# keeping races pure



## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Queen bees can be "instrumentally inseminated" (II) instead of allowing drones to mate with virgin queens. More on that here:
http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/apimondia_1.html

II is more expensive than drone mating, of course, and usually reserved for 'breeder queens' very near the top of the chain. If you are raising lots of queens, another strategy is to geographically surround your queen raising apiary with drone yards with bees of your choice. If doesn't guarantee control of the mating process, of course, but improves the odds that the beek can get closer to the target.

More on drone saturation here: http://www.wicwas.com/sites/default/files/articles/Bee_Culture/BC2006-06.pdf


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>how do breeders manage to keep a queen from going off and mating with a random drone and creating hybrid offspring?

Mostly, they don't. Unless you are buying an II breeder queen, you are getting open mated queens. They are all mutts. They have been open mating for millions of years. The ones brought to the US have been open mating for hundreds of years.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

very interesting. thanks.


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

Buffaloelectric, queen producers select drone mother colonies based on the traits they want to see in the offspring of the queens they produce. They also create drone mother colonies headed up by queens instrumentally inseminated with highly selected drone semen chosen for a specific trait, an example, the VSH trait beekeepers like to see in their stock but rare if naturally selected. Overall though, they want a basket of traits to be represented by the drone stock. Those mother drone colonies, and capped drone comb from those selected mother colonies placed in other field colonies, are placed directly in the mating yards and up three miles away. This is to insure that the drone congregating areas (you need to read up on these) have plenty of drones and drones with the qualities the producers are looking for. Since queens mate with sometimes up to 30 drones, and with her hopefully mating with at least 17, there need to be a lot of drones available in drone congregating areas around the mating yard of queen producers who may have several hundred virgin queens competing for drones at one time. I wish a queen producer that may come on here would elaborate what drone volume level they target. 

Since the workers in a colony are diversified in their qualities because the virgin queen mates with multiple drones, the more drones she mates with, theoretically, the more diversified the qualities of the hive and the more likely it is to be able to survive different issues that may confront the hive. And hopefully those qualities are also accommodating to the beekeepers need's, like gentleness, good honey producer, low swarming tendency, buildup according the beekeepers needs, etcetera. Here's a good article to read: http://beesource.com/resources/usda/breeding-and-genetics-of-honey-bees/

This is something I've been trying to learn more about this year but I'm not what I'd call an experienced beekeeper, just a beekeeper fumbling my way through the dark. Hopefully my input helps some. There are some beeks that come on this forum who have been at this for a long time that can really share good info on this topic from a variety of perspectives, honey producers, pollinators, some overwinter in the north, some in the south, different uses of different honey bee subspecies due to their qualities. Hopefully this thread prompts some of that. Hint, hint, Oldtimer, Michael Palmer, Jim Lyon, Sqrck.........and a bunch of others.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

As Michael Bush mentions, almost all bees are mutts. Breeders are adept at "de-selecting" undesirable traits as well as promoting desirable traits.

The most we hope for is a definable range of "acceptable" genetic traits - like hitting a target. The ranges hopefully "tighten up" (improve) over the years, as an archer hopes to hit a smaller target farther away as he improves his skills.

Instrumental insemination allows us to speed up the improvement process by coupling well-chosen female bloodlines with complementary male counterparts (these are not "male bloodlines" - the males are haploid and are therefore tracked along the drone mother's bloodlines).

By raising great numbers of bee colonies and selecting only a small percent of the best of this generation's stock for breeding the following generations and killing the drones and replacing the queens of the non-conforming colonies, progress toward a genetic goal can be made.

Desirable traits do not magically appear - they have to be present, even if it is the only desirable trait in an otherwise terrible colony of bees. Therefore we must import the desired traits. We breed for strong expression of this one trait, promote the best (usually in a grading system with a high overall performance), cull the worst, and repeat the process.

