Basic Honey Bee Genetics for Beekeepers John Chambers 

I'm a huge fan of swarms. Firstly, they are nearly all the product of colonies that survived the previous winter, so generally healthy and fit. And secondly, they're free, so losses are not a hit to the pocketbook.

Thanks JB. AMM IN IRELAND With fewer imports into Ireland over the years, there are areas where colonies have very high AMM genetic makeup. Grace McCormack’s paper “A significant pure population of the dark European honey bee ( Apis mellifera mellifera ) remains in Ireland” (Journal of Apicultural Research 2018;57(3):337-350) is a good starting point. You can download it at researchgate.net. ISLE OF WIGHT DISEASE (IoWD) There is debate about how damaging the IoWD was to the national stock. Was it completely wiped out or did it take a big hit before mounting a recovery? I suspect the latter. The idea that native AMM was exterminated by the IoWD was promoted by Brother Adam. You can read a sincere and very convincing paper by him on the subject, published in 1968, at www.pedigreeapis.org/biblio/artcl/BAacarine68en.pdf. Key points in the paper are: 1. The IoWD was probably inadvertently imported with honey bees from mainland Europe. The problem appeared to have started just south of Newport in 1904. All Isle of Wight honey bee stock died out by the end of 1909. 2. Transportation of stock from diseased areas to other parts of the country led to rapid disease spread and devastating consequences. Within 15 years 90% the British honey bee population had died. 3. The first case of IoWD to be reported in Devon was in 1912. By the end of 1915, the county bee inspector predicted that there would be no survivor colonies in that county by the following spring. Only 16 of 46 colonies survived at Buckfast Abbey and in other nearby apiaries not a single colony survived. Every Buckfast survivor colony was considered to have genetic heritage traceable to northern Italy. 4. Brother Adam imported more honey bees from northern Italy to boost his own survivor stock. Fairly high-volume queen bee production was successful and much of this stock was distributed around the country during 1919 and 1920. (I have no doubt that many beekeepers were very grateful for this). 5. Brother Adam writes: “Among the Italian queens raised by us at that time there was one, a first-cross, of outstanding performance, and she became the foundation of our present strain. The performance of this cross was so far ahead of the pure Italian strain that we felt justified in running the risk of a recurrence of the disease”. The two best queens from the next generation were used as breeders in 1922. One of them consistently produced acarine-resistant stock and the other consistently produced acarine-susceptible stock. Brother Adam continues: “It was apparent that we had by accident made an important discovery - of hereditary susceptibility and resistance to acarine” and this statement is completely true. Brother Adam should absolutely be credited and thanked for this discovery. 6. The rest of the paper describes Brother Adam’s attempt to develop an acarine-resistant strain with many of the appealing properties of the native AMM. (NB. I have no doubt that what he did was considered cutting edge and scientifically valid in its day. He almost certainly did the very best with the prevailing knowledge and insights of the time but, regrettably, it does not make much sense at all when viewed with a contemporary understanding of honey bee genetics. You can decide for yourself whether this is being too harsh - his breeding records have been made available online at perso.fundp.ac.be/~jvandyck/homage/elver/pedgr/ped_BA_1929.html). Leslie Bailey’s views about the IoWD could not be more different. Bailey was a highly respected honey bee researcher/academic based at Rothamsted. The second edition of his book “Honey Bee Pathology” is a classic. Although published in 1991 and long out of print, copies understandably sell for well in excess of £200 today. In 1964, he had an article published in Bee World entitled “The ‘Isle of Wight Disease’: The Origin and Significance of the Myth”. You can download it for a fee at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0005772X.1964.11097032?journalCode=tbee20. In it he states: “We have no evidence that any parasite we know today was the cause of the wholesale losses of bees. Having examined the evidence, I suspect that the I.O. W. disease was assumed to be the cause of all the losses for which there was no obvious explanation at the time. In this sense it was truly a myth”. Yet another take was presented by Beowulf Cooper, a professional entomologist in the Government’s Agricultural Advisory Service. In 1962, he made it his biggest priority in life to help interested parties improve the quality of their honey bee stocks. He did this until his death 20 years later. It is hard to imagine that any other person visited as many apiaries in the British Isles as he did, before or since. His position on the IoWD can be found in his posthumous book “The Honeybees of the British Isles”, some of which is quoted