"I don't think we're knowledgeable enough about the genetics of any species to attempt to manipulate a reproductive instinct."

It does not take any knowledge at all other than what is gained by simple observation of behavior.  My wife used to raise canaries commercially.  You take the run of the mill canary hen and try and breed her and what you will see is 10% will not even lay an egg until two years old.  Another 10% will lay one round of eggs as one year olds and maybe two rounds of eggs as two year olds if you are lucky.  Some will lay eggs like machines and refuse to incubate.  Some will lay and incubate and refuse to feed the young the first bite of food.  Some will feed for a week and stop feeding.  Maybe one in ten will lay multiple rounds of eggs, incubate reliably, feed the young to fledgling and still be reasonably productive as three year olds.  You take the 10% that are best and save every single hen they produce to breed from and only use cock birds produced by your most productive hens and in four of five years your stock is so improved you are producing 1000 young a year from 100 hens.  My wife did this with zero knowledge of the reproductive genetics as no knowledge was needed.  But, she sure manipulated the reproductive instinct greatly.  She had one particular cock bird that she valued highly and raised quite a few young from.  That cock never fathered a hen that would lay more than one round of eggs as a yearling and two rounds as a two year old.  Half would not even lay one round the first year.

The rock dove, the ancestor of the common pigeon, might raise two or at most three rounds of young a year.  Long ago commercial squab raisers had birds that would not even stop reproducing during the molt and would raise a dozen rounds of young a year and do that until the hens were eight or ten years old and cocks even older.

How about chickens?  We took a bird that wanted to lay ten or a dozen eggs, incubate them and raise a round of young once a year and turned them into a bird that will lay an egg a day and has lost the instinct to even incubate.  How about dogs?  They come into estrous twice a year while their wolf ancestors only have at most one estrous cycle a year.  How about sheep?  Some breeds produce only one young per pregnancy.  Others produce four or five or six.  Are those not examples of manipulating the reproductive instincts?  All of those examples were accomplished largely before Mendel ever published.  Darwin said you will get what you select for and he was right.  To think it requires genetic knowledge is ego, not fact.  Man has been breeding for better reproductive traits for three or four thousand years, better being defined as what the breeder wanted to happen. He has done it with both plants and animals.

Honey bees are no different in that respect than any other animal.  I know of one case of a commercial bee keeper (not in the US) who has selected for no swarming.  He only breeds from three year old queens that have not swarmed and have headed productive colonies for two years.  The third spring he purposely crowds them.  Those that swarm are out of the breeding program.  He tells me he routinely has no more than 2% of his production colonies swarm a year.  Now, you should get the hint that as he does not breed from anything younger than a three year old he is from Europe.  In Europe long productive life is highly valued in lots of animals so breeding is often from old  critters.  I know a European racing homer guy who will not breed from a bird until it is eight years old.  In the US we do not value a long productive life and have not selected for that trait.  So, our queens are lucky to live two years and our pigeons are lucky to live four or five.  By contrast I have one pigeon that came from Turkey in my loft.  She is now 15 and by far the oldest pigeon I have ever had.  I have not tried to breed from her for five years but would not be at all surprised if she could still reproduce.

Genetic knowledge can speed the process greatly if you know enough about the DNA to be able to establish a good set of markers such as SNPs but other markers have also been used.  Even then you do not need to know a single thing about the genes involved.  You simply need a marker linked to the genes involved and a good statistician to tell you what the observed data tells you about which markers are important.  After all, we have known since 1875 when Darwin's cousin Francis Galton published his work on human traits that most things of interest are the result of a combination of many genes, not just one or two.  Unfortunately the US genetics community ignored everything he showed and tried, up to almost the present, to blame every trait on one gene.

Dick

             ***********************************************
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