At 10:18 AM 1/14/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Luis asks about drones for use in queen breeding.  My queen breeding is very
>limited, only about 50 a year, but I have had a real interest in drones
>since Varroa hit us, and I will share what I know:
 
Hi Lloyd and Bee Friends,
 
I believe in rearing queens on any scale there are things we can change and
many more we can not.
 
An example of what we can not change or don't fully understand is
identifying drone congestion areas.
 
Many bee keeper have never observed drone comets or seen and heard the
actual mating of queens. The reason this is important is that these areas
may be far distant from your apiary and in fact if this distance is great
any drones you provide may be diluted by other's drones. This may be a God
send or it could be bad.
 
Some research from Europe is reporting that the more different drone lines
a queen mates with the grater the possibility of resistance to bee pests
and predators.
 
Of course I would expect this to be in the next generations as our worker
bees have no fathers just grandfathers, so it has been written so it must
be true.
 
What we can change and is missed by most bee keepers and many bee breeders
is Stock Selection for Drones. Most beekeepers seem to realize that the
selection of breeder queens is critical in improving stock and many make
much effort in testing many queens to find that one breeder queen to use in
grafting. I believe that the same effort should be spent in finding drone
mother queens and some do make an effort but all should do more.
 
All this genetic stuff seems to give me a head ache when I try to apply it
to my bees so one way to get variability in my bees is to not use the same
stock each year for breeding which sometimes means giving up the idea that
the number one criteria for selecting stock, their visual appearance is
forgotten every few years. Most bee breeders will not admit to this as if
you are a Italian bee breeder you want nice yellow bees, drones and queens
the same as if you are a Caucasian breeder you want black or dark bees,
drones and queens. To cross them is blasphemy.. I am not saying this is
bad, in fact I think it is good but the end user may need a different approach.
 
If you are a beekeeper and not a bee breeder it is easy to change queen
suppliers each season and requires only a small testing program to decide
which one to use the following season or at the least one could change a
large percentage each year based on your own testing program or even one of
your neighbors. In this way your drones would mostly be from last years
stock and some increase in genetic variability could be expected in this
years bees and in the future.
 
I feel that head ache coming on and thank God that for the most part we
depend on what nature provides us and learn how to use it, the good and
bad. It is far more important to have a young queen reared under good
conditions at a point in time that the weather is good enough for her to
mate with more then one drone, but if she is not available a natural queen
will do just as well. Which reminds me of a sad experience.
 
The story... I was busy making spring increase. I always made my divides
ahead of receiving the queens and the weather had turned bad for mating
queens in my suppliers area and I could not get any from my supplier but
had a few hundred queen cells and maybe 25 caged mated queens so I put the
queens in and I celled the rest of the divides until I ran out of cells.
The only hives that made the cut were the 25 with caged queens and the
one's I did not cell because the weather turned so poor for the queens from
the cells did not mate but cleared up in time for the natural queens to
mate. Does not matter how many drones you have if the weather is to cold
for flying it makes no never mind.
 
Chow, the OLd Drone
http://beenet.com