Knowing which colonies have which traits is not an easy thing at the beginning of your career as a bee breeder. Learning the best ways to test for the various traits, collecting, maintaining the records, and developing an intuitive feel for what the data is telling us requires some experience. You'll want to get some excellent help. You can find a lot of the information here on Beesource, but it takes a while to filter through it all, digest it, develop it into a working system.

Breeding pre-suposes a fairly large apiary, a mastery of beekeeping, queen rearing, drone rearing, a working knowledge of genetics, record keeping, and mostly being a full-time beekeeper. One could apply a lot of the principles as a sideliner if one is astute, it's just that without the numbers of colonies of a large apiary, progress toward a genetic goal will be slower.

It's probably fair to say that scientists using I.I. might keep pure bloodlines, breeders just try to manage a decent collection of mutts with better-than-average traits, tuned to an area where the selected traits are well-matched to take advantage of available forages and surviving the winters.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>It's probably fair to say that scientists using I.I. might keep pure bloodlines...

But they would have to start with pure bloodlines...


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## Colobee (May 15, 2014)

kilocharlie said:


> The ranges hopefully "tighten up" (improve) over the years, as an archer hopes to hit a smaller target farther away as he improves his skills.


"Spot on"... from 40 yds. After ruining a few expensive arrows like this, I switched to shooting "five spots"


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Michael Bush said:


> >It's probably fair to say that scientists using I.I. might keep pure bloodlines...
> 
> But they would have to start with pure bloodlines...


Actually, they don't have to start with pure bloodlines. Selfing and back-crossing techniques available through I.I. allow things that nature does not. 

Through some of the genetic techniques / routines available, we can breed a lot of inbred bees, out-cross them with other impure mutts, "de-select" what we do not want, and end up with the traits we used to have with a "pure" bloodline.

I believe the New World Carniolan bloodlines were "re-purified" and brought back to a genetic "band" of traits that were believed to comply with the original Carniolan stock.

If you wish, I can look up the story and post it.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Colobee said:


> "Spot on"... from 40 yds. After ruining a few expensive arrows like this, I switched to shooting "five spots"
> View attachment 25872


And you call yourself Colobee instead of Robin Hood???


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

kilocharlie said:


> Actually, they don't have to start with pure bloodlines. Selfing and back-crossing techniques available through I.I. allow things that nature does not.
> 
> Through some of the genetic techniques / routines available, we can breed a lot of inbred bees, out-cross them with other impure mutts, "de-select" what we do not want, and end up with the traits we used to have with a "pure" bloodline.


Exactly correct. To say queen producers are selling mutts is simply ignorant. Some do of course. But, that is not the usual. I have bought open mated queens from commercial queen producers that were first class queens and I can tell are very close to as advertised genetics if not spot on. Those queens were good enough I hardly even consider them the same species as the crappy mutts and feral queens I have handled. They were also as good as the queens I have raised myself from II breeder queens. I honestly do not know how in the world the commercial queen producers I have dealt with can produce such an excellent product at the prices they charge. I am decent at raising queens and I sure could not be profitable at commercial prices.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

I guess I'll dare to open a can of worms...forgive me Michael 

When we start making genetically engineered bees, we will have almost absolute control over the bloodlines. Yeah, I know, so many non-scientists with "pro-green" attitudes *HATE* gmo's, and the fear is with good reason - done wrong, it is a scary thing. Done correctly so that nothing but beneficial traits show up, and the abnatural critters are kept separate from nature, gmo's could be our best friends. 

Imagine bees that are almost immune to mites, fly out in 38 degrees Fahrenheit air, gather pollen and nectar throughout the season, build up population very predictably, adjust for dry years, make honey by the ton, and sting bears but not beekeepers. (OK - that last one is stretching it  )

This is just a rosy snapshot of a possible future where everything went right. It is admittedly improbable, perhaps as improbable as throwing bricks and wet mortar into the air and they land in the shape of an outdoor barbecue. It's possible, just not very probable. Overcoming the politics would be akin to achieving world peace.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

Virtually every ecological disaster and genocidal movement has been an attempt to improve things.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

Yup. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.


