Meet the Scientist Breeding More Resilient Bees (And 4 Other People Working to Save the Pollinators)
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yesmagazine.orgPosted Jul 15, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC
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yesmagazine.orgI'm hoping to requeen at least one of my hives with a VSH queen this fall. Disease/parasite resistance selective breeding is some of the most important work being done on honeybee survival, even though it doesn't get as much attention as other issues.
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I never understood the "breeding programs." All queen breeders selecting queens that don't die, make a lot of honey, require minimal feeding, and are acceptably gentle. Literally every single one. We emphasize some traits over others, but in the end if bees aren't strong to mites they don't survive long enough to be breeding stock. You don't have to be a scientist. You don't have to count the opened brood cells. Just breed bees that don't die, make honey, and are nice.
The biggest problem in my opinion is the vast majority of beekeepers are afraid of making their own queens. They import genetics that they hope work well in their area even though the breeder is sometimes thousands of miles away, and spend $17-25 per queen instead of spending 2-3 hours per week to make 30-100 queens.
I am biased, and I have my own anecdotal evidence. For the last 3 years I haven't had the money to buy queens, so I had to make my own. This year I haven't had to treat any of my roughly 100 hives. It is a very small sample size compared to the large companies, but it makes me very optimistic for the future. My only problem is that my "acceptable defense" is a little more aggressive than most people, but over time I think I can calm them down.
The vast majority of beekeepers don't have hives they can dedicate to raising 30-100 queens. Most are hobbyists with fewer than 10 hives and many have only 1 or 2. They are breeding with who knows what drones from ferals nearby and other apiaries. Queen breeders are forced to maintain adequate European drone sources, random beekeeper in South Florida or the South West doesn't have that luxury. Even in North Florida I can point out which hives have raised queens and which have purchased ones. The ones with raised queens in my apiary are assholes, the drone sources in the area are much more defensive than proven European ones from hundreds (I only order from S. Georgia and Florida now, CA queens didnt do so well) of miles away.
Then you get to losses. If you have 100 hives losing one doesn't matter as much, or you have the resources to requeen from another hive or combine them. With fewer hives having a single hive lose a queen, and fail to raise one (dragonflies are my enemy they destroy my virgin queens regularly) its much harder to recover. A single hive down in my 10 hive apiary is 10% of my hives, a guy with 2 hives looses 50% when he looses one and if something happens to the queen in the one he has left he is in trouble.
These are also the same people who don't check for mites and have no idea why their hives die only showing us pictures weeks later. If we get the genetics out to them it helps us all. They are not contributing good genetics, they are just holding on. I have already had one guy who bought a nuc from me come back 5 weeks later and get another because he killed them (overrun with SHB, probably lost the queen before that).
Then you go to the larger end. Once beekeeping becomes a real commercial business you don't have time to raise queens too busy traveling around to pollination contracts. Most those guys aren't going to check for mites anyway and treat and requeen on a schedule as it is. If they can spend $20 on a queen per hive and reduce the price of both treatment and labor installing that treatment all the better. They don't care about locally adapted queens, no where is local when you go from CA to FL to ME in a year. It costs them less to spend $20 a hive than setting up a permanent apiary staffing that apiary and raising their own queens.
Yes the programs matter. The time it takes for an unmanaged hive to die of varroa is generally said to be about 2 years. You are benefiting from them since as the genetics spread out into the world your bees get those traits. Yes you might eventually develop them on your own in isolation, or you might not.
We are purposefully trying to sort circuit what should be thousands of years of evolution in a short amount of time. In this case towards a specific goal. The breeding programs are the way to do that quickly, the way you are doing it might get there eventually, or might not.
Also if your neighbors are buying program bred queens the drones your queens are mating with are contributing those genes to your stock even if you don't have them already. If I had 100 hives I would be getting at least a few queens a year from diverse sources just to try and introduce more diversity into my yards. Then selecting the best of those and the ones I raised to retain an introducing more variety next year. Evolution can only work with what it has. If your bees don't have good traits they may never do a good job against varroa. Your other management techniques may be covering up and compensating for less varroa resistance. Adding those traits to your stock can only help in the long run.
