# Breeding vs inbreeding



## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

You did not mention how many beekeepers there are around you, and how many hive they have and how far from you?

I have one real life example from Finland. There is a story to this. Once, as a 15-year-old-lad, I visited one of the legends of Finnish beekeeping, Fredrik Vesterinen, with our beekeeping club. He had about the finest Italian bee stock in whole Finland. They were producing 70 kg honey in a long time average, you could work them with a swimsuit, they swarmed so little that there was no point doing anything against and for the last point, which probably pleased this grand old bee breeder very much, they were beautifully uniform yellow in appearance. They live in Porvoo, near south coast and he had an island/some kind of isolated mating station to do matings, but that was used to make breeders. 

Now to your question: Fredrik Vesterinen said that his whole stock is descendants of a single breeder queen several decennials back.

I would not worry about inbreeding, it shows signs before anything catastrophic happens. Test any new material before wider use. 
If you use outside queens as drone mothers every year you lose your own bee stock very quickly.


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## herbhome (Oct 18, 2015)

All the great breeds of domestic livestock were produced by intensive inbreeding. This practice is necessary to flush undesirable recessives out. It also requires a strong and unsympathetic hand at culling out the individuals with those undesirable traits. Granted, with insects this is much easier- many of the faults in purebred pets is due to inbreeding without any checks.


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

The biggest issue with bees seems to be out breeding, not inbreeding 

"I don't have many colonies" "I keep pure" "I believe they are stronger than what people around me have" "I think I can totally control the drones" doesn't jive well together with the the realty of keeping bees


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

herbhome and Juhani - thanks for your replies. Culling is ok, but wouldn't want to cull a too high percentage. My question is in a way how heavy inbreeding I should aim for to get desirable traits. Given that I can mate queens with drones from only one colony in the first round of mating (I'm sure lots of people will differ) and later rounds of mating would be open mating - how would you set up your breeding? The open mating will receive drones from a dozen or two hobbyists (I live in a city), with queens of different origin. Keep in mind, I don't have many colonies, and keeping many lines is probably not realistic. I'm aiming for starting with 10 production colonies every year (have 14 going into the winter now) and will produce queens for own needs, to make up splits to sell and overwinter some extra queens to sell in spring.

msl - I was expecting a challenge to what I wrote, seems to be a very common type of reply here on beesource. I'm glad you removed some of the qualifiers I had added, so you get some more rhetorical oomph.
I don't have many colonies - how is that not jiving with reality?
I keep pure - my region has by law been a pure breeding region for carnica for some decades. Although that's not in place anymore, the beekeeping organisation hasn't heard of anyone keeping anything else, and aggression has not been a problem in the bees, but noone can have a 100 % guarantee.
I believe my hives are stronger - at least with some TLC, because the people around me are hobbyists with few hives, and don't migrate to the late heather flow, which is very beneficial for overwintering strength. I also feed them winter stores earlier than others, while there are still summer bees, so I don't sacrifice so many winter bees on that task. The TLC part is stimulative feeding which others around me might also do, but I seriously doubt they're willing to unite 2 of their 3 colonies to get an early drone colony.
I think I can totally control the drones early in the season - because I can set up a drone colony that's much stronger much earlier than anything around me. There could of course be drone layers around, but drones reared in worker cells are less likely to mate, and they have a greatly diminished amount of sperm - in practice of no consequence.


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## Buzz-kill (Aug 23, 2017)

herbhome said:


> All the great breeds of domestic livestock were produced by intensive inbreeding. This practice is necessary to flush undesirable recessives out. It also requires a strong and unsympathetic hand at culling out the individuals with those undesirable traits. Granted, with insects this is much easier- many of the faults in purebred pets is due to inbreeding without any checks.


Wrong. Inbreeding does not remove "undesirable recessives". Inbreeding increases homozygosity and thus greatly increases the chance that detrimental genes will be expressed in the population. That is why purebred dogs and other human created organisms have persistent expression of detrimental traits. Have you ever heard of hybrid vigor? Hybrid crosses outperform the parental lines precisely because it reduces inbreeding. Breeding fixes alleles in the population and because of linkage it is impossible to select for any trait without fixing alleles in other traits that may not be advantageous to the organism.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Norbee said:


> herbhome and Juhani - thanks for your replies. Culling is ok, but wouldn't want to cull a too high percentage. My question is in a way how heavy inbreeding I should aim for to get desirable traits.


It all depends on your ability to control matings. If you really can control your matings, as you insist, despite the fact that you have beekeeping neighbors, it can be a problem.

