Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Bee breeding and improvement are not something that can be undertaken in isolation
by small-scale beekeepers. Evaluations of the results require large numbers of trial
colonies, but progressive improvements to populations can be achieved on a smaller
scale. The following is an example of such an improvement.
Closed-population line breeding is employed by breeders all over the world. In
this system, instrumental insemination is used to improve the breeding population
progressively and to maintain high brood viability (this minimizes the loss of sex alleles
and so minimizes inbreeding depression).
The procedure for closed-population line breeding is as follows:
Identify the superior-performing queens in your stock and select 35-50 of these.
These are the breeder queens.
Produce several virgins from each breeder queen.
Mate the virgins with 10 drones selected at random from the population.
Place these mated queens in hives and evaluate their performance. The more
evaluations, the better.
Select superior queens from among these queens and use them as breeder queens.
Researchers have estimated that 35-50 breeder colonies must be selected and
maintained in each generation if there is to be a 95% probability of retaining sufficient
sex alleles for at least 85% brood viability for 20 generations.
There are variations on this method. For example, the semen from a large, equal
number of drones from each breeder queen can be pooled and homogenized. This
is used to inseminate the daughters of the selected queens, thus ensuring that all the
queens are effectively mated with the population's entire gene pool. If the breeder
queens were selected for high brood viability, this would also maintain more sex alleles
