Appraisal of stock
Bee Breeding
SBA Beinefeld Article
|
|
|---|
|
Appraisal of stock Bee Breeding SBA Beinefeld Article |
Good Honey croppers are NOT good breeding material |
|---|
For many years the Textbooks have been preaching that we should consider the yield of a colony in selecting breeder queens.
I personally believe this a major cause of the extreme 'Mongrelisation' of our current bee stocks.
Bad management of breeding selection in honeybees, due to selecting for honey crop size as a primary objective. Honey production is linked to many genes rather than one or two and is a feature that is enhanced by hybridisation, in particular the F1 hybrid, it should not feature as a primary selection criteria in a breeding program.
The honey crop that a colony collects is governed by many factors, BUT one of the major ones is 'hybrid vigour' exhibited by F1 hybrid bees. By utilising such bees for breeding we are actually propagating 'variability' in our stocks.
I propose that the major consideration should first of all be 'temper' (including 'jumping' and 'running').
Then next in line would be 'Wing Morphometry' and other biometric measurements of the worker bees to establish the precise strain of bee that we are dealing with, (I suspect that we are about to find out more about this from the 'cellsize' work that is currently being carried out.)
Only after these characteristics are fixed should we turn our attention to further selection for size of crop.
A further thought on this theme... A more efficient and longer lived bee that only requires one B.S. size brood chamber may produce slightly less surplus honey, but because they are easier to work with and require much less labour in management, it is a simple matter to run a few extra colonies to make up that difference. Indeed it may be the case that an individual beekeeper may be able to produce a much larger total honey crop simply because he or she is able to manage many more colonies than would have been the case with their 'mongrel' stocks.
Printed from Dave Cushman's website Live CD version
Written... November 1999, Revised... 08 December 2001, Revised... 10 October 2002, Upgraded... 24 August 2006, Further Upgraded... 24 December 2007,
|
