Hi All

> > b)  The queen cannot segregate her sperm "by drone", so we
> >      can assume the "drone component" of each worker to be a
> >      random selection, or something close to random.

I lifted the following from one of my posts to another list. The original
questioner was David Eyre.

> Did you know that
> a queen mixes all the semen she gets on her mating flight?

"Mixing" yes, but this mixing is not homogeneous... the sperm of each subset
is separated into lumps or packets and the lumps are held in some sort of
cluster structure a bit like a bag of marbles or maybe a thixotropic matrix.
The number of drones mated to and the size of these "marbles" varies with
race of bee... I myself, am looking for the details of this for one of my
"projects" and would be grateful for any referances.

The number of drone matings is to produce subsets within fertilised eggs,
not purely for volume of semen. I suspect that in AMM strains, the high
number of matings is partly to improve diversity due to the risk of similar
genes from "apiary vicinity mating" (with the high number it does not matter
if some of the gene sets are duplicated).

I would be interested to find out if each drone is represented equally with
regard to numbers of sperm or whether duplicates or triplicates are reduced
to produce equal representation of subsets.

Best regards & 73s... Dave Cushman G8MZY
Beekeeping & Bee Breeding Website
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman


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