Hi Joel & all

Talking of drones, Joel said...

> He therefore can only pass on DNA exactly as he received it from his
mother.
> Therefore he is merely an extension of the queen herself for the purpose
of
> diseminating the colonie's genes in the subsequent generation.

If we were dealing with simple sexual reproduction based on one queen and
one drone, this would be true, but (and it is very big 'but') we are dealing
with a colony that has one female line and something in the region of ten to
twenty male lines within it's patriline sets of subsisters.

> I have been raising ten colonies of bees in an area where there are no
other
> beekeepers.  So if I release a virgin queen there is a good chance she
will
> be mated with her brother

Whether this is actually damaging or not, depends on the amount of drone
drift and the timing (frequency) of opportunities for mating of elements
outside the closed community.

There is another factor in this that is hardly ever discussed or researched
and that is the ability of (bees in general) and queens in particular to
discern or recognise the genetic make up of other bees. This can go as far
as queens making decisions about the drones that are allowed to mate (or
not) and the number of drones that a queen actually mates with.

Both of these features can go a long way towards alleviating a degree of
inbreeding that might be damaging.

> The way I see it, if the drone is not otherwise related to his mother and
father,
> he has a 1 in 4 chance of combining the identical chromosomes with that of
> his sister/mate.

You are thinking about two sets of chromosomes here and you have ignored the
numbers of alleles and the number of locii at which these can act, drones
have no father... The nearest male ancestor is his grandfather so they only
have one set of chromosomes. Queens have two sets and so each set has an
allele at each locus so that there is a choice of two at any place in any
single queen and dozens within a population (even a closed one) that coupled
with the number of possible locii (hundreds of thousands, maybe even
millions) gives considerable diversity within the population.

Faced with ten colonies in a remote area, using US genetic stock, I would be
tempted to bring in one queen per year from a 'favoured' source and use her
to produce virgins that would be mated to the drones of the existing pool,
and to do this early enough so that there were no drones available from the
freshly imported queen. By doing this you can totally avoid direct
brother/sister matings, but you do need a reliable source that has a line or
'pedigree' behind it and you cannot chop and change your source otherwise
you will get F1 hybrids that may be nasty.


Best Regards & 73s, Dave Cushman... G8MZY
Beekeeping & Bee Breeding Website
Email: [log in to unmask] or  [log in to unmask]
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman & http://www.dave-cushman.net

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