# Queen mating



## thomas (Apr 23, 2006)

Hello

Today a freind of mine came by to look at my girls and as we talked he asked me something that i had to come here and get information from. He asked if he ordered a package of bees and after they got all set up what would happen if the queen dies so i told him he could order one or let her fly out and mate. Now he has a bunch of italians and was going to order some russians so he wanted to know if they mated with the virgin russian queen would the offspring come out all italians i told him they would be mixed but not pure italians is there something i am missing all help would be great.

Tom


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

If you have a pure blooded queen (for this discussion we will say Russian) and she is open mated, all of her drones will be pure blooded Russian and all of the workers and queens from her will be of unknown mixture but at least 50% Russian. 

If she's mated only with Russian drones then her offspring will all be Russian. If so, queens from her will be 100% Russian and if open mated will have worker offspring that are at least 50% Russian and drones that are 100% Russian.


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## thomas (Apr 23, 2006)

Thank you 

Mr. Bush now i see so if i was to get carni queen and she was mated with a italian drone then i would have half and half. I have alot more to learn but is it possible if you have a queen that was half and half and bred her with carni drones then would her offspring be close to pure or still half and half.

Tom


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## wayacoyote (Nov 3, 2003)

Thomas,
the females will always be half of their father and half of their mother (as I understand it)... And sons are identical proportion to the mother. So take what the mother is and divide in half, and add the father's percentage to it. For example 1:
Mother is 50/50 Russian and Italian
Father is Carni
Daughters are 25 Russian, 25 Italian, and 50 Russian.
Drones are 50/50 Russian and Italians.

Example 2)
Mother is 50/50 Russian and Italian
Father is Russian
Daughters are 75 Russian and 25 Italian
Drones are 50/50 again.

Sounds fairly straight forward, except for most of us, since we allow our virgins to fly and mate in the air, we have no idea who they mate with. Plus, each virgin will mate with multiple males (this has been proven to be beneficial to their survival by giving them diversity). This means that your hive is a wide mix of half-sisters. But the Drones are always full brothers (and the same percentages as their mother) as they have no fathers.

The next time you look at your bees, look at the various color paterns. This will give you an idea of how mixed the fathers are. 

Also for most of us who raise our own queens or purchase typical queens (out-mated, aka mated in the air) , we don't have pureblood queens. Garanteed pureblood queens are expensive and usually only of interest to big-time breeders or scientists, etc. Many of us would rather have mix with local, "surviver" or feral origins.

Great question. 
Waya


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## wayacoyote (Nov 3, 2003)

One more thing. What is you took the daughter of Example 2 and bred her with a 50/50 drone? Gets mind boggling soon, doesn't it?
Waya


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## Radar (Sep 4, 2006)

wayacoyote

>(Example 2)
Mother is 50/50 Russian and Italian
Father is Russian
Daughters are 75 Russian and 25 Italian
Drones are 50/50 again.<

>bred her with a 50/50 drone? Gets mind boggling soon, doesn't it?<


I feel reluctant to write this in view of recent  hostile  replies on beesource and possibly showing my ignorance.

I have always understood that a queen could only pass one chromosome to a drone, but in order to be a 50/50 drone she would require passing two chromosomes.

The way I see it is 50% of drones would be pure Russian and 50% pure Italian. 

The daughters by my understanding would be 50% pure Russian and the other 50% would be hybrids Russian/Italian and Italian/Russian in equal proportions.

This is how it is with me, if I am wrong please correct me, but be gentle.


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## cmq (Aug 12, 2003)

The queen has a full set of chromosomes (32 for Apis Mellifera), also referred as the diploid number. The drone only has 1/2 or 16 chromosomes (known as haploid).
When an egg is laid the queen passes on a unique combination of the 32 available chromosomes to the egg (which only contains 16 chromosomes). If the egg is not fertilized it will result in a drone (haploid ... 16 chromosomes). If the egg is fertilized the 16 chromosomes donated via the egg will fuse with the 16 chromosomes donated via the drone's sperm and will hopefully result in a diploid female (Worker/Queen). If however the two sex alleles are identical the offspring will be a diploid drone and will show up in the comb as a "empty cell" due to worker cannibilazition.
Therefore, since all sperm from a single drone are identical, all variation coming from a single drone insemination will be attributed to the queen.
That said, and to answer your question. There will be NO "pure blood" drones at this point.