On the small scale end you are absolutely right. Hobbiest beekeepers can't contribute much to the gene pool. Though there are many of them, they are generally not in a position to breed, and compared to the thousands of hives commercial beekeepers have they are a drop in the bucket. I still think they can raise their own queens very effectively and easily by taking frames with queen cups and using them to make splits cheaply and easily, but in the end that is not always possible or simple enough.
My main concern is the commercial guys. The first point you made was about the word "local." Beekeepers do migrate, so the word local may not have been the best choice. At the end of the day the beekeeper you described needs bees that can survive travlling from CA to FL to ME in a year, and survive the beekeeper's treatments, and overall treatment over the course of a year. In this case they just need to survive the beekeeper. If the beekeeper selects his best bees every year then he is selecting for bees that will work great for him. That is part of why I think beekeepers need to breed their own bees. Every beekeeper puts his or her bees through a different experience. A different gauntlet. What is good for that beekeeper may not matter to another at all. Having his own bees that do well for him is awesome.
In terms of cost, which is my biggest factor that I care about, queens are $20. You sound like a commercial guy. You know that beekeepers can keep 1,000+ hives per beekeeper. In a large operation you can use a LOT of queens. In one operation I worked for I think we used 1,500 queens per year. Assuming the queens are $20 each (depending on dead loss and shipping it can be more like $25 certain times of year) that is $30,000 spent on queens. You can almost hire a new guy to JUST raise queens for that, not to mention all the other value they can generate the rest of the year.
I don't know anything about the 2 year quote. Hives I have seen decline VERY rapidly.
Any time you are selecting your own bees you are fast tracking the progress. Every beekeeper is by selecting for traits, rather than randomly letting survivors breed. Artificial insemination gives a little more control, but keeping my strongest bees in one yard where I mate my queens isn't all bad either. I can't always control all the genetics, but that is good. Some randomness discourages inbreeding and can introduce beneficial traits that I did not previously have. A significant portion of my hives are from swarm and hive removals as well, which surely introduces bad genes into my stock, but I don't view that as a problem. Any weak genetics that are unacceptable will eventually be weeded out by starvation, parasites and pathogens, or by me squishing them for behaving in an unacceptable manner.
My bees never have to be perfect. They probably never will be. It is biology, so what is perfect anyways? My bees will probably never be immune to everything. I don't expect them to. Sometimes Chalk Brood, beetles, Tracheal Mite, and other stuff pops up. It happens. Using my own bees and my own genetics I feel makes a very big impact on my own stock, perfect or not.
Bryan, selective breeding is a little more complicated than if they die or not. In natural selection, there are two major components involved. First, you have selective pressure. In our case, this is varroa, brood diseases, winter severity, beekeeping practices, and nectar supplies (among many others). This part doesn't take experimental conditions or a scientist to understand. To a degree, if selective pressure were the only component here, it would be better for everyone to make their own queens, since the conditions change slightly depending on where you are.
The second component of natural selection is more complicated. This is genetic diversity. The depth of the gene pool decides how successful natural selection processes can be. The "most fit" queen for any pressure depends on how many queens there are, and their genetic diversity. In the case of making your own queens, this is where your abilities (and mine, as a scientist myself) fall short. Our gene pool consists of our current queen's genetics, as well as the genetics of any queens in drone mating distance. The more those other beekeepers make their own queens, the more similar our stocks become, making our collective genepool smaller. Generation to generation mutations still occur, and there will always be queens that are more "fit" than others, but this is a "hands off" approach which ignores the advances of science and relies on nature to fix itself. It will, we've seen that in countries that have had Varroa for thousands of years, but our beekeeping culture will be destroyed in the thousands of years point mutations take to make these advances.
Then, you have the scientific approach. You look at a broader gene pool, including a variety of common varieties, as well as uncommon ones that are known to have traits you want. You cross-breed for wanted traits, and determine the genes involved. This accelerates the process by thousands of years, taking the work nature has already done and applying it to our bees. This is what you and I cannot do at home. If we rely on the forces of nature, we will have to live with the higher hive losses varroa and other parasites and diseases have brought us.
