Thanks guys,
For the enthusiastic response. I'm going to read carefully. There's a lot in here and it doesn't touch the complicated part, epigenetics which could cause sweeping changes quickly. A couple of things I'm not going to buy, "off the shelf."
One: that the sole determinant of drone choice by the queen is the distance she puts between where she mates and where home is. Bees do everything else with pheromones, why not this? That she wouldn't be navigating by odor because she flies upwind. Winds change from day to day but not presumably, mating grounds. Also that she flies further than the drones....seems a little fragile. Methinks there's more. When we don't know something I think we should admit it. I know very little about genetics though I first studied it in the 40s.

But, in my starting post, about female insects discriminating against certain males, I was angling for a much smaller point. With yearly losses edging up from 30/35% the queen failure rate has come under suspicion. Queens either don't make it through the season, become infertile for a number of reasons. A lot of them don't mate right in the first place. (My experience, but others also.) Commercial beeks now requeen 2X a year as a routine. Long gone are the 3 yr queens.

My focus was on the MECHANISM whereby the insect cited discriminated against the males that were deficient. (If they were inbred, they were likely deficient in other ways). 

Back to bees. Now let's assume something went awry with the MEChanism. Good drones as well as poor would be nixed. Matings would be sporadic and we'd have the situation we have. Poor queens without really understanding why.

Pete: You signed off with:
>>"The question remains: do individuals of inbred populations differ from individuals from heterogenous populations?<

That's going to keep me awake for awhile. (smile)            

Dick

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