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From:
"(Kevin & Shawna Roberts)" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Discussion of Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 8 Jul 1996 23:57:02 -0400
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The discussion about the relative importance of good rearing technique versus
good breeding (so to speak) is a *nature versus nurture* issue.  If you think
about it some, you can see that some conclusions seem reasonable, even
without documented research.  (Although I'd like to see the research, too.)
 
Lamarck and Lysenko aside, rearing queens by excellent or poor methods will
 have no effect on the genetic background of the queen or on the genetic
makeup of her offspring (assuming adequate mating with unrelated drones).  If
queens of a particular line tend to produce large honey crops (through
tremendous fecundity, or worker longevity, or hoarding behavior, or early
build up, or whatever), then rearing methods will have no effect on the
*potential* for that line to produce excellent queens whenever rearing
conditions are also excellent.  The individual worker bees produced from a
bad queen with good genes should show the same longevity, hoarding behavior,
etc. as they would if the queen had been excellent.
 
Where poor queen rearing methods *can* diminish the honey production of a
colony headed by a queen from a highly productive line seems to me to be
limited to the effects on her ability to lay lots of worker eggs at the right
time, that hatch into larvae that nurse bees like to care for.  To the extent
that queen rearing methods affect those characters, then they also should
affect the honey production of her colony.  Her offspring would be the same,
but there wouldn't be as many of them.
 
There seem to me to be lots of possible ways that poor rearing might result
in poor fecundity or low brood viability.  If I starve a queen cell or a
newly-mated queen, will her mature ovaries produce fewer eggs, or eggs with
lower inherent survivorship? Does a  queen that emerges from a poorly-tended
cell become unattractive to worker bees?  Maybe big queens smell nicer than
little queens, and get fed more often.  A few weeks ago, I read here about a
brood disease that resembled EFB, but was apparently caused by rejected
larvae coming from a queen that was poorly fed during ovarian development.
 This would certainly affect honey production of her colony.  Maybe a
poorly-reared queen has some glandular imbalance that causes workers to
ignore her eggs and larvae.  I'm speculating on most all of this, but who
knows?
 
The general question of whether genetic background is more important than
rearing methods seems to me to be so broad as to be unanswerable.  If it is
reasonable to say that rearing methods have a real effect on a queen's rate
of reproduction (measured by emerging, healthy worker bees at the right time
of year), then rearing methods should have a real effect on honey production,
given queens of similar genetic backgrounds.  Likewise, the queen's genetic
background should also have a real effect on honey production, given queens
raised under similar (and adequate) methods.  Which one is more important
than the other depends on which one happens to be the limiting factor in a
given situation.
 
Kevin

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