Those NZ carnies

[gavin]

Hello All

I came across this link this morning and thought that it was an interesting read. It is the story of the importation of German carniolan semen into NZ to Daykel Apiaries, the ultimate source of the bees Murray has been bringing in.

http://www.queenbees.co.nz/view4.shtml

You get a flavour of the hostility to interfering with the Italian stock already in NZ and there is more of that in the pages of the NZ forum.

http://www.nzbees.net/forum/threads/carni-drones-all-over-my-italian-hives.309/

It seems that Murray's bees (and those of other importers bringing in stock from there) are hybrid backcrosses from only semen used on Italian queens.

Don't believe what David Yanke says about drones from F1 mothers segregating out 1:1, it doesn't work like that. Every gamete a queen makes will carry a mix of genes from her two parents, it is just that the drones she produces are not fertilised with semen.

However the article is a very clear explanation, from the man at the centre of the action, of the origins of these bees that are now contributing to the mix in the UK.

[Rosie]

Thanks for this interesting post Gavin. I peruse it in more detail this evening but spotted this on the NZ forum,:

"I saw a carny worker on a flower of my own garden the other day and really had to fight the urge to squash it. I really must have some deep-seated antipathy towards these bees. To me they are a bit like foulbrood in that careless beekeepers allow both to spread into other beekeepers hives. If the problem gets any worse I will see 40 years of selective breeding going down the tube. Carnies come from a restricted genetic pool and are maintained through artificial insemination. This may be what some people want but please think about before you inflicted it everybody else.2

The sentiment is worldwide then.

Rosie

[Jon]

Very interesting reading that NZ forum where they complain about the Carniolans being inbred but even more interesting they note the aggression in the hybrids as did Ruttner and just about every otherbeekeeper apart from Murray.
Importing Carnica into NZ creates a lose lose situation for both the Ligustica and the Carnica breeders.
I can see why the Ligustica breeders are furious. Several decades of careful selection being wrecked by Carnica drones.

[Adam]

The impression I get is that the NZ bees are generally well behaved.
I assume that the 'inbreeding' of the carnis will not be a problem once mated with the local girls in any case.

In the UK it's 'anything goes' with regard to bee imports and transportation of them so we have no control of who puts what bees where; It's a bit like someone dropping a German Shepherd into the pen of your Kennel Club approved pedigree Red Setter. Miffed you would certainly be!

Whether we can really control anything in these isles I don't know - there is no strategy as far as I am aware.

[Rosie]

Hi Adam

I don't quite see it your way. Once you start mixing races the offspring fail to breed true to either parent and future breeding becomes a lottery - often ending in unwanted behaviour that neither of the original parents displayed. It's not like mixing dog races. Mongrel dogs don't usually try to kill you and are often better than either parent due to recessive gene suppression. It's true that hybrid vigour in bees is often a good thing but after the first generation it can cause serious problems. Although I like AMM I would be mighty miffed if I lived in NZ and my carefully bred Italians were being ruined by some selfish neighbour. It could take generations (of beekeepers, not bees) to get back to decent stock again and beekeeping loses its appeal to everyone concerned, including the general public.

They are in danger of finding themselves in our situation where everyone is tempted to import bees just to have something handleable and the situation never stabilises again.

Rosie

[gavin]

Quite right. The default position is that the UK is mixed, you can do what you like (in terms of bee genetics though not bee health), and that if you want to try to improve stocks it is up to you to find a pen so far away that the German Shepherds will not be dropped into your Red Setter pen. There is an assumption that this is OK and there seems to be absolutely no thought as to a strategic view of where our bee stocks should be some years into the future. All this while beginners pop up everywhere, some of them going their own way with stocks they get from wherever, and commercial imperatives encouraging wider adoption in bee farms of stuff bred elsewhere.

I was surprised (prob shouldn't have been) to see NZ beekeepers splitting between some in favour of these new bees and others annoyed at the interference in their long-term efforts at improving their existing bees. There is even a guy seeking the old Amm which was the first bee taken there and which has suffered a major decline as Varroa swept through NZ.

[gavin]

NZ of course does not allow bee imports! These carnies came in only as semen, so the NZ carnies are carrying ligustica cytoplasm, if you'll forgive me getting technical. All their ultimate mothers were ligustica.

Ligustica and carnica probably mix easier than Amm and carnica for example. But if the hybrids do end up maladapted or cross NZ will probably be forced to adopt internal segregation and increased queen sales within their islands.

