Inbreeding/Diploid Drone risk

[Jon]

Big Man or Jimbo or any other closet geneticist:
I have a queen which had been laying for a week.
She is a daughter queen of colony 31 in the DrawWing thread.
She was mated in an Apidea at an Apiary with Galtee Drones and is now back home in a 5 frame nuc.
There are 12 colonies in the other apiary and I think almost all of them are headed by daughters from the same Galtee queen.
I grafted some larvae from my new laying queen.
What are the implications for mating any queens hatched, assuming there are not too many drones coming into either apiary from outside?
My apiary would be more diverse than the other one but, any new queen would still meet a lot of related drones. I was encouraging Colony 31 to make as many drones as possible.
Is there an advantage of using one Apiary over the other or are the inbreeding risks the same in each case? Or is the risk nothing to worry about.
I imagine this is back to genetic diversity in the drones and csd locus.

[gavin]

Did somebody call?!

OK, the csd (complementary sex determination) locus. For those who don't know, if you have two different copies of this gene, you're female (if you are a honeybee). If you have only one version, your egg wasn't fertilised and you're male. If you have two identical copies then you'd develop as a male but the patrolling workers usually eat you before you get far.

First of all, any theoretical assessment is likely to be wrong in practice. Queens and drones will mate with whoever they like (rascals) (unless you force the issue), so nothing is guaranteed. However ....

I'd worry more about in-apiary mating of colony 31 daughters with colony 31 sons. What would they represent - half of the available drone force in your apiary? Those matings would give perhaps 50% diploid drone eggs, and so if half of the semen comes from them then you might expect 25% dd eggs. Not good.

Is Mervyn's apiary much better? Maybe. If he had one queen mated with well-mixed drones, then raised quite a few queens from that queen, he would have captured the diversity at the csd locus represented in her spermatheca. He would still be much better with other Amm blood though - ask him about it!

But the best option is for you to find another source of decent Amm soon, and add that to your breeding stock (or take your virgins there).

Inbreeding probably affects vigour in other ways too, so too heavy a selection (especially when the apiary is isolated) may be good for the things you are selecting, but bad for overall vigour.

The advantage of *this* forum is that there is at least one other card-carrying Amm-sympathetic geneticist here too (get Margie taking part and we'll have three) ... so the second opinion ought to be along soon!

Gavin

[Jon]

I think Mervyn buys in a new queen each year which is the one he grafts from. The drones in the Apiary are produced by a dozen colonies which are headed by daughters of the previous years Galtee queen. He has just lost this years breeder queen so intends to graft from a couple of my colonies. He faces the same problem in that he has a 2 year old Galtee queen but all the drones in his Apiary are related to it. I should probably graft from his queen and raise the cells in my own apiary for mating.

PS Who's Margie? The more the merrier.

[gavin]

Mervyn has it all sorted, as you might expect.

It seems that Mervyn's apiary has purer Amm than yours. However if your drones are dominated by your more Amm-like colonies, then grafting his queens and mating them at your apiary has its attractions too. For one thing you may have some real Ulster genetics there, whereas Mervyn has gone over to pure Galtee blood.

Do you know the origin of the Galtee stocks and how broad they are genetically?

One day you might have Amm queens to spare for enthusiasts in Middle England who seems to be unable to source them locally.

Margie shares my surname, thanks to husband Jock to whom, as far as I know, I am not related. She was at SCRI for a while and now lives in an enchanted place in Wester Ross.

