I suppose the point I am trying to make is that a hobby beekeeper like myself will end up with much better bees if some attempt is made at queen rearing and selection as opposed to letting the bees swarm and make queens at random. Perhaps that is stating the obvious, but many amateur beekeepers seem to do just that.

Right. Every year we hear people proposing this as if it were a novel idea. There is a long history of the desire to have better queens, the concept of how to get better queens, the results of the attempts. 

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, honeybees have just not responded to selection in the same exaggerated way that some domesticated species have. Not all species are amenable to domestication. 

The honey bee evolved a complex system of survival over millions of years and many aspects of it are tightly conserved. However, the species is also highly adapted to various geographic localities so it is entirely plausible that there are large areas of its behavior and the underlying genomic regions that are flexible to change. 

The study of the genomes of various species has led to the discovery that many segments are passed down over millions of years. Presumably, these are core programs that are essential to the function of the organisms, and if they are altered the resultant mutants simply fail to survive or fail to thrive leading to extinction. 

On the other hand, it would certainly be evolutionarily advantageous to organisms in general and honeybees in particular to have variable genetic components which would allow it to develop adaptations to changing circumstances, such as the tropical bee evolving a mechanism to survive a six month winter. 

One of the key discoveries in the study of evolution is that many so-called adaptions are examples of evolution co-opting developmental pathways. For example, the honeybees' ability to survive winter is not the same as how mammals survive winter. 

In some ways it more resembles how tropical bees deal with dearth, with some apparent differences in the ability to survive low temperatures. But they cannot be said to hibernate like mammals or go into a dormant state like most insects that survive over winter (eg. Bombus). 

PLB

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