"Interesting suggestion, but wouldn't that imply that multiple individuals had multiple hives
 with highly inbred queens? "

Highly inbred seems to me a pretty big overstatement of the degree of inbreeding needed to see this problem.

Does it take all that much inbreeding in a small apiary to lead to some diploid drones?  Consider someone with ten hives who starts with ten purchased queens.  At absolute best he buys only 20 different sex alleles and more than likely a few less than that in his queen line and some extras in the sperm they are mated to.  Now, he reproduces from those bees by splits, grafts or supercedures.  His population of drones now contains only sex alleles from the 10 purchased queens while the daughters could have somewhat more diversity due to the sperms mom stored.  Still it is an odds on bet that as many as half the queens he produces will mate with one drone that shares a common sex allele with the new queen.  So right there in the first generation he should expect some of his queens to lay several % diploid drones.  After a few generations of such isolated reproduction he is going to see some of those original 20 sex alleles and many of the extra alleles from the stored sperm go away simply due to statistics resulting in even more diploid drones.  Now, this assumes he is isolated enough that matings are mainly with his own drones.  Unless he has close neighbors who keep bees in significant numbers I think this is pretty likely in a lot of places these days as in many places ferals are real scarce.  I would not be a bit surprised to find there is not one feral colony within three miles of my apiary, and it is not lack of decent habitat.  The last one I knew about was six miles away and last one summer.  They generally simply die out real fast due to mites and viruses.  In fact, even before mites and viruses there were very few ferals here as a local AFB epidemic took them out in the late 70s as well as 2/3s of the domestics.

I asked Randy recently how many colonies he felt were needed to have an effective population to allow a selective breeding program for mite resistance and he answered 1000.  Well, mite resistance is tough genetics as we all know or we would already have it established.  Still, I think even easy stuff like selecting for docile or productivity or cordovan probably takes at least 25 colonies to both allow selection for such easy traits while still maintaining adequate sex allele diversity.  It really does not take significant inbreeding to get into a sex allele bottle neck.   Drones being haploid are a huge bottleneck every generation.

Dick

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