I wish that there was better data on the effects (or lack of them) of crossing races. If thoughts of a long-term strategy are worth having, we need to have quantification of the effect on aggression and overall performance of mixing of bee races.

[Rosie]

Hi Gavin

I just read your first link and spotted this comment. It was after explaining how he was using Carniolan semen on Italian virgins to produce a generation of F1 queens.

"when you rear drones from these F1 queens, 50% of the drones are pure Italian and 50% are pure carnica. This is because the drones are haploid; that is, they have only one set of chromosomes representing one half of the queen's genetic makeup. So when the queen produces her eggs, the process sees her double strands of DNA unzip, with the carnica strand going to one gamete, and the Italian strand going to another."

Please correct me if I am wrong but surely the 2 halves of his DNA zip each contained a mixture of both Carniolan and Italian genes. If true it suggests his whole breeding strategy was based on a falsehood. It may indicate that these Carniolans that he supplies are really just selected mongrels - his very own Buckfasts in fact. No wander they don't breed true over here.

Rosie

[gavin]

Yes, he seems to have misunderstood this. The drones come from unfertilised gametes, and gametes are produced by the reduction division (called meiosis) that has recombination (swapping over maternal and paternal chromosome pieces) as an integral part of the process. So the drones will all be hybrid.

I don't think that he seriously misrepresents this as he must have thought that the female side will have this recombination anyway. But it is clear that these Carniolan look-alikes (!) are really selected strains from carnie x Italian crosses, ones selected to look like carnies. As the main yellow gene is dominant (thanks Jon!) it is easier to purify (in colour terms) a dark strain than a light one and some of the unwanted dark bees appearing in some Italian stocks will be from crossing a generation earlier than some of the NZ beekeepers expect.

Murray has mentioned that the stocks he has were raised by different queen and package production outfits and there further mixing with NZ Italians may well have taken place. Despite this their genetics is still heavily based in the German-bred carnie stock and their productivity and gentleness persists.

One interesting aside is that their mitochondrial DNA (in the cytoplasm, not the nucleus) will come form the Italian stock. If there is a difference between most carnies and most Italians then the NZ carnie (look-alike?) stock will look ligustica-like on mitochondrial DNA tests.

Do Italians and carnies differ much in wing morphometry? Jimbo did some on a sample of Murray's bees. Might be worth revisiting along with some Slovenian carnie stock.

G.

[Jimbo]

Yes I have a wing plot from Murrays Carnies They were so far removed from the Amm plots that they were off the scale and nowhere near the Amm plots. If I get time tonight I will look them up and try and post the plots. It would be interesting to see what an Italian or Slovenian carnie plot looks like if we could get some pure samples.

[Jimbo]

Murray's carnie plot has already been published on the Forum by Jon. See #69 Your Galleryof 2D plots thread

[Neils]

A friend has some Italians, I can try and sort some plots out if people are interested.

[Adam]

Rosie I said this
"The impression I get is that the NZ bees are generally well behaved" meaning the Italian types. and
"I assume that the 'inbreeding' of the carnis will not be a problem once mated with the local girls in any case". Which you disagreed with. What I was meaning to say (badly?) was that if there was inbreeding in Germany and a genetically unvaried stock from the carniolan semen (maybe shown by a poor brood pattern where drones had been removed); as soon as the carnis mixed with Ligustica there would be a good gene mix and therfore no inbreeding. However the outcome might be poor as far as temperament is concerned.
Gavin, please correct me if I'm wrong.

I can certainly understand why some NZ 'keepers are not happy about the Carniolans arriving.

[Rosie]

Hi Adam

I think we were at crossed purposes because I was not thinking of inbreeding as being a problem. The problem as I see was the outcrossing with Italians. I doubt if the article meant that the German bees were inbred in the sense that they had lost vigour or were having diploid drone problems. People sometimes use the term to mean "mated within race" which, to me , is a good thing rather than a bad one.

Rosie

[gavin]

Gavin, please correct me if I'm wrong.


Seems fine to me. The German breeders knew what they were doing, so the inbreeding thing is probably a red herring anyway, as Rosie acknowledged.

[Adam]

I have a friend who now has a couple of hives in NZ. His bees are as gentle as kittens, no need to smoke them or wear anything. He is surrounded my manuka plants too. You can understand the reluctance over there to have dodgy crosses if bees are like that.