[ January 15, 2007, 01:11 PM: Message edited by: BEESURV ]


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## sierrabees (Jul 7, 2006)

To complicate things a little more, I can't say if this applies to arthropods but in vertibrates there is a phenomina called recombination to often occurs after fertilization. In recombination, gentetic material from one set of chromosomes trades places with the equivilant genetic material in the other set of chromosomes.

It follows then that in the honey bee the drone would not have recombination and it's genetics would be straightforward 50/50. The female ofspring however would have some percentage with a direct copy of one chromosome from the queen and one from the drone allowing for two variations. There would be another unknown percentage where niether of the halves of the chromosome pairs were a perfect match to either of the parents due to recombination.

Again, this occurs in vertibrates. I can't say that it holds true in all animals with sexual reproduction.


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

"bred her with a 50/50 drone? Gets mind boggling soon, doesn't it?"


50/50 drone does not truely exist. Recombination events are rare and tend to most often exchange information at the tip of most chromosomes. Recombination events mixing *exactly* 50% of the chromosomal information would be uncommon, even in a queen who had a russian father and an italian mother. On *average* the queen in question could mate with a sample of drones that would total roughly a 50/50 mix, but this is NOT the same as an individual drone being half russian and half italian. For this reason (and others), most breeders find that the genetics of the queen is far more important than that of the drones. This is also explains the peculiarity of honeybee polyspermic matings--->without them, genetic diversity would be lost in just a few generations. Incidentally, Brother Adam strongly recommended using Carni drones rather than Carni queens. I think that this was the case because of the very desirable combination of fecundity and disinclination to swarm traits found in Italian queens.

[ January 16, 2007, 06:33 AM: Message edited by: Aspera ]


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## wayacoyote (Nov 3, 2003)

Ah, I'll sit corrected. I was going on the assumption of the rrecombination. I Did repeat entomology, but must not have done too well the second time. Anyway, the genetics do get rather mind boggling. 
Waya


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## olympic (Aug 20, 2006)

>>Incidentally, Brother Adam strongly recommended using Carni drones rather than Carni queens. <<
Aspera: Where did you get this information from? Can you provide some reference.
Best regards
Olympic


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## sierrabees (Jul 7, 2006)

<Recombination events are rare and tend to most often exchange information at the tip of most chromosomes.>


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Some references about Brother Adam work :

http://www.beekeeping.com/articles/us/adam.htm
http://perso.fundp.ac.be/~jvandyck/homage/books/FrAdam/breeding/

if I'm not mistaken one of this mentions the preference for Carni drones over Carni queens.

Regards,


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## sierrabees (Jul 7, 2006)

<Recombination events are rare and tend to most often exchange information at the tip of most chromosomes.>

Right, but minute genetic changes produce mostly no noticable effect, some some undesirable or even lethal effects, and a very few instances of desirable effects. Which of these changes fall in which catagory depends largely on the environment the individual finds it'self in.
With the huge percentage of diploid individuals in a bee colony that are not reproductive, and the drones not being subject to recombination because they are haploid, only changes in the queen can cause an effect on the currently existing population. It still does complicate the genetic distribution of traits we are trying to promote.

<most breeders find that the genetics of the queen is far more important than that of the drones. >

Unless they do their breeding by II and strictly control the drone pool. Open breeding is a poker hand.

[ January 17, 2007, 08:34 AM: Message edited by: sierrabees ]


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## cmq (Aug 12, 2003)

Brother Adam did mention his preference of carnie drones over carni queens. When you are talking about the "run of the mill" Carnies ... which I have witnessed, I agree whole heartedly. The F1's tended to be ill & wouldn't stay in the hive! Not so with selected carnies, a.k.a. New World Carnolians.


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

Sierrabees,

I was not referring to diploid drones, which do not reproduce. I was referring to the recombination events in the queen during oogenesis. Drones, by genetic definition, cannot produce recombinant sperm because of there haploid state. 


Olympic,

The info about carnies came from a book titled something like, "Breeding Bees at Buckfast Abby". The parts on II, are a bit out of date, but it is a book that I would recommend to the hobbiest keeper, research scientist and commercial producer. His practical writings are amazingly detailed and aurguments clearly explained. The second link above has the book that I am referring to.

