Richard Glassford II asks about strains of bees people use and why, and
desires bees that will be gentle, productive, and have a minimal propensity
to swarm.
 
There are so many variations in behavioral traits of bees produced in the
U.S. that it is practically impossible to accurately generalize in
attempting to describe traits of individual strains.  By that I mean that
traits of production queens and their offspring vary widely between breeder
operations and within most individual operations.
 
Having said that, I am quite comfortable making the following comments on
strains of bees.  I base them on 30 years of observations and personal
experience, and on discussions with many beekeepers.  My comments are also
predicated upon the use of successful bee management techniques which will
minimize undesirable behaviors that are occasioned by the less desirable
managment techniques.
 
a.)  Italians usually swarm more than other strains,
 
b.)  Carniolans swarm less than Italians, though they usually swarm more if
allowed to requeen themselves,
 
c.)  Caucasians and Midnites usually swarm the least,
 
d.)  Some breeders produce bees that swarm less than others,
 
e.)  You seldom see true black and grey Carniolans or Caucasians anymore.
They are fairly heavily crossed with Italians.
 
f.)  In recent years the dark strains appear to have greater problems with
poor queens than they did 15 years ago, and generally worse than Italians.
Of course there are some exceptions.
 
g.)  A few years ago I looked at colony problems for about 12 commercial
beekeepers who had purchased queens from 15 different sources representing
all queen production states.  The dark strains of bees had problems with
queens ranging from 25 to 100 percent while Italian sources had queen
problems ranging from 10 to 60 percent.  After studying bee behavior for
the past 30 years I have ceased making any recommendations on where to
purchase so called good queens.  I have concluded that it is impossible to
predict queen quality from year to year for any breeder.
 
Studies of honeybee genetics by USDA suggest that all production queens in
the US are produced from about 300 queen mothers.  There seems to be some
consensus that this constitutes too small a gene pool to ensure the ideal
genetic diversity in our honeybee stock.  A lack of genetic diversity
results in inbreeding of a population which shows up as reduced
survivability in brood.
 
For comparison, I heard a carrot breeder say recently that he has 2,000
genetic lines of carrots, from which he selects 200 lines to test each year
(for 2 years).  He then selects maybe 20 lines for two subsequent years of
production testing prior to general production by growers producing for
consumer markets.
 
James C. Bach
Yakima WA
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