Real life example from year 2009 in my internet pages, www.buckfast.fi, tells more:
"Halusin viime vuonna B139 pesän geenejä ”tiiviimpään muotoon” sisäsiitosparituksen avulla. Paritin Haukkamaalla B139:n tyttäriä B139 kuhnureilla. Koska aiemman kokemuksen perusteella tiesin, että kokeilu voi päättyä huonosti, tein toisen tytärjoukon parituksen Kurjenkylässä B89:llä. Nyt on viidestä sisäsiitos -parituksen saaneesta vain yksi elossa, toisen parituksen saaneista kaikki 8 ovat hengissä. Sitä saa mitä tilaa."

but because it is in Finnish I´ll translate it to you:

"I wanted to have my breeder B139 in a more compact form in means of inbreeding, get its good qualities better "packed" in same individuals. To do this I mated in Haukkamaa mating station B139 daughters with B139 drones. From previous experience I could expect troubles, and therefore I made another mating in Kurjenkylä mating station, mating B139 queens with B89 drones. Today (year 2010) of those inbred queens (B139xB139) are alive only one, from the other mating all 8 are alive. You get what you order."

But, as a side note: with luck this one B139xB139 which was still alive in one years age, could be a super breeder, it could have the ability to give me uniform offspring, pure B139. Just what I wished to have.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

We could also do it in Swedish, Juhani 

You seem to have done quite a bit of breeding. I can imagine mating virgins with drones from the same mother would lead to problems. As you say, she might be good as a breeder, but would have shotgun brood, I suppose. You think I should inbreed a line or two a bit for breeders, and then outcross them to drones from another good colony to get good production queens? To inbreed a bit, would you use sisters for grafting and drones? In that case, should I opt for sisters from controlled mating with 1 drone donor colony, for open mated sisters or for one of each? Just trying to get a grasp of the basics of this


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

I slimed it down for clarity.. I don't write particularly well so don't take my post the wrong way I am offten short and to the point 
trying again, a little more long winded
A small time guy is going to have a hard time controaling the DCAs in there area and keeping things "pure", especially as when they are migratory.... aside from a hypothetical geographically isolated land race, or the abilty of AHB to recombine after out crossing , there is very little "pure" in the modern bee world. 
how far out side of your mating yard are you planning to set your drone colony? say you put it 1-2 km to the south, what happens when your queens fly N/E/W? 

Mid sized hobby beekeepers seem quite often to feel there bees and there skills and better then those around them. This cognitive bias is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect (AKA 3rd year beekeeper syndrome :lpf. You discount your neahobors as "hobbyists with few hives" yet only have 14 your self.... and say you have 12-24 of them in flight range...

If it was realistic for a beekeeper with 14 hives to contoral the drone stock while surrounded by other beekeepers, our world would be very different and we would likely have a lot more mite resistant stocks and localy adapted bees. 

I also don't see the early crop of queens working out very well.... rearing them so they are taking mating flights before the local stock has been triggered to have drones flying seems like a way to get poor quality queens(poorly reared, poorly mated)... at least thats what the big guys would say...
Not only do you have to feed/push the drone colonly, you have to do the same to a bunch of other hives to build up eunf resources for the cell builder and mating nucs.... and then need good enuf weather the virgins and drones will be flying... all because you think this one hive is sooo much better. 

My thought is your doing a lot of work for not....If your idea worked reasonably well it would be common place, early season queens are in high demand and fetch top $$
Goood luck and by all means up date us next spring with your results


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## herbhome (Oct 18, 2015)

Buzz-kill said:


> Wrong. Inbreeding does not remove "undesirable recessives". Inbreeding increases homozygosity and thus greatly increases the chance that detrimental genes will be expressed in the population. That is why purebred dogs and other human created organisms have persistent expression of detrimental traits. Have you ever heard of hybrid vigor? Hybrid crosses outperform the parental lines precisely because it reduces inbreeding. Breeding fixes alleles in the population and because of linkage it is impossible to select for any trait without fixing alleles in other traits that may not be advantageous to the organism.


That is exactly how it works. The animals that express the undesirable trait are destroyed. Every pure breed of livestock is created this way. The culls are eaten not bred. Problem with dogs, horses etc is breeders want to make a sale instead of culling out the bad stock. Of course I've heard of hybrid vigor, it is central to any good beef operation. In general, it is only good for the first 2 crosses-F1 and F2. Starts to get much weaker after that.


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## Juhani Lunden (Oct 3, 2013)

Norbee said:


> We could also do it in Swedish, Juhani


Javist!



Norbee said:


> You think I should inbreed a line or two a bit for breeders, and then outcross them to drones from another good colony to get good production queens?


It is not necessary to inbreed to make a breeder, they may be pure enough already. In all inbreeding you also lose something. 
But if you need to do it, the answer is: In principle yes.



Norbee said:


> To inbreed a bit, would you use sisters for grafting and drones? In that case, should I opt for sisters from controlled mating with 1 drone donor colony, for open mated sisters or for one of each?


I don´t understand your question totally. There are several levels of inbreeding, milder and stronger. Have a look in some bee breeding book. Queen Rearing and Bee Breeding by Harry Laidlaw and Robert Page for instance. Mating sisters with brothers is one of the strongest ones, and I would not recommend that for a beginner, because the hive which result may be hard to keep alive.

To make a drone congregation area you need minimum 6 strong hives.