here: “With the coming of these foreign bees, and the greater transportation of queens and colonies from one part of these Islands to another, there arose from 1906 a malady or series of maladies collectively known as “Isle of Wight disease”, whose widespread appearance caused consternation amongst those whose bees were affected , and something approaching panic elsewhere. Sufferers wrote to the bee press, and those whose bees were still healthy feared that they would be next to be afflicted. In this atmosphere, losses of bees from any cause were readily attributed to the “disease”. Just as the heavy losses of colonies reported after the 1962-3 winter were later found to be greatly exaggerated when actual counts came to be made, so lack of precise statistics must have led to a great overestimate of the degree of loss that had occurred. This was accentuated by the large number of apiaries which had dwindled or been lost through the tribulations of the 1914-18 war when sugar scarcity prevented feeding, some winters and springs were exceptionally cold, colonies were neglected, honey removed was perhaps excessive, and newcomers made novice errors. When restocking became possible, this sense of defeat seems to have been maximised for political reasons, as an inducement to persuade beekeepers to accept subsidised colonies on movable combs, in the laudable belief that the latter would assist examination of hives for disease and increase yields by eliminating skep and box beekeeping. Thus arose the idea that the native bee was dead, which subsequent authors have tended to foster and enlarge, often to the point of fantasy. Some of those personally involved in the restocking campaign have admitted to me that there was in fact no shortage of surviving native bees. I have talked over the last 40 years to a great many beekeepers in England, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland and Wales who kept bees throughout this period, as well as some of those concerned in the restocking schemes. The surprising thing is that so many of them have said that the scourge of those times passed them by, or affected one apiary but not another, from which they subsequently built up again. The pity is that so many of these old beekeepers have now gone. My estimate is that well over half of the beekeepers of that time did not suffer the scourge in their apiaries”. For what it is worth, I suspect that there was a genuine acarine-based problem in Britain at the start of the twentieth century (brought in with imported stock) and that it rapidly caused an unprecedented number of colony deaths that frightened people. However, I also believe that there was some survivor stock. At Buckfast Abbey, this survivor stock happened to have a northern Italian genetic heritage. However, in some other parts of the country I have no reason to doubt that there were native AMM colonies with acarine resistance. I believe the resistance had a genetic basis in all instances. I agree with the long-held view that this resistance was probably anatomical, based upon spiracle size and the strength of the protective hairs. This idea is supported by the paper “Differences in the morphology of prothoracic and propodeal spiracles in three strains of Apis mellifera: Possible relation to resistance against Acarapis woodi R” (Journal of Apicultural Research 2004; 43(3):105-113), which can be downloaded from researchgate.net. As always, prevailing environmental conditions determine which alleles are “beneficial” and which are “maladaptive”. In the absence of acarine, alleles that code for large spiracles are more beneficial than those that code for small spiracles. In the presence of acarine, the reverse is true. When acarine is suddenly imported by man into a new geographic territory, the vast majority of colonies it encounters will have large spiracles and there will be a very frightening level of colony collapse from the perspective of a commercial beekeeper or a hobbyist beekeeper. However, survivor colonies with small spiracles have the potential to bounce back and correct the deficit within a relatively small number of years. This idea has striking similarities to the story I shared in the lecture between 40:50 and 44:22 with regard to varroa, which is exactly the same story that a beekeeper local to me described happening to his 100 colonies that he has never treated for varroa. It is also consistent with the genetic record of repeated honey bee population crashes, as described in the freely-downloadable paper in Nature Genetics “A worldwide survey of genome sequence variation provides insight into the evolutionary history of the honeybee Apis mellifera”. Doing nothing was not acceptable to the beekeeping community in response to the Isle of Wight Disease. However, hidden within their genetic legacy, honey bees probably had their own genetic solution to the problem all along and the human attempts to create resistant strains employed ideas that now look scientifically baseless.

@@johnchambers5140 Thank you for such a thorough, detailed and comprehensive response. Way beyond my expectations.