[ January 18, 2007, 09:20 AM: Message edited by: Aspera ]


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## beemandan (Dec 5, 2005)

thomas wrote ' i told him he could order one or let her fly out and mate'

thomas, I'm sure that I misunderstood, but in case I didn't, if your friend buys a queen or bees with a queen...the queen he gets will have already been mated.


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Aspera,

recombination being a rare event and change of information ocurring at the tip of cromossomes are a verified fact ? Or is there a well known biological mechanism for this to happen ?

It has been a long time I strongly believe drones are always pure blood, but lately I got suspicious they may not be, but I really would like to know and understand the reason.

Regards,


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## BerkeyDavid (Jan 29, 2004)

The only thing I think is missing from this thread is the fact that the Queen mates with multiple drones. So this may explain some of the questions asked by some folks here.


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## JBJ (Jan 27, 2005)

I think it is fascinating that a group of drones can be 100 % related to there mother but still show some genetic diversity between them. Recombination may explain some of this, but what about "crossing over"? I recall this term from my college genetics course and am not totally clear that this is a separate process than "recombination"? I have heard that "crossing over" is more common in haplodiploid organisms.

Anybody out there working on finding out on which chromosomes the various genes for VSH or SMR reside? Now that the bee genome has been decoded I suspect we should start to see specific gene locations mapped in detail and other dividends from the bee genome project.
JBJ


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## DaDa (Apr 3, 2006)

Brother Adam strongly recommended using Carni drones rather than Carni queens.

Yes he did for crossings between buckfast and carnica. The crossing BuckfastxCarnica is very prolific.


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## DaDa (Apr 3, 2006)

Brother Adam strongly recommended using Carni drones rather than Carni queens.

Yes he did for crossings between buckfast and carnica. The crossing BuckfastxCarnica is very prolific.


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

Marcelo,

Recombination events are relatively rare in nature, except for certain "hotspots" on the chromosome. This was initially proposed by a fly geneticist name Morgan almost a century ago. More recently a technique called quantitative trait analysis (QTL) has given us new insights into the relationship between parentage and offspring. Basically, two processes major processes exchange genetic information in the offspring. One process is the recombination event which sometimes only happens once per a chromosome (especially on short chromosomes). The second process is the segregation of chromosomes, in which entire chromosomes are moved around. The closer that a gene is to the centromere (the "center") of a chromosome, the less likely it is to swap places on the other redundant gene. Moreover, there are also maternal imprinting effects: getting the same gene from your father is not always the same as getting it from your mother. The genome is more like a small ecosystem than a blueprint.


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## JBJ (Jan 27, 2005)

Aspera, you sound well versed in genetics so maybe you could elucidate the difference between "crossing over" and "recombination"? Also is true that haplodiploid organisms have a higher degree of crossing over than in most diploid critters?
JBJ


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

They are different terms for the same process. The biological importance is not yet clear for these events, but usually increased genetic diversity, repairing the chromosomes and gene-gene competition are sighted as common benefits. As Sierrabees and others have noted, drones are haploid and cannot undergo this process when they manufacture sperm. Even in the queen however, two genes side by side are likely to be passed together into the same egg. This is called "gene linkage" and the reason that unrelated traits such are often inherited together. The crossing over events become more of an influencial factor in the F2 generation, when the traits are better blended together. I can't speak as to differences between haplodiplod and diploid/diploid systems. What I can say is what most of you already know: Most traits are controlled by multiple genes, and recombination can dissemble, assemble and leave some traits as good packages. Brother Adam really does a much better job explaining it then I can, and makes many relevant comments such as 'propolisation traits are difficult to select for' etc. The QTL work should tell us a lot about gene combinations once we get a few more genomes sequenced.


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Guys,

I've been trying to understand (a little more at least) this subject for a long time. 

Last week I started to read a book that could help you the way it helped me. "The Selfish Gene" by Richar Dawkins.


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Guys,

I've been trying to understand (a little more at least) this subject for a long time. 

Last week I started to read a book that could help you the way it helped me. "The Selfish Gene" by Richar Dawkins.


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## Focus on Bees (Mar 6, 2006)

I've never heard of it here, has anyone else ?