Before you have actually tested your mating area, it is wise not to fool oneself that you can get any inbreeding with open matings. Testing is easy to do with couple, maybe 5, Apidea mating nucs. Just put in queens, 2dl bees and food. No drones! Let them mate normally for 3 weeks. If you get no laying queens then you got a good place.
(keep your own hives drones inside with queen excluders, of course!)


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

msl - you know nothing about beekeeping in Norway, but keep on making your assumptions, no matter what I write. I'm not going to offer you advice on beekeeping in your local conditions.

You were actually close to giving me advice on breeding with asking about the drone colony. I've been thinking of using one drone colony and placing it in the mating yard. Do you have any knowledge whether that is going to be insufficient? (You see, I'm quite aware that there are lots of things within beekeeping I don't know.)


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Juhani, thanks for the tip on testing whether I actually do control the drone population.

6 drone colonies - is that a minimum requirement regardless of the number of queens I want mated? How many drone brood frames would that translate into?

I guess I should get at queen rearing book. I've seen Laidlaw and Page is highly recommended many places, so I'm sure it's a good start.


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## Branman (Aug 20, 2003)

Your queens are flying much farther away to mate than the same yard's drones, are you setting up drone yards far away from your mating yard? Typically queens don't mate with drones from the same yard. Or are you saying you control the mating because all the beekeepers in the area have the same type of bee you do?


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Branman - it seems logical that the queen and drones would fly to mate in such a way as to reduce the chance of inbreeding. If the queen tries to fly far away, but only find drones close to her apiary, it would seem logical that she mated there. I read a different thread where someone said that in the UK they made studies showing mating with own drones when there were not sufficient drones from other colonies. I've seen some posts recommending drone colonies in a perimeter 1 km away from the mating yard, others recommend not more than 0,5 km, others again recommend 0-1 km. This would only be a point early in the season, if I get drone colonies producing before others.

There was an interesting link about DCAs, that said a minimum of 1000 drones were necessary to establish a stable DCA. http://www.biobees.com/library/resea...ationAreas.pdf Drones from one apiary might fly to several DCAs, and probably not enough is known about how they disperse. Therefore 1000 drones in a colony is probably not enough to create a DCA.

When open mating, it's safe to assume that all beekeepers in my area keep carniolans, so open mating is ok. I'm looking to extend our short and variable season when it comes to queen rearing - some years no queens are able to mate because of cool and bad weather even in the best part of the season. Starting early to get an extra attempted round of mating is a way to hedge my bets.


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## Branman (Aug 20, 2003)

The other reason they do this is because drones use an incredible amount of fuel when they fly and have to remain active in the DCA for a period of time before they fly back. If they had to fly far away from the hive, the drain in honey resources on the hive would increase drastically an they wouldn't be able to remain in the DCA for any length of time.

I couldn't get the link to work. Edit: I found it, cool page!


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## Stephenpbird (May 22, 2011)

Norbee said:


> I guess I should get at queen rearing book. I've seen Laidlaw and Page is highly recommended many places, so I'm sure it's a good start.


Breeding techniques and selection of the honeybee, Friedrich Ruttner. 

Mating biology of honey bees, Koeniger and Co.

These two would be most helpful for what you are trying to do.


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## Cuttingedgelandinc (Mar 3, 2015)

Juhani Lunden said:


> Javist!
> 
> 
> It is not necessary to inbreed to make a breeder, they may be pure enough already. In all inbreeding you also lose something.
> ...


Very interesting method!


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

> msl - you know nothing about beekeeping in Norway,


then by all means please educate me, I am here to learn more then anything elce....
For the most part I am talking about basic stuff that is mostly across the board were ever you are 
Drones typically fly 0.5-2km, Queens typically fly 3-5 km.. 
its a time on target thing. 
Drones have about 30min of flight time before they need to eat, selection favors the ones that stay close to the hive as they spend more time in the DCA and less in transit so their chances of mating are better.
Queens don't need to spend much time in the DCA, they get there and mate quickly, so they can range father, selection favors the avoidance of inbreeding.

as with anything bees there is always exceptions, but its a poor plan to bank on them 



> If your idea worked reasonably well it would be common place,


However I did find a least one queen breeder (Liz Huxter, BC) who has brought in drone colonies from places that build up earlier to provide selected drone stock


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

Stephenpbird - thanks for the tips.


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## Norbee (May 8, 2016)

msl - imho, if you're here to learn, you should tune down your know-it-all a few notches. The beekeepers who have done some queen rearing in the area have always been concerned with preparing drone colonies early. The reason for trying to get drones early is our variable season, because you don't know whether there'll be good enough weather for mating flights, and the chances are almost just as good a few weeks before swarming time. It's a hit and miss thing. And what is swarming time? The onset of swarming season is to a large part dependent on the strength of the colony after winter, and through our management we beekeepers affect that. A bee from the Balkans locally adapted when they're not able to survive winter without beekeeper intervention? -Well, to a certain degree, of course.


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