# Drones determine gentleness?



## minz (Jan 15, 2011)

Anybody else heard of this or is it just his theory?
I was watching a video UoG Honey Bee Research Center and they were discussing their Buckfast Queen Mating Station on Thorah Island. and had said that the Drones determine the gentle behavior of the bees and the females are the greater contributor of the Hygienic behavior. 
My bees in Damascus have been getting real mean (not only stapling my socks to my ankles but the neighbors two houses down and the road crews. The ones in Boring rarely get mated and returned. The ones in Estacada are the nicest bees that I have. I have brought in 4 hives from the Estacada yard to graft from and do a cell builder and after the video I am thinking that I need to run the mating nucs back up the hill?
Anybody else heard of this or is it just his theory?


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## tech.35058 (Jul 29, 2013)

I have heard somewhere that drones genetics contributed to temperment, but I am not sure if I believe everything I hear .


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## Eikel (Mar 12, 2014)

The drone only passes on genetics, so like tech, I'm not buying into that one yet. I do believe location and the local genetics do play a part in any queens open mated at that location. Know of one location that queens open mated there produce consistently hotter offspring.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

I just love it when an new self proclaimed expert comes along and sets our understanding of science back several hundred years. Next up: The earth is flat and the center of the universe so if you sail west you will fall off the edge and presumably go straight to hell.


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## minz (Jan 15, 2011)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I just love it when an new self proclaimed expert comes along and sets our understanding of science back several hundred years.


I don’t know the ‘The University of Guelph’ seems like a real deal when I look it up. They claim to have started doing research when they were still the Ontario Agricultural college in 1964.


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## Bob Anderson (Jun 13, 2014)

I have also heard that drones determine gentleness. I believe that I heard it at the Purdue University Bee labs and that the statement comes from the work of Prof Ernesto Guzman, an internationally recognized bee researcher and currently head of the University of Guelph bee labs. Don't ask me to explain it genetically other than to wave my hands and say that perhaps there is linkage between sex determination and gentleness, either directly or epigenetically...


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Bob Anderson said:


> I believe that I heard it at the Purdue University Bee labs and that the statement comes from the work of Prof Ernesto Guzman, an internationally recognized bee researcher and currently head of the University of Guelph bee labs.


https://academic.oup.com/jhered/art...Paternal-Effects-on-the-Defensive-Behavior-of


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## 1102009 (Jul 31, 2015)

Many thanks for that link, David!


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

SiWolKe said:


> Many thanks for that link, David!


You're welcome.


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## Bob Anderson (Jun 13, 2014)

Riverderwent said:


> https://academic.oup.com/jhered/art...Paternal-Effects-on-the-Defensive-Behavior-of


Yes, thanks for the link. 

I guess I heard it at Purdue because Greg Hunt is a co-author... Now I'll have to read it to find out how to wave my arms.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

minz said:


> My bees in Damascus have been getting real mean (not only stapling my socks to my ankles but the neighbors two houses down and the road crews.


I would requeen those bees. Where did those queens come from?


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Riverderwent said:


> https://academic.oup.com/jhered/art...Paternal-Effects-on-the-Defensive-Behavior-of


Nice link limited to one particular cross. But hybrids are often mean bees. Brother Adam noted that in some cases hybrids were way meaner than either pure bee. This study showed a modest difference depending on if the drone was European mated to an Africanized queen or Africanized drone mated to a European queen. Either cross was certainly more aggressive than pure Europeans and in some cases even worse than pure Africanized. Suppose you did the same study only using docile and aggressive Europeans. Do you think you would see a paternal effect? I sure do not see aggression as hard to control by simply replacing queens. If I believed this study had anything to do with the behavior of pure Europeans I should be killing those hives to get rid of their drones as I raise almost all my own queens.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> I sure do not see aggression as hard to control by simply replacing queens.


I agree. Replacing the queen also replaces the drones. The new queen, once mated, carries the genetic material from the new drones with which she mated.


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## Patrick Cassidy (Apr 8, 2013)

I also heard this recently. My source said it was roughly 70-30 split. Drones controlling temperament and color and queens controlling hygiene and ....something, can't remember, notes are in the truck.
But like everything, those genetics are only a predisposition to be that way, other factors can weigh in overpowering the genetic predisposition.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

Richard Cryberg said:


> If I believed this study had anything to do with the behavior of pure Europeans I should be killing those hives to get rid of their drones as I raise almost all my own queens.


