Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
want to improve their stock to obtain a bigger harvest; or even perhaps because they are
just interested. Whatever the aim, queen breeding depends on you knowing about bee
reproduction and genetics.
Bee production and genetics
Until very recently, we knew very little about bee reproduction and genetics, but with
research agencies all over the world having to face an onslaught of new pathogens, a
new interest in this subject has emerged. This, together with the mapping of the bee
genome, has told us a great deal about the realities of bee genetics and breeding.
Most organisms function according to a certain set of basic principles, and now that
many of the genomes of a variety of plants and animals have been decoded we can see
just how much alike we all are. For example, humans share 99% of their genes with
chimps and 25% with bananas! But what makes bees and some other organisms slightly
different is the fact that the male bee has no father. He is born from an unfertilized egg
(a process known as parthenogenesis), and this has enormous implications for breeding
bees.
Another factor is that queen bees mate with many drones, all of which could be
described as flying gametes because they are the offspring of one queen only (no father
remember) and so bring the genes of another queen to the receiving queen. Confused?
Probably, but the situation does explain much about the social make-up of a colony.
It was mentioned in Chapter 2 that a queen who mates with drones from a wide area
will bring the benefits of genetic diversity to the hive. This means that the colony will
be made up of different subfamilies, each with the same mother but different fathers.
The next section of this chapter therefore explores basic bee genetics - something that
should help you to understand better the nature of these subfamilies, and how and why
a colony of bees is made up as it is.