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## JBJ (Jan 27, 2005)

It was required reading for Evolutionary Biology. Very entertaining and thought provoking if I recall.
JBJ


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

Dawkins is an excellent writer, but not always a very nice person. "The Selfish Gene" is one of the books that proposes that it is *genes* not organisms that compete with one another for a larger role in the next generation. This idea currently seems to be more correct for things with very large genomes, such as "higher" plants. Although probably correct, the idea is very difficult to test and therefore theory rather than empirical science.


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Aspera,

some articles had been published by both ABJ and BC last year regarding genetic research about africanized bees arriving to US territory. Have you read them ?

Some people believed these bees would be a hybrid (original brasilian brought from Africa crossed with EHB), but it turned out to be of the same genetic lineage of those original from Brasil. Does recombination could explain it ? Or lack of it ?


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

I only read the ABJ articles. Mr. Fisher, Bjorn and others have also led some good dicussions on this topic previously. My current understanding is that AHB drones outcompete the Europeans and that queens mated to European drones produce less viable, less swarmy, less fucund colonies. Anyone is welcome to jump in here, but I was also led to believe that ferals will become at least partially Africanized even in relatively cold climates such as the upper midwest. 
I'm practicing my queen marking and going towards breeders using AI and selecting for gentle temperments.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

>My current understanding is that AHB drones outcompete the Europeans 

That's part of it, but possibly a greater factor is usurpation. Here, a small swarm lands near the entrance of the european colony. Gradually, the swarm cluster enters the hive, balling their queen to protect her. The european queen is killed, and the african takes over. The european genes disappear. The incidence of usurpation is very high, at some times of the year. I've heard 20% is common in the fall in the southwest.


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## Aspera (Aug 1, 2005)

I think that negative heterosis has also been mentioned as a factor. In any case, 20% seems like a low number for explaining the speed with which colonies in an area become >99% AHB. Bob Harrison also mentioned the probability that pure scute swarms come in on container ships. Perhaps AHB workers also prefer to raise their full sisters as the next queen.


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

Aspera,

I considering mainly genetic factors regarding AHB drones to explain the fast spread. IF drones are not hydrid the offspring would be pure african in a few generations (after 4 generations 83% will be african, if I'm not mistaken).

Michael Palmer,

usurpation is a major problem in AHB areas. From practical experiences and historical data here in Brasil, EHB hives are 100% taken 6 months after the begining if you don't take good care. In mid 70's beekeepers were used to relate they must requeen 3 times a year to keep free of AHB. 

Currently some strains are better to defense themselves, I've never lost a hive to AHB so far. And I hope I keep just like this







.


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## Jeffrey Todd (Mar 17, 2006)

Interesting, Marcelo. What are your strategies for coping with AHB; in other words, how are you able to keep your hives EHB? Where do you get European queens, etc.?
AHB first hit Texas in the early 1990s and while they are here, they are not in the majority, at least not yet. My own experience last year with 10 colony/swarm removals were all EHB.
Thanks,

Jeffrey


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## thomas (Apr 23, 2006)

Well i think that the italian drone of the EHB genes are dominant that if any queen they mate with becomes more italain thus giving us a hybrid so the same goes with the AHB drones thier genes are like the italian drones but if they out fly our EHB drones then they mate with the queen first. But i also read that if you requeen a AHB colony with a more gentle queen then that hive will turn gentle i may be wrong on all of this but it was from some research on the AHB but if we flood our area with EHB drones then we might stand a chance that our EHB drones will beat the AHB drones to the virgin queen and mate with her thus knocking down the AHB population some.

Tom


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## marcelodelfiore (Jul 14, 2005)

I keep my hives with robber screen all the times and I'm working with a strain more resistent to usurpation. The Carniolan queens beekeepers used to work with in mid 70's and 80's were way to gentle to fight these small swarms invading EHB hives. I get my queens of a breeder in São Paulo, there are only a few.

In addition I keep raising italian drones all over the year, to saturate the areas I work with a known and good genetics.

And of course, keep close attention the best I can. I noticed some small swarms arriving to my hives entrance many times, but none of them were able to get in.

We don't have feral EHB anymore, all of them are AHB.

Regards,


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## BerkeyDavid (Jan 29, 2004)

> I keep my hives with robber screen all the times and I'm working with a strain more resistent to usurpation.


Interesting, might be a good strategy even for us northern beeks, for other reasons.


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