This year I am making queens

[slacker361]

I have got a great queen Buckfast , who has wintered great the last two years in south western pa..... she has such a great laying pattern (full frames of brood no empty spaces both sides) that I don't want to loose he lineage....

any pointers from you experienced guys?

[FRAMEshift]

We open mate our queens and do see a good bit of carry-over of behavioral traits.  But you are taking your chances in the next generation when the virgins mate randomly with whatever drones are flying that day.  That's even more true in your case since she probably won't be open mated with any Buckfast drones.

When I have a really good queen I'm pretty sure that the offspring queens won't be quite as good.  That's just a fact.   If you can raise a lot of queens and test them, maybe you can select equally good queens, but that's tough to do.  So the best you can do is try to ensure that the bees have lots of resources to raise young eggs to make new queens.

The only alternative is to do artificial insemination.  But that assumes that you can simultaneously judge the best characteristics better than the bees can.  I probably can't do that, but when I have a great queen, it's very tempting to try.   :-D

[slacker361]

I was thinking of taking one of the drones from the buckfast hive and the virgin queen..... a little fermented honey... maybe a beeswax candles and some luther vanDross playing in the back ground... .and well.......


No i here what you are saying and guess I will just give er a shot and see what happens.....hopefull my original queen didn't mate with a AHB and that trait comes out in the subsequent queens..... :shock: :shock:

[FRAMEshift]

I was thinking of taking one of the drones from the buckfast hive and the virgin queen.....

Well, the drone from that hive is a copy of half of the queens genes (he's just a flying sperm  :-D)  and the virgin queen is the queen's daughter.... so if my understanding of Pennsylvania state law is correct....

Yeah, even if it's legal, it won't work.  The new queen will not be able to lay worker brood unless the drone she mates with has a different sex allele.   After 200 million years of evolution, the bees figured out a way to foil your crafty plot.

[wildbeekeeper]

you could try and get some of her virgin queen offspring - dont let them mate and set up several hives that are strictly virgin queens laying nothing but drones.  you will have to supplement those hives with some worker brood from other hives to take care of the drone brood, but that will add a lot of buckfast drones to the area so you increase your odds that a queen going on a mating flight may come in contact with those buckfast drones.  other than that you are taking a chance with open mated queens - you still are with having these drone yards set up but at least you are adding buckfast genetics to the area.

[slacker361]

Frameshift, so you are saying that  queen that lays the drones and eggs for a virgin queen cannot mate? I understand what inbreeding like this does for the human populations, however inbreeding is a way of nature for many many species....... I am trying to think of my intro to genetics class, and if not mistaken that the queen being the only producer of genetic material for the hive, makes the bees more genetically alike than if every time the queen needed to lay she went out on a date...... hmm i am going to have to look into this as my mind is somewhat jumbled (big exam today)

thanks

[FRAMEshift]

Intensive inbreeding can cause the same problems for bees as for humans.... the reinforcement of recessive traits.  The bees protect themselves from this by a system involving 19 sex alleles.  Unless the sex alleles are different between drone and virgin queen, the fertilization will not be successful.  The best source of information I have found is this:

http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/genetic_aspects_queen_production_1.html

[slacker361]

dangit...... so i am pretty sure I have the only buck fast bees in probably 100 mile radius..... so this isn't going to work out at all..... I may have to get another queen and split of some bees from my only surviving hive for even the chance of getting a pure bred mutt...LOL

[FRAMEshift]

That's why I've adopted the practice of just making queens from the best hives.  There's nothing pure bred about it, but it should improve the queens over time.

[slacker361]

canceling that private room with the jacuzzi ......