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## BGhoney (Sep 26, 2007)

We could get to many feral hives if they were that tuff, I've heard around 1 in 10 swarms survive the first winter, if that number went up to 5 out of 10 we may have more than the planet can handle


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

Wouldn't if you kept selecting for best characteristics kind of funnel a few lines of bees together and eventually be crossbreeding them? If anyone knows a good book on bee genetics or genetics in general that could relate to bees, let me know. It's never too late to start and I've already read the three bee books I have multiple times.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Virtually every ecological disaster and genocidal movement has been an attempt to improve things.

Sevareid's Law:
"The leading cause of problems is solutions."--Eric Sevareid


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> Wouldn't if you kept selecting for best characteristics kind of funnel a few lines of bees together and eventually be crossbreeding them? If anyone knows a good book on bee genetics or genetics in general that could relate to bees, let me know. It's never too late to start and I've already read the three bee books I have multiple times.


Get a copy of Brother Adam's Breeding the Honeybee.

You might also like Breeding Super Bees by Steve Taber.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

Any chance you have read "Queen Rearing Essentials" by Lawrence john Connor and could compare it to your two suggestions? I'm always wary of buying a book in which Amazon doesn't have the Look Inside feature, but I am also wary of buying a forty dollar book.


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

I've read _Breeding the Honeybee_, by Brother Adam. It's a very good book on breeding honey bees and you can buy it on Abebooks.com for $15.

_Contemporary Queen Rearing_, by Harry Laidlaw Jr is also a good book. You can buy it through Dadant at a very fair price. 

There is also a section in _The Hive and the Honey Bee_ that was written by Harry Laidlaw and Robert Page that is good to read.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

buffaloeletric said:


> ... If anyone knows a good book on bee genetics or genetics in general that could relate to bees, let me know. ...


Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding by Harry H. Laidlaw, PhD. and Robert E. Page, PhD. Out of print, last I heard, but check with Dr. Larry Connor, Wicwas Press, if Dr. Page has re-licensed the rights on the book, or with Dr. Page himself at Arizona State University.

Elemental Genetics and Breeding of the Honeybee by Ernesto Guzman Novoa, PhD. University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada.


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## frustrateddrone (Jan 31, 2015)

Michael Bush said:


> >Virtually every ecological disaster and genocidal movement has been an attempt to improve things.
> 
> Sevareid's Law:
> "The leading cause of problems is solutions."--Eric Sevareid


Africanized bees.......... Good in theory, but who in a modernized day wants that type of angry bee, just to get more production? I've dealt with them and done a lot of reading up on them. In my opinion, they should have employed people to go out and search for any bee hives in a 20 mile radius of where the study was that the idiot removed the queen excluders. It's worth it VS what happened afterwards.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>In my opinion, they should have employed people to go out and search for any bee hives in a 20 mile radius of where the study was that the idiot removed the queen excluders. It's worth it VS what happened afterwards.

You know that story can't be true. The excluders would clog up with drones and everytime the hive was opened the drones would escape. You can't control genetics of a free flying hive with an excluder.


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

Michael Bush said:


> >In my opinion, they should have employed people to go out and search for any bee hives in a 20 mile radius of where the study was that the idiot removed the queen excluders. It's worth it VS what happened afterwards.
> 
> You know that story can't be true. The excluders would clog up with drones and everytime the hive was opened the drones would escape. You can't control genetics of a free flying hive with an excluder.


Who tried to control the genetics using a queen excluder?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

It is the mythology around Dr. Kerr and the "escape" of the Africanized honey bees in Brazil.


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

The way I remember the article reading was that there were queen and drone traps on the entrances, not queen excluders on the bottom boards. What is your version of the "Mythology?"


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

Michael Bush said:


> It is the mythology around Dr. Kerr and the "escape" of the Africanized honey bees in Brazil.


Oh. I never really knew how that had happened. I read the wikipedia version though just now, so now I know what you are referring to. 