That's not to say introducing queens is perfect. Obviously, success rates with installed queens vary. I'm very new, and have little experience to go on, but I do find it peculiar that some people have absolutely no luck with them, while others will tell you they requeen all of their hives every year with almost no issues (and just get a replacement when they do). I for one will be looking to get some good genetic stock going in my apiary, but to each their own. I'm not trying to tell you how to keep your bees, and I hope I didn't come across as rude. I just wanted to point out why this research IS important, and must continue for the betterment of our trade and/or hobby.
Aren't a lot of things like this due to too much human intervention in the first place though? Is the answer really more human intervention?
Bees are under attack from humans. It's our fault they are dying off. And because we're lazy, rather than stopping the attack on them, we want to create ones that don't mind us attacking them quite so much?
Yes, it's due to human intervention. That same argument would mean that we would stop trying to do anything about climate change, deforestation, endangered species, and loss of habitat. We're a very destructive society because we have moved beyond the basic laws of nature. Unless we go back to hunter-gatherers, we will continue to have a negative impact on the environmental balance. The best option is to use our toolbox to try and undo some of the damage we have done to the environment. This means using science to help nature.
As far as gentleness goes, that's a double-sided coin. Selective breeding is used both for survival (resistance to mites and disease) and human benefit (honey yield, gentleness). The first, because it is needed to sustain our use of the honeybee in agriculture, the second because it makes selective breeding more profitable (the government funds a lot of the research, but you still need to sell the queens to make a profit, and to get the genetics where they're needed).
Honeybees wouldn't even be in North America without our intervention, not to mention all of the parasites and diseases. It is our global economy that has spread their entire set of parasites and diseases to all but a few small corners of the world. If we do nothing, honeybees will survive on their own, but beekeeping as a hobby and business will become unsustainable. I for one feel that we have an obligation to use science and technology in every way we can to benefit the environment.
A better analogy would be that instead of reducing our environmental impact to combat climate change, we try and make the planet more resilient to our relentless attack.
The biggest issue is our relentless breeding. In the last 30 years our population has doubled. If we don't do something about the population explosion pretty soon we'll be the victims of our own success. And if we don't tackle that big issue, any attempts at helping out honeybees / the environment / endangered species etc will be wasted effort.
Personally, I would rather see far less scientific intervention in the environment. It's shown time and time again that it messes things up far more than it helps.
This is a really weird topic. Bees aren't from the US, or really most of the places they are found now. They are introduced. Really they are invasive, displacing local pollinators. Humans need bees, and not just the hive or two per acre that would occur naturally, but sometimes up to 4 per acre on orchards. If humans disappeared the bees would CRASH. I don't think they would go extinct, but without us feeding and caring for them their numbers in the world would decline sharply before it stabilized. At least that is what I think.
Bees are under attack from parasites, pathogens, and the pesticides from the very plants that make their mass existence possible. Without pesticides we wouldn't have access to the number of plants and money and resources that is keeping the artificial system of bees we have alive. Humans may be impacting the bees, but without the very crops poisoning them they would die because the beekeeper couldn't afford to care for them.
On the aggression note, this artificial system also demands that the bees not hurt the farmers. If the bees are too aggressive to get contracts the bees lose their value, and ultimately die, so docile bees are important, but I don't think they need to be as docile as we are making them.
A couple of thoughts: First of all, it sounds like you're arguing that breeding one's own queens will reduce diversity. While it's true that if all the beekeepers in a town stopped buying queens from other places you might see a homogenization of the gene pool, it will also mean that global beekeeping won't lose the genes in that region. As someone studying how long-lived isolated forest bee populations resist Varroa, I often lament the fact that everyone is buying queens from the same few stocks across the country, meaning that national genetic diversity is getting hurt. That being said, if queen breeders do find genes that confer Varroa resistance, buying those queens and mixing them with locally adapted stocks will likely be the best way to fight back against Varroa.