Its simple Mr. Parker, your claims do not hold up to logic reasoning or Science. You inability to realize that your claims have been investigated ad nausea, and proven to be untrue only adds to the complication of accomplishing the goal.

​@@charleslinder3119 Did you watch the video? What specific claim have I made that has been proven to be untrue?

I can honestly assure you that I am not a propagandist for BIBBA (Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association). Regrettably, my passing references to anthropogenic bee improvement techniques of any kind (regardless of who employs them and to what end) were unflattering in the main for the simple reason that they represent the genetic antithesis of almost everything that the natural honey bee mating process tries to achieve. Many ideas in the presentation will have been very difficult indeed for some BIBBA members to hear and this was actually the subsection of the audience that I was most worried about offending because I have considerable empathy towards them. I suspect that many BIBBA members would dearly love the importation and long-distance transportation of honey bees to stop because of the genetic damage it causes to locally-adapted stock and the disease that it can spread, and I would dearly love the same thing. However, there might not be much common ground between us beyond that point with regard to the best way to facilitate stock improvement or what that improved stock might look like. As I said in my first slide: there are as many opinions about how to keep bees as there are bee keepers. What I presented was a very basic summary of some of the simpler and more important genetic discoveries of recent years as they apply to honey bees. If I presented a paradigm, then I hope that it is a contemporary and scientifically evidence-based one. However, it barely scratches the surface of what we are now discovering. There is a RU-vid clip entitled "The Monk and the Honeybee Part 1-5". It opens with Brother Adam saying: "There is no such thing as a perfect honey bee. It has to be created, bred in other words. Not created in the strict sense but developed by the hand of man." I could not disagree more with that point of view and my disagreement is based upon how we now understand honey bee genetics to operate.

John Chambers, when you are discussing the expression or non expression of a trait in the talk, are you referring to it in the individual (or colony), as in genetic expression in the classic sense, or so you mean it for a population of many colonies in a region, referring to the extinction or string reduction in the frequency of a trait from the local gene pool? Sometimes I felt you meant one and other times I thought you meant the other, but maybe that was just me. Thanks for such an interesting talk. Learned so much. Sure blows what we get generally here out of the water. National Honey Show talks are always at an amazing level, yet the audience follows along. Inspiring!

@@johnchambers5140 That's quite a long reply to a simple point: I just wish that presentations on "genetics" would stick to the genetics and leave the race-politics out of it. We all have our own views and, as I am very aware, it is an emotive subject. Inevitably, when you discuss genetics, you have to discuss selective improvement. If this offends people, I'm afraid that is their problem. Beekeepers want stock improvement but, in my humble opinion, they are poorly served by "conservationists" whose primary objective is preservation and not improvement. Although I am not a Buckfast devotee myself, Brother Adam was ahead of his time (at least in the UK). For that, if nothing else, he should be remembered fondly.

@@johnchambers5140 Excellent Reply John, I enjoyed your presentation, even though I 100% disagree with the concept of leaving bees alone. Here in the US we view bees a bit differently and many of us are more interested in the husbandry side and how to improve management as opposed to the hands off side. But that does not mean we cant appreciate the details of your presentation. We here have a much bigger challenge. there are many "breeders" touting things like the Bond method, with zero comprehension of the billions of tons of produce that would collapse were we to follow that path.

@@charleslinder3119 These fear tactics are so often used to keep so many beekeepers in bondage to treatments and the commercial mindset.

The wider scientific community believes planet earth to have existed for about 4.5 billion years. It has been suggested that Apis mellifera evolved about 6 to 9 million years ago and that the division into different subspecies started about 0.7-1.3 million years ago, largely due to the geographic isolation of different subpopulations. This fits quite neatly with what I presented. The paper "From where did the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) originate?" is a good starting point for exploring all of this. You can access it for free at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3433997/ I hope that helps. I think that I have scientifically valid references for every claim made in the lecture. Please let me know if you would like any others.

The Earth is over 4 billion years old. It's been proven time and time again.

Ah, the circle of proof. Bones judged by rocks that are judged by bones. Assumptions galore in that theory. Just stop already. Lol

J.Arnold Cotton just not true

Craig Nelson man is not that smart He guesses and calls it proof - laughable