I guess this is a good reason why we don't normally allow bees to be imported anymore.


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

According to this article, http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/ahb/inf15.html, it sounds like he was using a type of queen excluder to keep the drones and queen from leaving the hives. This guy was a noted geneticist and beekeeper too. To bad he's mostly remembered in this way.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>To bad he's mostly remembered in this way.

I agree. People had been importing and breeding exotic bees from all over the world all over north and south America but he got all the bad publicity. The fact is it was a very unexpected result all the way around. The USDA got stock from him and was doing the same here in the US... but they didn't get the blame for it...


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

I think it is the most successful publicly funded bee breeding initiative ever. It was designed to turn around the failing Brazilian honey industry, and it did.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

A large part of his bad reputation is because ilof humanitarian activism he participated in was frowned upon by the Brazilian govt.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

Yes Brazil is now a force in beekeeping. North America needs to go down there and learn how to work with African hybrids and develop sensible policies. They ain't going away.

The idea of a pure race is absurd. Even in a natural setting where no artificial bee movement, there would be genetic interaction of some sort. Some distinctive races may emerge given natural barriers to movement like high mountain ranges, water, and deserts. But usually it would be a gradient of traits with various allele frequencies shifting across a range. With all the bee movement and long history of beekeeping in Europe, there are no natural barriers to genetic flow. In this case some sort of genetic types are preserved through natural selection. If we stopped moving bees, the same thing could happen here. We would have local adaptation with bees and various traits emerging that are suited to local conditions. There would be subtle shifts in genetics across the range of honey bees. 

To focus too narrowly on traits like production and reliance on too few breeders lowers genetic diversity, making bees more susceptible to outbreaks of disease. Beekeepers that select from their own productive survivor stock may not reach the productivity of specialized breeder produced bees, but will have other traits of local adaptation and if generally followed over a long time, would build genetic diversity in bees.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

"Pure races" are not absurd - they are bees from a specific area that have not been out-crossed. They occur naturally. Humans inducing them to live in boxes and moving them with trucks and shipping the queens and germplasm on airplanes to other continents cause outcrossing. THAT might be absurd, but it is what we are dealing with.

Maintaining some bees of "pure races" is not a bad idea at all - the principle is called "heirloom stock" - it allows us to select certain traits and to introduce them to our apiaries. The outcrossed F1's resulting from the introduction can prove to be excellent bees, those that are not, they are not selected to make F2's.


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## deknow (Jul 17, 2006)

KC, one problem with the logic you post above is that when dealing with 'inbred lines' (fixed traits...probably more inbred than a 'pure race', but the same idea), the F1 is the goal. Selecting from good or bad F1 doesn't really matter if it falls apart in F2.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

I agree, Dean, it probably traces to my lax use of a definition of a "pure race". I think of all the right traits flying in perfect formation (same as the original race) as good enough to call "pure", whether or not it was arrived by natural inheritance, by inbred-outcross-deselect, or by whatever means necessary. That is technically incorrect, only by natural inheritance is truly "pure".

If a race loses it's properties at F2 level, we don't even have a race, do we? Part of the fight today is maintaining recessive trait expression. But if we keep producing and re-introducing the trait, we are likely to maintain some of it. If the natural pressures favor them, time should see the bees find a way to survive, and a significant percent will likely maintain the favored trait, as long as SOME bees with that trait survive.

The point I made about F2's (and later generations) is that they may have to go through more selection (and "de-selection") until a genetic hoop is jumped through.

Anybody have a reference regarding Dr. Kerr's mishap in 1956? I read about the efforts of collecting bees in the Great Rift Valley and down into South Africa. I'd heard a net was left open while opening the hives, but I'd be interested to find out how his hives were set up. I used to keep AHB crosses under 3 excluder cages and a net, far away from people and bears. No accidents until the sand shifted and smothered the entire hive.


