Hi guys,

        I blundered into this article today as well as spending an hour on
the "Students T test" at wicki.com, etc. Why, you ask? I'm nuts, that's why.
I had a couple of courses in statistics in my BA, but they didn't stay.

Every so often someone remarks on breeding good queens from his little
handful of bees. It makes me wonder..

 

If you have a good queen and you graft from her..what are the chances her
daughters will have her traits. How many daughters would you need to study
in a control group to find a valid superiority. It would start with an ANOVA
(Analysis of Variance) within the study group, say 100 colonies as compared
to 100 daughters of run of the mill bees. Right away we need a threshold
number or results will be meaningless. 2 hives are intuitively not enough.
100 may be. Is this where you decide whether your results will have meaning?
So, Let's set our sights on the operationally defined variables of wintering
2 winters plus honey production. How do you decide on the minimum number of
colonies?

 

I suspect that nature made drones haploid as a way of controlling for some
sort of wild variability. The drone, being a courier of his mothers genes,
does not contribute. This would ensure that accidental drone traits, that
led to more mating success, would not skew the line in a direction not
conclusive to whole colony health. (Konrad Lorenz described a mating
mechanism of a type of pheasant: long tail or other feathers, used for
display, eventually led to more breeding success but the birds could no
longer fly).

 

Am I correct that this trait would sort of dampen the mutations of the
species?

 

Dick

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.gsejournal.org/content/44/1/14

 

 


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