G.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

Gavin has given the answer and explained it better than I could. He being a practicing Geneticist and me being more a desk jockey Biologist.
In -apairy mating is a worry if you are trying to improve the strain. When I started I had 5 good Amm colonies and bred other more unrelated hybridised queens with them to improve the Amm charateristics and to have a better mix of drones. This year I have mixed and matched again. I have 3 sites so can isolated the not so good colonies and take queens for mating to the site that has the best Morph results.
I do have a few concerns. The first is at present I am selecting just on the wing results i.e by using the best wing values I could just be improving this characteristic Gavin might be able to explain better. The second is sourcing good Amm queens to improve my stock. So far I have not seen any inbreeding signs but with so few colonies and some now related I think is only a matter of time. I have arranged to get a queen from Andrew Abraham for next year to improve my stock. I think there is opertunities through the forum to exchange queens, however there are few people trying to improve the Amm and the added complication is some of them do not have varroa therefore we can't freely move queens about.
Gavin might also be able to explain this but Andrew on Colonsay I think has about 35 colonies which are all Amm and have been in isolation for a number of years. Why does he not get in-breeding or is it a matter of time with such small numbers.

Jimbo

[Jon]

For one thing you may have some real Ulster genetics there, whereas Mervyn has gone over to pure Galtee blood.

G.

I have some nice colonies and there is no way I want to ditch what I have to start again with Galtee or anything else. I do like the idea of getting some Galtee into the mix though. Mervyn has lovely bees which he works bare handed.



Do you know the origin of the Galtee stocks and how broad they are genetically?
G.

I will be able to corner a few people in a bar in Cahir with questions like that in September.

[gavin]

Hi Jim and All

Inbreeding as an issue has been much exaggerated in some quarters. Sure, if you have a really small number of colonies at an isolated site then you may have problems. However 35 colonies is a big number and the diversity stored in that number could be huge if the founding colonies were also diverse. Just one colony (queen and the sperm she carries) could have most of the diversity present in the area - but take one queen to one daughter and repeat, and you will have serious inbreeding issues.

Queen-swapping could be one of the big benefits of a forum like this.

Jim, in your situation - where you would expect some fairly pure Amm to turn up - I'd rely on wing morphometry as a first means of selection. It is straightforward, and relies on several genes. To do the job properly you might like to follow Peter Edwards' stud book criteria where a range of Amm traits are used. He has done marvellous things with Amm in Warwickshire.

G.

[gavin]

I have some nice colonies and there is no way I want to ditch what I have to start again with Galtee or anything else.

Do your bees look any different to Mervyn's? Same colour for example?

[Jon]

Jim, in your situation - where you would expect some fairly pure Amm to turn up - I'd rely on wing morphometry as a first means of selection
G.

Are you very confident about the reliability of the morphometry - especially as a first means of selection?
With someone like me who has used morphometry for the first time this year, it may well give an accurate snaphot of the amm genetics in my apiary,but how accurate would it be for someone who has been using the tool for years? The risk is that you select for vein patterns rather than underlying amm genetics. The assumption is that genes which control vein patterns lie close to genes which control other amm traits so selecting for one automatically selects for the other.

I can 100% see its use in identifying a hybridised colony and electing not to rear queens or drones from it.


Do your bees look any different to Mervyn's? Same colour for example?

They look the same. I wouldn't like to have to separate mine from his in an identity parade.

[gavin]

I suppose that Peter Edwards was the one who convinced me that morphometry was a good way forward. Not that he set out to, just that he answered a question in the right way.

Morphometry seems to sample a range of genes. There also ought to be genes that are responsible for the white cappings, the low temperature foraging, pollen all round the brood nest, thick-set bodies, long hairs on the tergite, body colour. So I asked Peter whether by selecting for wing morphometry (in a heavily mixed area) and some Amm traits he saw the other traits coming along too. He did. This implies that he was fishing out largely unhybridised stocks rather than just breeding for morphometry in a wholely mixed population. I think. DNA tests might not add a great deal to that as they also usually sample a very limited number of genes - unless you are comparing the data to archived samples perhaps.

If there are little bits of other races lurking in what otherwise seems to be pure Amm stocks selected out of the mix that most of us see, does it matter? Is it any different from what we see naturally? Before man interefered surely there was already hybridisation taking place between races in adjacent regions. So were Amm and its mates not always a little bit mixed? But maintained as different through natural selection?

I think that I read today - in a paper Jim pointed me towards - that the Colonsay Amms are browner than some others from W Europe. If yours look like Mervyn's then maybe they are both from the same stock.

