" In addition, inbreeding in any organism is in
the long term, harmful, and due to their haplodiploid nature, honey
bee populations lave less genetic diversity than that of many other
groups of insects. "

I take strong issue with such a blanket statement.  All domestic breeds are the result of inbreeding.  There is no other way to concentrate good genes and get rid of bad genes that is nearly as practical as inbreeding.  Clear back in grad school I raised a lot of Killie fish.  That was in the 60s.  One in particular was the Blue Gularis.  The stock I started with was inbred when I got them.  The pair I started with were brother and sister.  A few years ago I talked to one of my fellow students who had gotten a pair from me.  He still had them and had never introduced new blood.  Those fish have a life expectancy of about two years.  So he was 25+ generations past the fish he got from me and they were still doing fine.

Go to any pet store and look at the fancy guppies.  Do you know what a wild guppy looks like?  A male is maybe 3/4" long and has a few spots of color and a normal size and shape fish tail.  Those two and three inch long males with the big tails and all the color you see in the store were developed by taking families of guppies and dividing the family into two to four breeding populations.  Each population was mated brother to sister, generally for 20 generations with intense selection in each family for desired traits.  Then the families were crossed and the resulting crosses are the fish shown in guppy shows.  Those show quaIity fish are also used to start new families which are mated brother to sister for many generations.

When you start such a program the usual result is loss of vigor until you either hit a dead end and they will no longer reproduce or they start to get better.  The dead end in many species happens around generation three.  If you get past that point the low point in vigor generally happens around generation eight.  While there are lots of species where you hit a dead end that is not universal by any means.  Fish in general seem decently forgiving.  Some mammals are quite forgiving.   Mice for instance.  Others are not such as rabbits or pigeons.  Yet in both rabbits and pigeons inbreeding is still the back bone of any program to improve a breeds performance.

While the data is clear that a queen needs to mate with multiple drones to produce an effective colony I see no evidence at all that our domestic stocks of honey bees suffer a bit from inbreeding suppression.  If anything a bit more inbreeding might well be desirable in terms of getting to a better commercial queen.  But, short of under taking a massive II program I see no practical way to get more inbreeding.  The ideal would be a program more like the guppy or corn breeders run.  But, before anyone thinks this is a sure shot remember, that not all crosses give vigor.  Even with the well controlled breeding programs the corn guys use some crosses are simply no better than the inbred lines that were crossed.  If we ever figure out what causes hybrid vigor maybe it would be less of a crap shoot.  But right now none of the experts actually knows what causes hybrid vigor.  The only ones that know what causes hybrid vigor are those who know nothing useful about genetics.

Dick

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