African bees with an Italian queen

[caticind]

Gdams, crossing in Italians in an AHB-dominant area is going to be an expensive proposition.  With the vast majority of drones carrying AHB trait, the Italian genes from your introduced queens will be largely flooded out in just a generation or two if you open mate.  Some traits are persistent, but to my knowledge gentleness is not one of them. 

To pull this off you need to either be equipped for instrumental insemination or be willing to pay to import every last one of your queens.  You say that you walked through an AHB/Italian yard with no overwhelming defensive response.  Before committing such a large sum of money, perhaps you should walk through several more times to be sure you were not simply lucky.

You know better than most of us in the US just how dangerous AHB can be to those not properly protected.  If you have "civilian" traffic walking along the road within defensive response range of your hives and they will not know that the bees are there, I worry for the results.

[GeorgeAdams]

caticind...

Hmmmm..... I hear what you are saying and do not have the experience to refute... BUT only 2 Italian queens were brought to Nicaragua some years ago and bread with an AHB apiary and the results speak as 2 weeks ago I walked through his 39 hives without protection.

[CapnChkn]

I'm not trying to ruffle feathers or open old wounds, but genetics simply does not work like this.

With the vast majority of drones carrying AHB trait, the Italian genes from your introduced queens will be largely flooded out in just a generation or two if you open mate

If you follow this reasoning, then all Afro-American/Euro-American mixtures will come up with Dark skin and eyes.  Tara Banks comes to mind.  Though the dark skin and eyes are dominant genes, there are may documented cases of Afro-American mothers producing Light skin, blue eye, and blonde offspring.

Dominant genes are simply dominant because they work best for the environment they were produced in.  If dark skin were an absolute, the American landscape would be littered with brown and black skinned people, the white "recessive" gene overpowered by the "dominant" genes of the American Indians, Polynesians, and Black Africans that gave birth from liaison with proper Aryan genetics.

ALL the genetics from that careless beekeeper 64 years ago are AFRICAN/EUROPEAN hybrid.  There is no "African" bee in the western hemisphere.  By the reasoning you are using, the undesirable traits of these honeybees, being dominant, would "flood" and overpower any variant established here.  That means the dominant gene that allows the northern varieties to survive in the cold of the northlands would become mixed with the dominant genes from the overly defensive AHB.

It's not really a good idea for a race of bees to be as suicidal as the AHB we visualize, they would soon die out, leaving the gentler and better adapted offspring to carry on.  Beekeepers throughout history have kept the queens that act less defensively, that's to say less tendency to sting the beekeeper.  These are the bees we associate as being hive bees.

As is stated in the articles I referenced above, the AHB in Brazil have been selectively bred, removing the defensiveness associated with the original strains.  Open breeding would create a certain number of undesirable (from the Beekeepers point of view) characteristics in some colonies, but the base genetics, the part that isn't moving around - the hive, is still there.  As with all hot bees, you pinch the evil queen and toss the ring of power into the volcano.

I would look into simple techniques of raising queens from the gentle hives, getting queens from the beekeeper with the gentle apiary, and exercise patience.  It may take some years, but the defensiveness will have to fall eventually.

[BlueBee]

Maybe there is a business opportunity for you down there to raise and sell Italian queens that are instrumentally inseminated?  It sounds like the supply vs demand curve might be in your favor.  You might be able to run both a bee yard and a queen supply house.

[caticind]

My feathers are quite unruffled (this is genetics, not personal!), but I feel that your example has gone astray.

There are two genetic rules at work here:  trait dominance and recombination.

What I mean by "flooding" is this:  each egg laid by a queen has only half of her (Italian) genes.  Let's assume that the queen is from a gentle strain, and that the AHB drones in the area all lack whatever key gene or gene clusters produce gentleness in workers.  The genes that lead to gentleness have at best a fifty-fifty chance of being passed on to a queen daughter.  After two generations of open mating, only 1/4 of queen grand-daughters (on average) will carry those genes.  This has nothing to do with dominance or recessiveness, but rather the introduction of a rare allele into a gene pool where the vast majority of colonies carry a different allele.  If the OP selects VERY diligently from his queens for gentleness, he may be able to produce a gentler "re-hybridized" AHB.  But he will have to pinch half of each round of queens or some hives will display aggressive behavior on supercedure.  That is a lot of management.  

If the gene (or cluster) is recessive and requires two copies to have its effect, then even though 1/2 of the first-generation queen daughters carry a copy, not a single one of those hive will be gentle.  The gene won't disappear, but will not "amplify" into the population the way the OP wants.

It's not that simple, of course, since there might be multiple alleles for differing levels of aggression or gentleness, but we don't exactly have the option to genetically engineer it.  Beekeepers still have to work on the Mendelian level.