G.

[Jon]

If there are little bits of other races lurking in what otherwise seems to be pure Amm stocks selected out of the mix that most of us see, does it matter?
G.

It doesn't matter that much to me, but it would be nice to fix a population of amm or native type bees which breed true and dont throw up aggressive colonies such as Carnica/AMM crosses.
I will be monitoring carefully the temperament of the colonies headed by queens from the Apideas which I brought away for mating.

One of my new colonies from 33 which was mated with my own drones has a perfect pollen ring around the brood frames and a really black queen. I will clip a few wings later in the year when all her own brood has worked through.

[beebreeder]

Hi All
Being a southerer I do not want to rock the boat and its great to read a thread with some real challenging ideas in. Our local association had a Galtee queen a few years ago but we had big problems with aggressive colonies from her daughters, we also had very real problems in introducing them into local mongrel colonies, the bees would accept the new queen but almost without fail supercede her within six months. This problem combined with the aggressiveness, led us to abandon AMM and go for local mongrels that work well in our location, I am a BIBBA member and notice Roger P is also moving towards a local mongrel to try and overcome his queen problems, have'nt spoken to him recently so I do not know how he is getting on

[gavin]

Hi Kev

I suppose that what happens to your stocks when there is uncontrolled mating depends to a large extent on what the make-up of these local mongrels really is. In my case my bees have been variable over the years but until the last couple of years just what is found locally. Some in the early years were close to pure Italians, but recently they have usually been close to Amm mongrels. Two years ago I had a very vigorous colony which was the most difficult to manage I've ever had. In other words it was ferocious. Those bees were *darker* than usual and came from a near-native mother. Later I found out that a large apiary a couple of km away had Carniolans. So if your association brought Galtee queens to a local area with a preponderance of Carniolans or some other incompatible race, then trouble would have been inevitable. In other local areas other bees may have predominated.

Roger P is still keen on Amm as far as I am aware and is continuing to select bees that look like Amm from his local area. Peter Edwards also has selected what seem to be pure Amm in his area in a neighbouring county to yours.

best wishes

Gavin

[Rosie]

Hi beebreeder

I speak to Roger quite a lot and think his approach is not quite as you describe. He thinks the queen problem he has identified is not confined to his stock so the problem is our problem and not just his. His main aim though is not to fix this problem but to breed from the bees that are the gentlest and show the most AMM traits. After some years of this he tested his wing venation and found that his bees had become more AMM-like in morphometry as well as behaviour.

I suspect that his original position would have been similar to your own where the local bees have so much exotic blood that the introduction of pure AMM results in aggressive hybrids. I would hope though that by now he could risk introducing pure AMM and get away with it. Unfortunately, now that Galtee have ceased exporting bees to Britain, it's difficult finding a supplier of bees as pure as the Irish ones.

If you like AMM traits such as the ability to be confined to a single national without swarming and without loss of honey croop then you could do as he did and breed from your best.

All the best

Rosie

[Jon]

Hi Beebreeder/Kev.
Bringing in outside stock is always a risk as hybrid vigour can translate to increased aggression amongst other things. The AMM Carnica cross is the best example of this.
Roger Patterson is comitted to working with and improving the bees he has in his local area. He mentioned that he would not bring in queens from outside his area.

In my case my bees are 'native type' I had half a dozen colonies tested last year and the % AMM according to wing venation varied from 65%-85%.

I was grafting from two queens with AMM characteristics and I brought Apideas to get queens mated with galtee drones. I have about 10 nucs headed by queens mated with these drones and none have shown any signs of aggression yet. I don't need to use smoke when checking for example and I only ever use nitrile surgical gloves. I have a load of nucs in my garden behind the shed and I wouldn't risk that if they were cranky.
I also have ten nucs headed by queens from the same two breeder queens which were nated in my own Apiary and I don't see any problems with aggression there either.
I have seen most of the problems of early supersedure described by Roger Patterson in queens mated at my own apiary, queens mated elsewhere, queens mated in Apideas, queens mated in Nucs and queens mated in full colonies. ie, everywhere! I don't think it has anything to do with Galtee Genetics.

