiful yellow queens, built big colonies, and were weak or dead come spring. Italians just don't winter well here, and MH stock was selected from the old Starline Italians. They were designed for the beekeepers running between the upper mid-west and Texas.


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## j.kuder (Dec 5, 2010)

people have a way of complicating things. I like things simple and after wading thru tons of useless to me info my simple understanding of breeding VHS bees is this. VHS is a recessive gene. it takes both parents carrying that gene in order to pass it to the offspring. now in order to do that you need a VHS virgin to mate with VHS drones. because the queen mates with many drones the best you can do is flood the area around your mating yard with the proper drones. ("If we wanted to improve our chances of getting good poker hands, we might think about stacking the deck with extra aces. And if we want to improve the chances of getting better colonies, we can stack the gene pool with the genes that produce the traits that we want in the bees." Tom Glenn.) the way we are planning to do that is thru our local bee club with incentives for members to use the VHS queens in their own hives spread throughout our county stacking the genetic deck in our favor. so our simple plan is to buy a AI queens and use their daughter queens in our hives and as many other local hives as we can. then next year either get a new AI queens or select from our own best stock or both. the drone stock will already be in place for next years virgins to mate with.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

The piece that is missing from your plan is a way to do vsh assays. If you don't actually do the assays as part of the evaluation selection for breeding, you will not maintain a vsh trait...unless you constantly bring in high expressing vsh stock.

....the logical conclusion is that you have crowded out other traits that might exist, amd selected against any non vsh strategy the bees are using to deal with mites.....all to incorporate a vsh trait that will revert to the mean (disapear) when the aggressive importation of vsh stops.


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## j.kuder (Dec 5, 2010)

deknow said:


> The piece that is missing from your plan is a way to do vsh assays. If you don't actually do the assays as part of the evaluation selection for breeding, you will not maintain a vsh trait...unless you constantly bring in high expressing vsh stock.
> 
> ....the logical conclusion is that you have crowded out other traits that might exist, amd selected against any non vsh strategy the bees are using to deal with mites.....all to incorporate a vsh trait that will revert to the mean (disapear) when the aggressive importation of vsh stops.


we are planning vsh assays as part of the evaluation selection for breeding. any advice or direction is welcome.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

deknow said:


> The piece that is missing from your plan is a way to do vsh assays. If you don't actually do the assays as part of the evaluation selection for breeding, you will not maintain a vsh trait...unless you constantly bring in high expressing vsh stock.


Requeening your stocks with vsh queens won't solve the problem, because, as you say, the trait will get diluted through breeding within non-vsh drones. But the plan will never give you instant results until you change the neighborhood. I began using vsh stock in 2004. I raise some daughters from the vsh breeders, and introduce them into my apiaries. I believe I'm seeing the work improving my bees. Where I used to see dwv crawlers in mid-summer, and colonies in trouble come August, I now don't see that. Yes, I treat in August/September after I take the honey, but I'm seeing mite loads remain low while others I know are seeing crawlers mid-summer if they don't treat spring and fall. 20 apiaries were sampled in Vermont this past summer for the National Survey, 3 being mine. 2 of my apiaries had the lowest varroa counts, and the third was #4. While I can't make the claim that vsh is the silver bullet, I think it helps...over time.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

that says a lot michael, congrats. i'm no pro, but my opinion is that taking grafts from the overall best of the best makes more sense than using a single measure or two. i know you 've shared it before, but would you tell us again what you are looking for when selecting a queen to take grafts from?


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

Strength at first spring look, # frames brood at first flow (dandelion here), absence of brood diseases (esp chalk), temper, honey production, sugar fed. 

I agree that by selecting breeders from the best colonies, that have performed well over time, will get you there, eventually.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> Strength at first spring look, # frames brood at first flow (dandelion here), absence of brood diseases (esp chalk), temper, honey production, sugar fed.
> 
> I agree that by selecting breeders from the best colonies, that have performed well over time, will get you there, eventually.


I think you are generally right but I like the idea of using at least some outside tf breeding stock. We use much of the same criteria but I worry that weaknesses may be masked by treating while the reality remains that the overall health of the operation pretty much demands it.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Mike, the two data points that seen to be missing are:
1. What percentage of queens raised for your operation are conine from your operation, and what percentage are purchased cells or grafts from purchased breeders?