Dominance of alleles is not the result of suitedness in and of itself, but is related to the action of the particular proteins coded for by the alleles.  With your example of blue eyes, for instance, there is no allele "for" blue eyes, but only a broken allele for brown eyes, because the normal "brown" allele results in the production of pigment, where the "blue" allele results in no production of that pigment.  As for why more people do not have brown skin in a situation where different skin color alleles are present in a population, you might look to non-scientific factors (i.e. racism and the resulting skewed marriage patterns) for the reason.

I don't know if any studies have been done on the genetics of bee aggression at this level, but look at it like this:  Bees are evolved to be aggressive.  Aggressive response is the major defense mechanism of the colony and has long been critical to survival.  Whatever gene clusters produce this behavior are very common in AHB.  They are also presumably dominant, because even in homogenous populations of Italians way outside of AHB areas we hear of hives becoming more aggressive, but seldom does someone say "Hey!  I open-mated all my colonies for 10 years and tried to select for viciousness, but they're all sweet as puppies now!"  

If gentleness is recessive, that doesn't mean that the OP can never breed it into a larger population of bees.  There are two ways to do it.  Either select hard for gentleness from the local stock (as has been done throughout the area as you cited in those articles, resulting in a more tractable, but still pretty aggressive, AHB), or bring in Italians and select even harder.  Keeping the trait constantly present would require careful and controlled breeding, and probably the importation of a large number of Italian queens.  

I'm not saying he can't do it, and in fact agree with you entirely on his best course of actions.  I do think that he should have a good idea of how much work it'll be.  

I really second BlueBee's suggestion about starting an II queen shop.  If you're going to have to instrumentally inseminate anyway, you might as well be able to sell the extras.

If you follow this reasoning, then all Afro-American/Euro-American mixtures will come up with Dark skin and eyes.  Though the dark skin and eyes are dominant genes, there are may documented cases of Afro-American mothers producing Light skin, blue eye, and blonde offspring.

Dominant genes are simply dominant because they work best for the environment they were produced in.  If dark skin were an absolute, the American landscape would be littered with brown and black skinned people, the white "recessive" gene overpowered by the "dominant" genes of the American Indians, Polynesians, and Black Africans that gave birth from liaison with proper Aryan genetics.

ALL the genetics from that careless beekeeper 64 years ago are AFRICAN/EUROPEAN hybrid.  There is no "African" bee in the western hemisphere.  By the reasoning you are using, the undesirable traits of these honeybees, being dominant, would "flood" and overpower any variant established here.  That means the dominant gene that allows the northern varieties to survive in the cold of the northlands would become mixed with the dominant genes from the overly defensive AHB.

It's not really a good idea for a race of bees to be as suicidal as the AHB we visualize, they would soon die out, leaving the gentler and better adapted offspring to carry on.  Beekeepers throughout history have kept the queens that act less defensively, that's to say less tendency to sting the beekeeper.  These are the bees we associate as being hive bees.

As is stated in the articles I referenced above, the AHB in Brazil have been selectively bred, removing the defensiveness associated with the original strains.  Open breeding would create a certain number of undesirable (from the Beekeepers point of view) characteristics in some colonies, but the base genetics, the part that isn't moving around - the hive, is still there.  As with all hot bees, you pinch the evil queen and toss the ring of power into the volcano.

I would look into simple techniques of raising queens from the gentle hives, getting queens from the beekeeper with the gentle apiary, and exercise patience.  It may take some years, but the defensiveness will have to fall eventually.

[Tommyt]

  What I haven't read from all of you, or better yet what all seem to have wrote
about is,
How much AHB drones will drown out the Italian genetics
bee genetics that went from bees to Black,White,Redman,back too Italian Queen bees
I say!Why have none of you considered the man with the 39 colonies of
less aggressive bees being the drones that are in the DSA??
Now when you have gentle hives, you can saturate the area with your drones
Isn't this what you all are saying in an opposite manor,and that the AHB drones will
be in the DSA not the less aggressive?
IMO,The man with 39 hives should do his best to saturate the area as best he could
with his less aggressive drones followed up by
Gdams once he gets his colonies(s) up and going, could bring his queen mating
hives,over to the gentle bee yard with hopes of his queens being bred from the more docile
Drones,Besides all this breeding can't these calm queens live a year or 3 would that not in
itself,send more calm drones up too mate
  Am I way off base ??

I have a question :)
Someone spoke of importing Italians to him answered by
"customs would or could hold them up for 2 weeks"
If the beek was going to inseminate
could he use semen from Italian strains shipped safely from the USA?
I truly don't know if it can be frozen or if there is any storage life?
http://www.vegetus.org/honey/art.htm

Tommyt

[GeorgeAdams]

Interesting!

