Honey Bee Gene Pool

[GSF]

How many hives must one have to keep in breeding from happening?

[biggraham610]

Do we consider the ones in the trees "Kept"?

[deknow]

I'm not sure of the answer.

I did hear a presentation (and did a little.follow up online) about some research in NZ that was looking to see how many variations of the sex determination gene was found in NZ (common wisdom is that there are 17 or so)....they found well over 100.

I haven't seen anyone qualified critique it, so I'm not sure what to think.

[little john]

How many hives must one have to keep in breeding from happening?

Sadly it doesn't quite work like that - I only wish it did ...

If we assume that mating can take place within 5 miles of an apiary, the question then becomes "How many colonies must there be within the >300 square mile area surrounding any apiary to keep in-breeding from happening?". I'd say around 100(ish) - but would be happy to learn otherwise.

LJ

[GSF]

LJ, I was thinking something along those same lines. After X number of swarms and X distance said swarms covered, somebody's gonna sleep with their cousin after all is said and done.

[BeeMaster2]

The bees figured out how to keep that from happening millions of years ago.
The queens travel about 2 -3 km to find a drone congregation area. The drones fly about 1 km. Drones can use any hive as their home base which means they can move farther away from their birth hive over time.
The queen will mate with from 12 to 60 males. That also minimizes the impact of the possibility of one of her drones mating with her. On top of that, about one half of his sperm will produce viable eggs.
Does this help.
Jim

[iddee]

Add to that, if a queen mates with her brother, the bees will remove the eggs fertilized by him. That, for all practical purposes, eliminates inbreeding.

[little john]

The queens travel about 2 -3 km to find a drone congregation area. The drones fly about 1 km.

It's much further than that ...

Quantifying honey bee mating range and isolation in semi-isolated valleys by DNA microsatellite paternity analysis.  Ratnieks et al, 2005

"Ninety percent of the matings occurred within a distance of 7.5 km"
"The maximal mating distance recorded was 15 km"

To save anyone reaching for their calculator, 7.5 km is 4.6 miles, and 15 km is 9.3 miles.

LJ

[little john]

... somebody's gonna sleep with their cousin after all is said and done.

Not if you saw my cousins, you wouldn't ... 
LJ

[MikeyN.C.]

What is a semi-isolated valley, i live on pretty -much flat land ? ? ?

[buzzbee]

And how do we really know how far a queen flies to mate? Does someone know or do they just guess?   

[BeeMaster2]

They probably do it based on how long the queen is out of the nest. The problem is that it does not account for search time.
I am sure it varies by area and terrain.
Jim

[Eric Bosworth]

We need to start putting GPS trackers on queens. Then we can find out. Until then I think it is all hearsay. Of course... The GPS tracker might slow her down some so that might skew the data.

[buzzbee]

We need to start putting GPS trackers on queens. Then we can find out. Until then I think it is all hearsay. Of course... The GPS tracker might slow her down some so that might skew the data.

And maybe also less attractive, also skewing the data,

[Michael Bush]

>And how do we really know how far a queen flies to mate? Does someone know or do they just guess?   

There have been many a mating station on a island with pure Italians and they discovered they were far enough when the offspring were half German black bees...