And second, no place has had Varroa destructor for thousands of years. Varroa jacobsoni have lived on the Asian honey bee species Apis cerana for a very long time, (probably millennia) but V. jacobsoni jumped onto European honey bees and speciated into V. destructor about a hundred years ago, as best we can tell. Just so all the beekeepers here have that in mind. This is a VERY new problem, and does warrant attention.
Thanks for the info on Varroa! I believe what I had heard was probably referring to jacobsoni.
As far as diversity, I agree on all fronts. Diversity wouldn't disappear unless everyone in an area raised their own queens, and even then would just be smaller. The problem is, many mentors and associations teach just that.
As far as national queen suppliers, I completely agree. Your average California mass produced queen is just as bad, if not worse, than your own. My cheap packages I started with had queens that were nothing to be proud of. One was bad enough the girls replaced her, the other is doing alright, if not stellar. The breeding I was defending was true selective breeding, like the USDA program. This has already yielded steps in the right direction, like hygienic queens that have been well received, and VSH/pol-line, which has yet to catch on but has higher efficacy against Varroa.
Right. Hygienic fights chalkbrood, not so much Varroa. VSH is more effective, but dreadfully hard to test and select for. (Trust me. I spend a lot of my days doing it!)
Sorry in advance. This is going to be a long rant.
We both agree that the first component is the main part beekeepers have control over, so I am going to skip over most of that part. One of the key things I seem to have not emphasized is mating the strongest of the surviving stock, not any old survivors.
In terms of genetic diversity there is a HUGE variety of bees. Carniolans, Italians, Cordovans, and Russians just to name the most common ones, and of those every breeder's strain is a little bit different. You are correct. I will never have access to unlimited genes. I will never make perfect stock. That is the beauty about biology though, nothing is ever perfect. I bring in swarms, I try to introduce new genes through other breeders, and I do what I can to prevent inbreeding, but you are right, I will never have access to all strains of bees, and I will never make the perfect queen. Especially since bee genetics are so finicky and we will probably never fully understand how they work. I don't think the universities will either, though.
The second half of that paragraph is where you lose me a little. To pretend I have a smaller gene pool with 100 bees on three locations surrounded by at least 5 other commercial beekeepers, and lord knows how many hobbiest beekeepers while universities tend to have VERY small sample sizes is a bit unfair. They may have a larger selection than I realize but universities tend to have less than 50 hives (usually a lot less), and the sample size is usually very small by the end of the experiment. One university breeder I met ended the year with 10 hives of his stock left, and that is not uncommon. Everyone buys from different breeders, moves their bees to different states, and there is a HUGE potential for a lot of mixing of genes. Most universities have one location and import bees and try to use artificial insemination. They have more control for sure, but I don't know about more access to diversity. Over time close beekeepers may get more genetically similar bees, but with the overall bee migrations (especially given how many bees are on almonds in February) there will always be a huge mixing potential.
Also, I was under the impression Varroa was relatively new, having recently hopped over to honey bees from a bumble bee species. I don't think bees have been battling Varroa very long, and specifically they have only been battling Varroa for (less than?) 30 years in the US. Most beekeepers do not raise their own queens. They typically order them from out of state. By importing bees from foreign stocks there is little adaptation or evolution occurring. Beekeepers take their strong genetics and throw it away every time they purchase queens from far away places. Especially Kona queens, which did not have Varroa until I believe last year.
I also don't think our beekeeping culture is really in danger at all. I had 4 hives roughly 3 years ago. Now I am hoping to break 100 this year. Our bees are plenty strong to survive, grow, and thrive with proper care. What we really want is to improve our stock to be more productive with less inputs. I am sure my stock would all die out if I just left them alone. The idea is to improve my stock over time.