CapnChkn   

I would look into simple techniques of raising queens from the gentle hives, getting queens from the beekeeper with the gentle apiary, and exercise patience.  It may take some years, but the defensiveness will have to fall eventually.

I think this is an excellent idea.

Frozen seaman for insemination from Europe or the US... they do that all the time here for cattle.

There are 2 other US Citizens who are friends and we three are starting beekeeping at the same time in different places.  We could do a documented experiment.  I am open to suggestions except one option I insist on is to raise, in one of our yards, queens from the gentle 39 hives.

If I do an experiment – what do you suggest?

And, I noticed no one has commented on honey from coffee trees.

Thanks

[CapnChkn]

Yes(sir or maam) caticind!  I am by no means a Geneticist.  I just come from a family of scientists.  I suppose I could ask my Sister, that may be more trouble than it's worth.

The problem I think we're having is quantification rather than qualification.  The genetics that create a bee that is "aggressive" are magnified by the hybridization.  Bees aren't aggressive by nature, they're defensive.  The thing about Afies is they're OVERLY defensive.  What I'm saying here is the gene pool will eventually settle on a bee that's not so defensive they attack whatever moves within 150 paces of their nest.  The problem with crazy bees is they cray-zay...

There would have to be some factor involved that would make the neurosis a mechanism for survival.  In the savannah of Africa, there are animals that specifically target honeybee nests.  That makes for a paranoid, neurotic animal that has to defend the nest at all costs.  Being that stinging is a death sentence for the defender, this kind of behavior is survival at it's extreme.

Like flightless birds, the mechanism for flight is so expensive there's no reason to maintain it if there's no need for escape.  Bees are not nomadic by nature, so picking up and moving, Kamikaze tactics, and promiscuous reproduction is counter-productive.

I didn't just state Blue Eyes, I stated Blue Eyes, Blonde hair, and Light skin from an Afro-American mother.  It's only an example.  However, the point I was making was the population would not "Homogenize," with all the dominant characteristics of all the races suppressing the recessive factors.

There's a happy medium where the bees are defensive enough to protect themselves, and gentle enough to not destroy themselves.  If the bees are too gentle, the hive will revert to a more defensive stance in later generations, have protection, or die in the process.  I have 3 colonies right now, one I trapped, one was given, and one a split with a very gentle queen.  I notice the gentle bees are very gentle, they like to land on me and taste me.  I actually associate them as kittens, and have warm fuzzy feelings for them.  The trapped colony is tolerant, but will get grouchy, and the given colony will fly out at you and sting at the "drop of a hat."  I had bees from that colony follow me through the trees for 400 feet, and sting me from as far as 75 feet from the hive.  They're some kind of mutts.  Of the three I would say the dynamic would best be modeled by the trapped colony.

Bees are evolved to be aggressive.

You see, Bees are not anymore aggressive than any other life on the planet.  In fact these little insects are vegetarian.  I don't know of anyone who boards up the windows to keep the cows and horses out.  Cows and horses can also be aggressive.  Even animals that are really aggressive such as domesticated cats are not feared, and I've seen mountain lions playing with their keepers like kittens.

The reason for AHB (I like Afie!) is the varieties of A. Mellifera used for domestication are all temperate.  There are some varieties better suited for tropical climes, but not very productive.  The Sub Saharan African race was chosen for the hard working characteristic, as you can see from the above statement, gathering stores quickly would enhance survival in the savannah.

Mellifera have been kept in Central America for hundreds of years, but not successfully.  The reason for Afies being the bee of choice is simply that.  The locals would probably ignore the Italian queens.  I don't see a reason for bringing in new bees anyway.  Gdams (as TommyT pointed out) has already said there's an Apiary with gentled bees established for "some" years.  I would get the queens from there.

I suppose it would be a lot of management for us here in the colder regions, but Gdams will have two seasons, wet and dry.  I cannot imagine a day he will have where the temperature drops below 80℉.  I would worry more about the Varroa and SHB.

Those queens would have to be open mated.  Gdams, is the apiary you are talking about artificially inseminating their queens?  

I haven't been in that area of the world since I was about 8 years old, and can only remember one beekeeper.  He was a German man who had arthritis so badly he claimed he used to sleep standing sideways in the doorway until he got the bees.  Most of us have no idea what Coffee trees look like, maybe the Hawaiians.  All we can tell you is if you have thousands of acres of nothing but Coffee, then you will probably get Coffee honey.  Otherwise the bees will collect the nectar from whatever plants they choose.