This was posted on BeeSource and thought this appropriate to this thread, but I am not sure if this really has any worthwhile info for you who post on this forum. 

"Average relatedness of workers in a colony is calculated with the formula X = .25 - .5/Me where "Me" represents the mating effectiveness of the queen.  In other words, did the queen mate with 1 drone or 30 drones that were fertile and produced some amount of sperm stored in her spermatheca.  Put this into a formula in excel and you will find that mating with up to a dozen drones produces 2/3 of the benefit of polyandrous mating that is provided by mating with 30 drones.  This sounds counterintuitive so please do the math and prove to yourself that a queen needs to mate with a minimum of 12 drones to have high levels of worker diversity and with up to 30 drones to produce the maximum diversity.  Given that we already know A.M. queens mate with an average of 17 drones, this provides a strong suggestion that queens mated with larger numbers of drones produce colonies more fit than queens mated with fewer.

The number of sex alleles in a population can be expressed as V = 1-1/x where x is the number of sex alleles present regardless of the number of drones the queen mated with.  If the queen mated with.  As you can see, the more different sex alleles present in the drones the queen mates with, the higher brood viability becomes.  When all sex alleles are different, i.e. the queen did not mate with any drones carrying the same sex allele as one of the alleles the queen carries, brood viability is 100%.  This formula works for matings where some percent of duplication is present but does not properly express the relationship when all alleles are unique.  I counted brood viability in a couple of my colonies and came up with 88 to 89 percent.  Plugging this into the formula gives about 9 or 10 sex alleles present in the breeding population.

The problem with bees is that it is necessary to account for both the queen and her offspring when determining how much impact inbreeding will have on the colony."


Deb Corcoran, Bee Thankful Raw Honey

Proverbs 16:24
Pleasant words are a honeycomb, 
sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.


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