Selection of Drone and Queen Lines: Improving Apiary Genetics
This article serves as a compendium of knowledge on bee selection, explaining how to precisely identify and propagate colonies with the highest production potential and the lowest level of aggression.
The Foundation of Selection: Why Choice Matters
Selection work is the cornerstone of modern beekeeping, enabling the creation of highly productive, vital, and disease-resistant colonies through skillful selection of parent pairs. Individual traits of a bee colony, such as honey-gathering intensity, gentleness, or swarming tendency, depend directly on the quality of the queen. In nature, natural selection promotes survival, but in apiary management, the beekeeper takes on the role of selector, creating strong colonies with desired economic traits.
Selection Criteria: Honey Yield and Gentleness in Numbers
The main criterion for selection is honey productivity, which is indirectly influenced by health and the absence of excessive swarming.
- Honey Yield (Productivity): Record-breaking colonies are considered those that collect 1.5 to 2 times more honey than the apiary average. If the average yield is 40 kg, colonies selected for breeding should provide 64–80 kg of honey.
- Gentleness: This trait is crucial for the beekeeper’s work efficiency. Gentle bees allow for hive inspections without the use of smoke and a veil, continuing their work uninterrupted during checks. Selection in this direction should be absolute – aggressive colonies should be culled regardless of their other advantages.
- Additional Parameters: Selection also considers winter hardiness (food consumption at a level of 0.6–1.4 kg per one bee street weighing 250 g) and the rate of spring development.
The Role of the Queen Line and Drone Line
In bee breeding, the role of drones is often underestimated, while it is the male that passes on hereditary traits to offspring much more fully than the queen. Therefore, selection must be conducted on two fronts:
- Queen Lines: Provide larvae for queen rearing. They must come from the “Super Elite” or “Elite” group and demonstrate trait stability over at least two seasons.
- Drone Lines: Provide drones for mating. They should be unrelated to the queen lines to avoid inbreeding depression (slowed development and a high number of empty cells in the brood).
Selection Process
Step 1: Maintaining Apiary Records
Objective assessment is impossible without systematic entries in the apiary journal. Record: colony strength after wintering, number of brood frames, amount of honey and wax harvested, and bee behavior during inspections.
Step 2: Selecting Colonies for Breeding
Based on records from the entire season, the beekeeper divides colonies into three groups:
- Group I (10–15% of the apiary): Outstanding (record-breaking) colonies, serving as breeding material.
- Group II: Average, production colonies.
- Group III: Weak, diseased, or aggressive colonies – designated for queen replacement or elimination.
Step 3: Preparing Drone Colonies
In early spring, introduce 2–3 frames of drone comb foundation into the brood nest of drone colonies. To ensure high-quality drones, these colonies must be very strong (minimum 2 kg of bees) and abundantly supplied with bee bread.
Step 4: Controlling Mating
To solidify desired traits, strive to control mating:
- Spatial Isolation: Transport queens to a mating apiary with an isolation radius of 5–7 km (preferably 10–15 km in open terrain).
- Saturating the Area with Own Drones: If full isolation is not possible, create a powerful drone background by introducing frames with drone brood from drone colonies into the remaining colonies in the apiary. For each group of queens, there should be at least 10 strong drone colonies.
Step 5: Evaluating Progeny (Genotypic Selection)
The ultimate proof of a record queen’s value is the performance of her daughters. For a reliable test, compare a group of daughters (minimum 10–15 colonies) with a control group of similar strength and queen age. If the daughters show higher honey yield than the control, their mother is considered an “improver” and is used intensively for further breeding.
Systematic selection can increase the apiary’s honey yield by 20–40% in just a few generations, making beekeeping more predictable and profitable.