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## RichardsonTX (Jul 3, 2011)

Brother Adam in _Breeding the Honeybee_ makes the point that Nature breeds for survival of the honey bee in it's environment but NEVER breeds the "ideal" or "perfect" honey bee suited to the demands of the beekeeper. However, he points out that Nature has provided Mankind with a wide variety of ingredients and with those ingredients we can breed bees with an economic goal in mind, essentially the only reason to breed bees. Otherwise we leave Nature to breed them. And Nature breeds them to survive, not to meet the demands of a beekeeper. 

If you think about that for a while it really make sense. It explains why some traits, like hygenic abilities, may not even be the most important trait (but may have a degree of importance) when considering the demands of certain beekeepers. It explains how important queen producers are to the industry, especially those producing breeder queens. It explains how it's important to even look at the surviving "feral" population as a separate group. After all, that's the "heirloom stock", like KC talks about above, that Nature has bred to survive in certain geographic localities. It explains why there is a big need for queens with enhanced hygenic abilities for beekeepers who put the most emphasis on keeping bees without using any chemical treatments. The list of reasons goes on. It's not that anyone is right or wrong.

Edit: I said that it's not that anyone is right or wrong. That's incorrect. It's a matter of opinion on that statement. I do think the quality of the products we consume from the hives is important from a lot of perspectives, including ethics. Being responsible in our breeding efforts is also important.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

kilocharlie said:


> "Pure races" are not absurd - they are bees from a specific area that have not been out-crossed. They occur naturally. Humans inducing them to live in boxes and moving them with trucks and shipping the queens and germplasm on airplanes to other continents cause outcrossing. THAT might be absurd, but it is what we are dealing with.
> 
> Maintaining some bees of "pure races" is not a bad idea at all - the principle is called "heirloom stock" - it allows us to select certain traits and to introduce them to our apiaries. The outcrossed F1's resulting from the introduction can prove to be excellent bees, those that are not, they are not selected to make F2's.


With bee movement, there is no purity. Hence the absurdity. At any rate nature is completely indifferent to purity. Mixing and experimentation is what she is about. Since beekeeping and bee movement started well before we understood genetics, and since relative complete genetic information is only recently available, there is no baseline of genetic information to prove "purity". In most cases genetics is a smooth function, or a gradient if you want to describe it mathematically. Possible discontinuities due to isolation have been mostly wiped out by artificial movement.


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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

If you read the thread about the German Black Bees, the question is raised about a possible exception to the massive outcrossing by movement. 

Don't believe that there are some un-mixed races out there? Go to Ferguson, Missouri and ask a Black person.  I'm just kidding. 

To a large extent you are right. The great majority of bees in USA are of mixed ancestry. Maybe not as mixed as my Cherokee / Scot / French / Welsh / German / Italian / Black / and God-knows-what-else butt, but at least a little contaminated with something. 

While I consider an I.I. line of inbred-hybrid or back-crossed line with all the traits described long ago as, for example A.M. carnica, as "as good as pure", like Dr. Cobey has done with the New World Carniolan bees, it makes the point. Scientists may keep "Pure" bloodlines, most breeders maintain good mixes.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

In the absence of artificial movement, and you were able to define a range of a supposed race, then you took a transect across the range sampling complete genetics as you went, you would find considerable differences. If that range bordered the range of another supposed race, then transected across the two ranges, there would be a gradient of allelic frequency across it. You are faced with the problem of how do you define race in the first place? At what point do you have a type specimen? It becomes arbitrary. If you were able to do complete genetic testing you may find that almost all alleles are spread across the entire range even if the relative frequencies change. The relative frequency is determined and maintained by local natural selection. The concept of race loses meaning, but having locally adapted critters that have certain physical characteristics and behaviours make sense. 

Now if gene flow was completely shut off for a while, then true speciation events can take place where isolated populations reintroduced to each other maintain genetic isolation (largely do not mate, or have infertile offspring). This can happen quite quick. That supposed bee races are so able to mix and mate so readily implies that true isolation may not have happened long enough, and gene flow of some sort has been ongoing for a long time, even in the absence of artificial movement.


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