PS. Check out the level of protection used in the galtee apiary (http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=373&d=1285019752).

[Alvearium]

Hi All
Maybe I speak to soon and I do not want to sound smug....but I am really amazed how relatively straight forward it has been to propagate more docile stocks once I got a uniform strain of dark local bees. Is this because docility is a dominant trait? I am being careful to breed from at least 30-40% of the better stocks by doing a series of grafts. The next thing is to develop an Isolated Mating Site.......Gavin have you made any progress there?

[gavin]

No, but I did miss a call which may have been about this. Are you free on your usual days in the coming week or two? You can tell me at Scone tomorrow!

[beebreeder]

Hi Gavin
The galtee queen was about 15 miles from me and so had no influence on my own stocks, the Carnica stocks have now been repeatedly crossed with local mongrels removing any with bad traits. Like Jon I have Nucs, Mini nucs and full sized colonies in the garden, it is a big garden with fields at end and empty house n/door, but the bees are easy to handle, I have been running taster courses all summer and have a dartington that has been runing 16 frames of bees and brood 14x12 and no one has been stung so I must be getting something right. I have been grafting from that queen and moving the cell/ virgins to another site with drones raised from other colonies with desirable traits for mating, I have had 25 year plus experienced beekeepers buying queens because of their good temper and desirable traits, AMM around here would be a near impossible as the area is fairly flat and isolated mating near impossible unless II was used but thats another thread for the winter months.
Regards
kev

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,
I have started to check my new stocks using Drawwing and still finding the results similar to you ie 70% to 85% for Amm.
I still have not seen a colony giving 100% with a good sample size of 40 -50 bees. My question. Is 100% achievable with this software or the way that Drawwing makes the measurements means that 85% -90% as good as you get. It would be good to see a plot from the Galtea bees which have been bred as pure Amm for comparison.
Jimbo

[Jon]

I have a daughter of a Galtee queen which was mated in an Apiary with 12 Galtee Drone colonies so I will take a sample from that one in a few weeks.
I introduced it to a couple of frames of young bees at the end of July and then combined it with another colony from which I had removed the queen 2 weeks ago - so it has a mix of bees around it at the moment.
I know a few people who bought pure Galtee Queens at the Bibba conference a couple of weeks ago so I can get samples from their stock as well.
One guy bought 25 for members of his association.
I doubt if you can ever get a sample much over 90% due to some natural variation and the odd bee drifting in from another colony.
I would be curious to see if the same colony was sampled 10 times over a period of a few months would the percentage AMM always be the same or similar.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a variation of 10%.


AMM around here would be a near impossible as the area is fairly flat and isolated mating near impossible unless II was used but thats another thread for the winter months.
Regards

Hi Kev.
The Galtee apiary has an II setup now as well.
kev

It's in the shed labelled in Irish behind Roger Patterson and Ole Hertz the Danish AMM breeder.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=362&d=1283865301

[Rosie]

Hi Jimbo

According to Jacob Kahn, cubutal index is totally dependent on genetics but discoidal shift can be influenced by environmental pressures. This suggests to me that cubital index should be given more weighting than DS. I have tested wings (using DrawWing and Morphplot) for a number of people including someone with bees on a pensinsula in Wester Ross. On that basis these are the best I have come across so far:

393394

The first was a swarm collected from a feral colony in Wrexham and the second is a managed colony in an apiary in Nottinghamshire where no bees have been added for 41 years. Neither are 100% but they are the best plots I can offer. I am trying to find the origin of the Nottinghamshire bees but I cannot get earlier data than South Derbyshire in about 1970. Does anyone know if Galtee were exporting bees then?

Rosie

[Rosie]

Does anyone know if Galtee were exporting bees then?Rosie

I've just checked the Galtee bee breeding site and found that they did not form a breeding group until 1991 so I have answered my own question.

