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Date: | Sun, 2 Aug 2020 18:08:53 -0400 |
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Thanks to all for your replies to my “swarmy bees” inquiry. Very interesting.
Re. Dick’s comment, “I could give you a book full of examples of marvelous things that people who knew between little and nothing at all about genetics were able to accomplish simply by selecting and breeding from the best and getting rid of the rest.”
As a follow-up, I asked my beek buddy (who has formal university training in entomology with some apiculture stirred in) about the observations made that lead to the conclusion that they had “swarmy” stock. “What data did you have in hand that lead you to that conclusion? There is an assay with a 4 point scale developed long ago (Ruttner 1972; Buchler et al. 2012) that is used to classify the swarming behaviour of test colonies.”
Beek buddy response: “ Generally what we noticed over several years was bees that were inclined to swarm despite lots of drawn comb and extra space. We would see colonies that had extra space in their brood chamber as well as drawn comb in both the chamber and honey supers but would be instead inclined to swarm….The new genetics totally corrected the swarm tendency. Over a couple years I think we replaced all our queens and problem solved. Of course we stayed away from that queen replacement method [making nucs with swarm cells] after unless we were in desperate need of a queen but we tended to mark her for replacement when joining colonies or if we had queens to spare at some point.”
So, despite beek buddy’s science training, a great deal of craft knowledge/experience was used to solve what was observed as a swarming problem. No elaborate assays were used, etc.
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