2. What the vsh expression is in the bees you have?

Without that data, it is hard to know where the progress is coming from (your own selection of stock or better quality genetics beong provided by outside breeders), or if it's attributable to VSH.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

j.kuder said:


> VHS is a recessive gene. it takes both parents carrying that gene in order to pass it to the offspring.


I see this idea tossed around quite a bit as fact. I was curious enough to contact Dr Bob Danka from the USDA (probably one of the most authoritative sources on VSH bees). He refuted the idea that VSH is recessive, and instead used the term "additive", which means you DO NOT need both parents to carry the gene to get some level of VSH in the offspring. Of course when they do you will have higher VSH performance. In fact this was the result that produced the Pol-Line bees that were/are so good.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

As far as I'm aware, the Pol Line bees are of unknown and untested for vsh expression....it is unknown what role vsh does or doesn't play in the Pol Line bees, or if it's even above the mean.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

deknow said:


> As far as I'm aware, the Pol Line bees are of unknown and untested for vsh expression....it is unknown what role vsh does or doesn't play in the Pol Line bees, or if it's even above the mean.



You might find this helpful:

http://vshbreeders.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=153&pid=668#pid668

Clearly they were evaluating Pol-Line for mite resistance.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Exactly. The best I can tell, they crossed vsh bees with commercial stock, and chose the best results wrt survivability and prodiction. Certainly there is some hybrid vigor involved, and, as I said before, I don't believe these bees are assayed or selected on the basis of vsh assays....which is why I'm skeptical that vsh has a role in their success.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

Sure that link didn't say how they evaluated the "significant expression of VSH", but I believe that is was a detergent wash of 300 frozen bees. 

I found the original release of the Pol-Line out of Glenn exceptional bees. I was fortunate enough to get 200 ul on Pol-Line semen last season that was crossed with my VSH bees. We'll see this season how they turn out. 

From the link above:

_"The colonies that get added generally are chosen because they survived with large bee populations and low varroa populations after being used for migratory pollination and/or honey production. We have been fortunate to be able to increase the level of selection during the past two years by testing more bees that are managed in three, large-scale, commercial migratory beekeeping operations. We are trying to create bees that function well in such operations while retaining significant expression of VSH."_

From: Functionality of Varroa-Resistant Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) when used in Migratory Beekeeping for Crop Pollination

_"Importantly, an economically useful level of resistance was achieved in these VSH colonies despite half of the genetics of the worker bees presumably having come from drones of the mite-susceptible control stock. It is a common practice in large-scale commercial beekeeping to introduce queens via queen cells and then let the queens outcross with local drones. Using VSH to introgress mite resistance seems to be well suited for this application. Because the VSH trait is genetically additive (Harbo and Harris 2001), mite resistance in a beekeeping operation should improve over time as colonies with VSH queens begin producing drones with the VSH trait, and newly introduced queens mate with those drones."_


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

A mite wash does nothing to determine vsh, it is a mite count....which is my point.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

From your second link (the end of the abstract):


> This study demonstrates that bees with the VSH trait and pure RHB offer alternatives for beekeepers to use for commercial crop pollination while reducing reliance on miticides. The high frequency of queen loss (only approximately one fourth of original queens survived each year) suggests that frequent requeening is necessary to maintain desired genetics.


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

many thanks michael and jim for the replies.

here's where i am so far:

1. 2 or more winters of survival with a continuous queenline and looking strong in the grafting year, the more years the better.
2. upper end of the spectrum with regard to surplus honey and comb production, the more honey and comb the better.
3. positive response to swarm prevention (which usually correlates to good honey and comb production).
4. caught swarms and colonies that failed to respond to swarm prevention are excluded and used for splits instead.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

deknow said:


> From your second link (the end of the abstract):



Keep in mind that this study was conducted in large commercial operations, where queen mortality is expected to be higher.


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## AstroBee (Jan 3, 2003)

deknow said:


> A mite wash does nothing to determine vsh, it is a mite count....which is my point.


Sure, but starting with known VSH stock, that was evaluated for VSH traits, it is not a huge leap to assume that the statistically significant improved mite counts are related to VSH traits.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Stephenpbird said:


> Could you provide a link to which one you mean?


It looks like Tom updated the site and now the genetic color diagrams make more sense, but thank you!


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