It's me gammy leg!

[Jon]

I have seen 4 queens with a paralysed back right leg this year, all grafted from the same mother. The one in the video is not laying but others have flown and mated, producing fairly patchy brood which is hardly surprising.

I am speculating that this is a genetic defect caused by a gene from a single one of the drones the mother queen mated with as I have seen 4 queens like this out of about 60.

Could this be possible if the gene does not have a detrimental effect in the drone? Drones being haploid should not be carrying lethal genes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxVslbbSjNo

[gavin]

Was that the new camera? Looked like a better quality image.

It certainly suggests that genetics are involved if they are all from the same mother. Presumably your drone colonies were contributing to queens from other mothers too? If that is the case and they didn't show the defect then the mother must be a source of the gammy leg gene too.

That spoils your 1 in 15 single-drone hypothesis but it could still be a genetic trait.

Queen mother carries a recessive gene for the trait - Aa (and doesn't show anything) (gene a for arthritic of course)

*two* out of 15 drones are a

Daughter queens come in the aa form in half of two fifteenths ie 1 in 15.

Alternatively, something about the daughters of these queens caused the mating colony to knee-cap the poor virgin. Dodgy territory here referring to knee-capping in an Irish bee.

Its fun to speculate.

[Jon]

This is the queen I swapped one of mine for last summer. It is a Galtee daughter and mated with presumably mainly galtee drones at the other apiary. That is Mervyn's hand you can see in the video and he said he had never seen this in any of his own queens. 4 queens all with a gammy right back leg. It must be an inheritable genetic trait. I am just curious re. how it has come about.

[gavin]

Now that you have saturated Belfast with your preferred queens, you could always experiment! Do you have eggs from one of those arthritic queens?

If it is a single dominant gene (A causing the gammy leg) then the gammy legged queen will probably be Aa. Assuming her daughters mate with normal drones, 50% of the queens raised by that queen will have a gammy leg (unless they are unfit prior to mating in which case the frequency could be lower).

If it is a single recessive gene (a causing the gammy leg) then the gammy legged queen will be aa. Her daughters will show the trait again anytime one mates with a drone carrying a, which is probably at a low frequency and will change from mating site to mating site (try some at your dad's apiary and see if the trait disappears).

Then you can write a wee paper on it!

Do folk in the Galtee group see this trait sometimes?

[Jon]

Do folk in the Galtee group see this trait sometimes?

I asked Mervyn the same question but he had never heard any mention of it.
The queen was open mated at his apiary so assuming it is a genetic problem it is not necessarily related to galtee bees.
I sent him the video link which featured his own fair hand so he can forward that to interested parties.


probably at a low frequency and will change from mating site to mating site

4 queens is probably a frequency of about 5% judging by the number of queens I have seen this year although if the defect impairs flying or mating it could also account for a few disappearing queens. The other 3 mated and started laying.

[Adam]

I'm pleased you lashed out on a new camera Jon.

Is there anywhere - an idiots guide to genes and crosses etc available? I see words like alleles and homozygous and such like but know little about it all.

[Jon]

I'm pleased you lashed out on a new camera Jon.

Is there anywhere - an idiots guide to genes and crosses etc available? I see words like alleles and homozygous and such like but know little about it all.

You shamed me into spending £79 on the camera. I'll have to eat cardboard until the end of the month or scavenge for roots.

Gavin or Jimbo have a moral obligation to clarify these things for the rest of us.

Or failing that just google allele definition, heterosis definition etc. (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/gammy)

[gavin]

I hovered over the link, thousands wouldn't!

This seems reasonably good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_genetics

Bear in mind that male bees are unfertilised and therefore have only one set of genes. But you knew that anyway.

Then you can move on to honeybee genetics:

http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/genetics.html

[Jon]

That glenn apiaries site is always a good read.

I have been e-mailing Philip one of our bka members re this gammy leg and he reckoned that if I see it in some queens I should see it in some workers.
Makes sense I suppose as you are starting with the same dna in the egg and the difference between a queen and a worker is nutrition.
I checked the colony earlier this evening with a view to perusing the workers. To quote Peter Cook, I didn't see any workers deficient in the leg department to the tune of one.
The novelty is that I did find a large black queen unclipped and unmarked which was laying. The gammy leg mother queen has/had a clipped wing and a nice blue spot on her.
It looks like she has been superseded but there has never been a brood break in this colony as I have been grafting from it every week.
I have not seen a supersedure cell and this colony made no attempt to swarm this year as it has not made queen cells.
The other possibility is that a virgin flew in, was accepted and took over. I notice from my records that the last time I saw the marked queen was July 4th.
This new queen does look exactly like all her other daughters though. She is much bigger as well.

[The Drone Ranger]

I picked up a small swarm near one of my hives as I mentioned on another thread.
The queen is jet black and a bit smaller than I would see normally.
The swarm was so small I would have classed it as a cast if the queen hadn't been marked.
At first I thought I had dropped a queen from one of the nearby hives but that turned out not to be the case and I didn't have many queens that matched the description to look for.
Detective work over she had flown in and is now in a nucleus hive which is making slow progress.
Her back legs appear not to be working either.
If this is genetic I don't want that in my gene pool I just though she had been slightly injured
If there are any missin letters in this post its because some bits of toast got under the keys :)

[Adam]

Thanks Gavin; I wasn't aware of the glenn apiaries site - so I'll bookmark it and have a good look through. I thought I'd start easily with 'Oddball Bees' but the link didn't work :(

Jon, I too found an unexpected queen a week or two ago. No queencells visible for me either. She was a virgin so I caged her and put her in a queenless mini-nuc in order to get mated. The following week I found a single sealed queencell in the hive so I suspect the virgin was a supercedure queen rather than one that flew in.

[Jon]

Just had an interesting chat with my mate Tim.

Tim was with Mervyn and myself the day I shot the video of the queen with the gammy leg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxVslbbSjNo&list=UUue8V6a4fIYZX7rf9Pn1qLw&index=12&feature=plcp

He has been reading Manley's book 'Honey Farming' and came across a couple of paragraphs describing how a queen returning from a mating flight can get stung on the leg on entering the hive. If the sting is on one of the front 4 legs this usually makes the queen non viable, but if the sting is on a back leg the queen can lay more or less normally but is usually superseded early. The leg withers up or disappears completely. He described seeing a queen with the sting of a worker sticking out of a leg joint.

I think this is the most likely explanation for the 4 or 5 queens I saw last summer with a gammy leg as none of the workers from the parent queen had leg abnormalities and if it were a lethal genetic problem caused by two copies of a recessive gene it would tend to be eliminated in a haplodiploid species as haploid drones with this gene would not be viable.

[gavin]

I remember seeing a new queen with stings stuck in her leg. She was from one of those towers with three nucs in one box and plywood dividers, and had gone back to the wrong entrance. Maybe this is another reason for having readily distinguishable (brightly painted) boxed for queen mating. Maybe you could reduce the frequency by decorating the Apideas?

[Jon]

I don't think Manley was suggesting it was a queen returning to the wrong colony, although it could certainly be for that reason. There was other stuff about the mating sign / drone endophallus. I'll post the relevant text when I get hold of the book.
I suppose if a queen picks up an unfamiliar odour on a mating flight it could be rejected.
I have seen queens getting balled on quite a few occasions but have never seen one with a sting protruding.
I had 70 apideas on the allotment at one point over the summer and I did note queens returning to the wrong apidea on occasion.