[Jon]

I've just checked the Galtee bee breeding site..

There is a Galtee timeline here. (http://www.gbbg.net/history.html)

[Roger Patterson]

Howdy Folks,

I had a bit of trouble finding this outpost, but finally made it. I can do with a beer if anyone can buy one then pour it for me! Not all at once though!

You are all guessing at what I've been up to and getting parts of it right, so let me explain:-

I came back into beekeeping in 2001 after being out of it for 15 years. I had stayed in touch with my local BKA and had still done some demonstrating, but had no bees of my own. Five different people gave me a colony as a thank you for helping during my time out. The bees were all horrible, yellowish, bad tempered, runners, followers etc. I retained a good relationship with most of the local beekeepers and they became useful for taking my queens and providing extra colonies for trialling. I was also asked to manage my local BKA teaching apiary that gave me more colonies.

I decided to try to improve what were heavily mongrelised bees, firstly to improve their temper, and secondly to see how much amm I could tease out of them, assuming there may be a tiny bit. I was told it was impossible to "back breed" and accepted that, but when I want to try something there isn't much that will stop me.

In raising queens from these colonies I soon found out there were problems with queens that I had not experienced before, and that is when I made enquiries and found out that it was largely the older beekeepers who were also seeing problems, but the newer ones who weren't. It then became obvious there had been problems for a few years, and the newer ones thought that what was happening was normal. There are many who still flatly refuse to accept there are problems, even when I show them in their own apiaries.

I was invited to Kev's BKA mating apiary with about 20 colonies in 2006 to see a colony with a queen problem. I found 4 more they didn't know about.

In the first year I had about 3 queens through each colony, and was culling heavily. At the end of the year the progress had been tremendous, and all the colonies were much quieter, so you can select for temper and be successful very quickly, and don't believe anybody who says you can't.

I haven't done wing morphometry myself until recently. Although results are very varied I have some in the high 70%'s, and that's without trying, though some are 0%, and that's without trying as well!

I consider they are now largely "native type" and the characteristics quite good. They will all now happily fit in a BS single B/C all year without spring feeding, where what I was given 9 years ago wouldn't. I have not brought in any outside blood apart from my immediate area. This may change, although I am now convinced I can get to similar figures to some of you folks without it.

Ready for another beer now!

Roger Patterson.

[Jon]

Hi Roger.
How did you slip in under the radar?
You will have to join the southern softies sub group with Nellie, Kev and Adam D
This is a good spot for anyone interested in bee breeding or promoting the native bee.

[gavin]

I had some spare red wine in the bottle last night and would gladly have poured you some of that Roger.




I had a bit of trouble finding this outpost, but finally made it.

That'll be right!! We took a lead from a certain other forum and headed in the other direction - to a more open format more easily found by Google and able to be sampled by anybody prior to them signing up. Some on here have even helped that other forum by making helpful suggestions on becoming more visible and more welcoming ....

Top marks to Roger for selecting from local stock and ending up close to where he wants to be. The original pure Sussex Amm may be gone forever in its purest form, but surely it is better to select your way back to something similar rather than import Galtee stock from another climate zone entirely? Of course there are local Amm types elsewhere in S England so maybe recovering something even closer to original Sussex Amm is feasible after all.

all the best

Gavin

[gavin]

According to Jacob Kahn, cubutal index is totally dependent on genetics but discoidal shift can be influenced by environmental pressures. This suggests to me that cubital index should be given more weighting than DS.

What about the other metrics, perhaps the Hantel Index. I can't even remember how good that is in discriminating bee races, but is it reputed to be more heritable? I've often thought about plotting a third factor to see how some of these data sets look. Anyone with data sets worth looking at this way?

I have access to a program that plots scatter-plots in three dimensions and is able to be freely rotated to view the cloud of spots.

