> > What I never expected was to see first hand bee breeders selecting
> breeder queens on the basis of how pretty they were (you can't make this
> stuff up).
>

I watched a well-known queen producer last year, on two separate occasions,
tell audiences that they passed on potential breeders with excellent
performance if that queen had even a speck of what they considered as "off
color."  If one's advertising is for a particular color, then that is the
simplest trait to select for (or against).

>
> >As a matter of fact, Dr. Rinderer has told me repeatedly and pointedly,
> that they have done the work and the bees are available to beekeepers. His
> question is Why are they being more widely adopted?
>

As I've mentioned before, so long as treatment with available miticide(s)
is cheap and effective, there will be little commercial demand for mite
resistant stock. This despite the well-demonstrated benefit in mite
reduction from using VSH or Russian stock.

In my own experience, the Russians were a great bee, but not a good fit for
my business, which depends largely upon almond pollination and nuc sales.
VSH also very good, but needing constant selection pressure to maintain.
Either stock would give a breeding program a kickstart.

In answer to Charlie's observation: Those drones are the basis of the
mating pool.

The next season after requeening an operation solely with daughters of
selected queens, ALL drones in the operation will only carry genes from the
selected queens and the sperm that they carried.  This was the basis of the
hybrid Starline and Midnight breeding programs.  It only takes a year to
largely control the genes of the drone population.

In my own operation this season, I took a big chance.  I normally breed off
of a minimum of 25 breeders selected from my operation each season (I DO
NOT select for or against color or appearance).  But this season I found
one queen that was so exceptional that I did not want to lose the genetics
of the COLONY that she headed (half the genes from the queen, half from the
perhaps 20 drones with which she had previously mated).  Since I have no
idea whether the critical genes that apparently coded for performance and
mite resistance came from the queen or from one or more drones, I knew that
grafting from the queen only would only save a portion of the potential
critical alleles.

Since I don't practice instrumental insemination, I feared that I could
lose critical alleles from those drones.  So in order to save them, I
grafted 600 daughters from that single queen (nearly half my operation; the
rest from 30 other queen mothers).

Those 600 daughters will provide the drones for next spring's matings, thus
greatly increasing the chance of me not losing them.  I'm well aware of the
danger of losing sex alleles, but I felt that this particular COLONY was so
good, that it was worth the risk of genetic bottlenecking.


-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html