The only great advancement in science that the programs are using is artificial insemination. There have been discoveries in genetics and very intricate details about bee genes, but I am skeptical that is helping them be much more productive than every other beekeper who uses artificial insemination, and there are a few. There is at least one person using artificial insemination to select queens in Ventura County, where I am from, and there is at least one person doing the same in LA county, which is right next door. The university using the same method doesn't make them all that special. Is it REALLY that much better than wild mating though? A queen mates with roughly 10 drones, and I don't honestly know what the drones have to do to mate successfully, but I am skeptical that the method does not damage the queen, And I wouldn't be surprised if it promoted drone genes which are less than ideal for natural mating. How do we know that mated queen is vastly superior than one that just mated in the yard around the same drones? I am not sure we do. We hope it is better, but that is not the same thing. Literally every beekeeper in the country could be doing at least open mating, which is not perfect and not without challenges and risks, but is honestly pretty simple, it can save a lot of money, and it can push bees in a more positive direction than purchasing far away queens does.
Few beekeepers mate their own queens. Beekeepers in California introduce queens from Hawaii, Texas, the Dakotas, and other states. These are not states with fires, drought, and cool ocean currents. These are states with hive beetles, flooding, and high humidity. Sometimes even snow, which is totally alien to our environment. These are bees that are treated for mites in ways that a California beekeeper may never use, introducing the stock to totally new miticides, pesticides, and other chemicals. Then when these bees die, they are replaced with more queens from the same or other far away places, rather than locally adapted bees. I will never pretend to be perfect, but every year it feels like I need to feed and medicate a little less, and I produce a little more. Anecdotal evidence at best, but I don't have the time or patience to run a full survey, and in the end I am saving a lot of money making my own queens. I feel other beekeepers could benefit in a similar way.
Part of raising your own queens is introducing them once they are fully raised, and that is a really fun beekeeping discussion. A typical acceptable take rate on introduced queens is 70%, but you are right, it varies tremendously. There is no evidence to support this claim, but in my experience the closer related a hive is to the introduced queen the more likely they are to accept her. If you change queen breeders you will likely have an abysmal take rate. If you raise your own queens you will have a GREAT take rate. I actually had a minor accident and had a queen hatch early while I had no queen cages available. I introduced her to a hive by letting her walk in. She didn't seem to have any bees jump on her, and a queen was laying in that hive 2 weeks later. It appeared to be a complete success. Meanwhile if I purchase from a new breeder even leaving a queen in a 5 frame nuc for 5 days isn't enough time. Bees will sting and kill her immediately upon release. That being said, the bees will immediately try to replace her, and generally do so successfully. No matter what you do you will need to introduce queens in some way though, if I make my own queens, queen cups, or introduce someone elses.
We all want strong stock. Every single one of us. I just don't understand why when the university does it that it is big news, while literally every other queen breeder out there is striving for the same exact goal, and they don't get any credit.
We may not be measuring everything as directly as the universities do, I don't see any reason why universities are more fit to make a super bee than literally every single queen breeder in the country.
I understand your points! I think one of the biggest confusions in our argument is that it has become a battle of absolutes. It sounds like your queen raising situation is pretty good, high colony counts in the area, swarms, and likely the commercial beekeepers around you bring in plenty of new blood. On the other hand, you have "generic" breeders that do nothing special. Artificial insemination by itself is no better or worse than the old fashioned way.
The main advantage of breeding research is in the genes. Yes, Varroa is a new problem, but that doesn't mean resistance genes can't exist. Resistance genes often are carryovers from similar threats, that help when a new threat appears and make their genetic stock more fit. The research that really has the potential to help is the research hunting genes, not just breeding for the sake of it. Hygienic queens, and much more importantly VSH queens, are great examples of this. The benefit these stocks have over survival stock is that we know they have resistance genes, that confer that resistance to their offspring. Survival stock is important, and is how many of the genes researchers are looking for originated, but an "island" of survival stock will never be as good as it could be with resistance genes. If you, or your neighbors, introduced VSH queens, or something similar or better researchers find in the future, it could improve your stock, which as you said, everybody wants. I never intended to say that you were wrong, and if I came across that way I'm sorry. I just wanted to get across that while your success is great, it doesn't mean this research isn't important for the future.