[gavin]

The first was a swarm collected from a feral colony in Wrexham and the second is a managed colony in an apiary in Nottinghamshire where no bees have been added for 41 years. Neither are 100% but they are the best plots I can offer. I am trying to find the origin of the Nottinghamshire bees but I cannot get earlier data than South Derbyshire in about 1970. Does anyone know if Galtee were exporting bees then?


If the Nottinghamshire bees have persisted in that state for 30 years, there is a fair chance that they were local bees before that too. Do you know if they look like Galtee bees, particularly in colour? I'm thinking of this business that some Amm are darker than others, and perhaps lowland/eastern Amm are more likely to be browner.

G.

Doh! Just read your later comment.

[Jimbo]

Hi Rodger,

Good to see you here! I read your post and see you have got to with your bee breeding where some of us in Scotland are already starting from. We started with near native Amm with some good temperment and wish to increase numbers to give to the beekeepers in our area to help conserve the strain. We don't have problems of people importing or buying in other strains in our area. Not yet!.
I wouldn't listen to Jon. With a name like Patterson if you trace your family back far enough you will find a Scottish relative so won't need to join the Southern softies sub group.

Jimbo

[Jon]

Just to link back to the first post in the thread:
I took a virgin queen in an apidea to a mating apiary with Galtee drones about mid June.
The queen was laying in the Apidea by the end of June and I introduced her to a nuc at the start of July.
They tried to supersede her within a week and I kept a cell which hatched and resulted in a mated queen, mated in my own apiary, before the end of July.
I checked the brood pattern of this queen earlier today and it was very good with very few gaps so no sign at all of diploid drone effect.
I will get a sample of wings off to Roger within the next month as they look like nice bees with a bit of Galtee genetics in the mix.

I still have the mother of this queen in a nuc and they have tried to supersede her all summer.
I removed another cell about a week ago.
The brood pattern is not as good as that of her daughter but it is not bad enough to warrant supersedure, imho.
I might well find the nuc is queenless next March, but my curiosity gets the better of me in cases like this and I like to see the outcome if you deny the opportunity to supersede.

PS Jimbo. Patterson is a common surname in N. Ireland as well. I was at school with a few. I dare say you would call them Ulster Scots.
Roger may well be a southerner but he has a good thick skin on him.

[Rosie]

.. and perhaps lowland/eastern Amm are more likely to be browner.

I saw samples from 3 colonies in the Notts apiary and didn't see a yellow band on any of them.

Rosie

[Roger Patterson]

It seems like you horrible lot have been waiting to gang up on me!! You are the only friends I have, so I suppose I'll have to put up with it. Auntie Doris hasn't pitched in yet, but I guess she will side with you lot.

I'm not sure about the male line, apart from the last 5 generations being from the south, but my mother was a Scot from Kirkcaldy. I could even be related to Gavin, but I'd rather be related to Jimbo, he's much better looking!

I'm not sure about Gavin anyway - A Scot drinking red wine????

I think we should be a bit careful how we treat morphometry results, as most of us are amateurs and only have access to inexpensive and easily obtained equipment. Are the results any more than a guide?
I have been concerned about this for some time and did several hours yesterday experimenting. I won't tell you what I did, how I did it or the results, as I hope to put an article together today for the next issue of BIM. You will have to wait, but I think you will find the results quite interesting although the experiments were conducted using engineers logic, not from a scientific approach.
There will be another morphometry weekend at Stoneleigh on 20/21 Nov. This will be with Peter Edwards and myself, and slightly modified from the one held last March. It is for anyone, not just BIBBA members, and for ordinary beekeepers not the trainers this time.

Roger Patterson.

[Stromnessbees]

... Doris hasn't pitched in yet, but I guess she will side with you lot.


Hi Roger, nice to have you an board.
As for jsutification of joining this forum, who am I to speak? I haven't got a drop of Scottish blood in my veins, I'm just a ferrylouper, as they say in Orkney.

I'm hoping to join in with the morphometry discussions through the winter, I have collected some samples but not had time to look at them so far.

Doris