"Mating habits and reproductive schemes of plants and animals tend to reflect their reproductive needs. Lobsters have millions of offspring with few expected to survive, while elephants rarely have more than one calf at a time. A lobster that had only one microscopic offspring at a time would go extinct very quickly, and if elephants bred like lobsters, there would be a lot to clean up!

When an animal has an unusual reproductive method, it’s best to pay attention, as there are usually reasons why the system works, and there are consequences to “improving” things.

In order to understand the importance of genetics in breeding, we must take a closer look at the role of drones and queens in the mating process:

	[lb]	Drones are produced in abundance when the colony can afford to raise them. Drone production usually indicates a strong colony, as they use up a lot of resources. 

		Drones drift freely between colonies over an area of several miles. Since the queen of a colony will mate with up to 30 or more drones, odds are against a queen mating with more than 1 or 2 drones from any one colony. Each drone the queen mates with will only have genetic influence on a small percentage of the queen’s offspring. This is a wide but shallow dispersion of genetics. It means that many colonies are influenced by the drones’ genetic material (from any given colony), none to a huge extent.

	[lb]	Queens are produced in very small numbers. At most, a hive will experience a few swarms and one or two new supercedure queens within a really active season. All successful queens will head up colonies, and all the offspring from each colony will have half the genetic material of their queen. Through rearing queens, bees in a natural system produce a few queens with a very narrow but deep dispersion of genetics. Few colonies are influenced by the queen’s genetic material, but there is a strong influence in each of these colonies.

You must consider genetic influence when thinking about what kind of queens to use in your own apiary. A common beekeeping practice is to graft new queens from your best queen(s). In this way, you end up with a number of queen “daughters” from your best stock. 

But grafted queens change the natural genetic dispersion. You now have the genetic influence of one queen spreading both wide (to many colonies) and deep (to all bees in all those colonies) from the queen side alone. Without a good deal of attention to the genetic history of the drones that the sister queens are mating with, such a scheme will very quickly lead to inbreeding. Care should also be exercised when purchasing mated queens.  Deal with a queen breeder who is small enough to talk to you personally and be able to assure you of the diversity of their stock.

Grafting can be useful when used judiciously and carefully, but simple line breeding is preferable, as it much more closely resembles what the bees do in nature. "

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