If you believed the study, you would not need to kill the drones because they don't have the gametes from the drones with which the queen mated. If you don't accept the study, then you may want to eliminate the drones. But you could do that by sequestering the drones using smoke and a couple of queen excluders rather than killing the hive.


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## Richard Cryberg (May 24, 2013)

Riverderwent said:


> If you believed the study, you would not need to kill the drones because they don't have the gametes from the drones with which the queen mated. If you don't accept the study, then you may want to eliminate the drones. But you could do that by sequestering the drones using smoke and a couple of queen excluders rather than killing the hive.


I believe the results as reported are accurate within experimental error. Those results say that perhaps 60% of temper comes from drones and 40% from queens. That kind of split is not particularly over whelming. A little epigenetic imprinting could lead to this size effect in this particular experiment. Such imprinting is usually erased in the next generation. I emphasize usually. It can also carry over for several generations and depending on the details even skip a generation or two in terms of expression. Expression can also be changed by local current conditions. The whole epigenetic thing is horribly complicated and unpredictable. If you want to get some idea of how bad epigenetics can get just look up callipyge in sheep. There you can see reversion, skipped generations and sex mediated expression all for the same epigenetic change that is not even inside a gene.

What bothers me is to take a single study like this and leap to some general conclusion about drones being responsible for temper and queens for some other trait. You could easy enough repeat the experiment with some other European race of bees and come up with very different or even inverted results if it is an epigenetic imprinting effect.

I have bred lots of different animals and nearly every hobby group has some saying along the lines of traits A come from the male and traits B come from the female. As a general rule such wisdom is simply old wives tales that either fail totally on testing or rarely are the result of epigenetics that will hold true for one or two generations and then fail. Of course in some cases in some species sex linkage can play a role. But, honey bees do not have the sex linkage problem.


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## texanbelchers (Aug 4, 2014)

Richard Cryberg said:


> What bothers me is to take a single study like this and leap to some general conclusion about drones being responsible for temper and queens for some other trait.


I'm clueless when it comes to these genetic discussions, but I agree with this statement. A single study doesn't prove a hypothesis. The statement in the video makes it sound like a hard proven fact, but when looking earlier this year I couldn't find anything else to support it. This doesn't confirm it is not true, but it is suspect.

I was looking because I need to raise queens, but can't control the drone population. If the drones control behavior "outside the box", then I should only purchase known laying queens instead of risking poor behavior because of feral AHB drones.


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## minz (Jan 15, 2011)

Riverderwent said:


> I would requeen those bees. Where did those queens come from?


I usually demaree up a hive in the spring and take the supercedure cells to a queen castle. 
These bees fly in the rain and here it means that they are 2x of any other hive I own. I just could no longer deal with them. After my grafted cells were ready every one of the mating nucs got a frame of brood until the queen had no place left to hide. I killed her with the hive tool before I had time to reconsider. I moved all the mating nucs to the nice yard. I left that hive in place and gave it a queen cell. 
The next day I was in the gardens, easy 100 yds away and got stung in the ear. We had a nice 48 degree rainy day and that hive also got taken to Estacada.


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## Riverderwent (May 23, 2013)

> I moved all the mating nucs to the nice yard. I left that hive in place and gave it a queen cell.


Is the hive with the queen cell in Damascus where the mean bees are or somewhere else?


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## minz (Jan 15, 2011)

Anything with a queen cell got moved to the nice yard (Estacada). The last hive I waited until I had all of the foragers and moved it in the rain at night. The mating nucs I moved as soon as they were made up. 
It would have been a good experiment to put grafted cells from the same frame to two different yards and see the results. I was not thinking experimentally, just of comfort.


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## newbeek79 (Mar 21, 2017)

In doing some research after attending the NCSBA conference and attending all of the sessions, the conclusion is that the drones contribute half of the genetic material to the female offspring of the queens that she produces. The drones she produces only have her genetics. So if you have drones from hives in the area of your apiary that have aggressive tendencies, or any other negative tendency, that will show up in your new queens. One of the suggestions was to provide queens to all the neighbors that have hives, and then you can start to improve the success of the your queens and improve the genetics. This was stated several different speakers at the meeting.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Every worker gets a random set of genes from their mother (the queen). Every drone has nothing but identical sperm because they only have one set of genes to contribute. So if one drone carries an "aggression" gene there will be a lot of offspring with those genes. This is not particular to aggression. These related workers who have the same father, are more closely related that a sibling in a species with diploid males. We call these subfamilies for that reason.


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