# General beekeeping > Native honeybees >  Example of hybridization

## Jon

yellow-banding2..jpg

This colony is headed by a black queen mated mid July 2010 but at least 50% of her offspring show yellow banding, probably from Buckfast crosses.

The queen was one I took in an Apidea to an apiary with Galtee drones but she obviously strayed into bad company. There are two apiaries close by with Buckfast bees.

I haven't done morphometry on this one so it might be interesting to take a sample as I am sure the % AMM is low.
A queen like this can still produce perfectly good AMM type drones as her own drones will not be influenced by the yellow drones she crossed with.

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## Jimbo

Hi Jon,

I have noticed this with one of my colonies that was mated in an apidea and moved near to other beekeepers bees. In our area no one as far as I know has brought in a queen so I don't know where it has come from. I have less than 50% and the orange banding is not as strong as you have i.e. Only one orange band.
I noticed it when I was collecting bees for wing morphometry. I did think at the time I should keep the black bees separate from the banded bees but thought this will influence the result. I might do this in the spring and see what I get from banded v black bees

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## Jimbo

Hi Jon

I have checked some images of the other bees species. I don't think they are Carniolan. They could be Lingustica or Caucasica or something else
If you read the paper by Adam Tofilski he did not look at Lingustica therefore I don't know where they sit on a Drawwing plot. He also showed that if you plot all the wings separate there is some overlap of the groupings. It would be neat to get a pure Lingustica sample and do a Drawwing plot.
I supose this is all academic as your plots all fall within the agreed Amm criteria

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## Jon

> I have less than 50% and the orange banding is not as strong as you have i.e. Only one orange band.


That one was mated in Mervyn Eddie's apiary and he has 12 colonies all with Galtee drones. I believe he has had a quiet word with the neighbour and offered to requeen his stock for him next year. I think the neighbour has agreed to take up the offer which bodes well for next year.
I brought several batches of Apideas to his place over the summer and the best ones were the first lot which were mated in June.




> I did think at the time I should keep the black bees separate from the banded bees but thought this will influence the result.


I would say in the colony above, if you separated the black bees they would be pure AMM ie crosses from my queen mated with Galtee drones whereas the yellow ones would have a scattergram intermediate between AMM and whatever way Buckfast plots.

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## Jimbo

Hi Jon,

Before I set up a site I was offered on a nature reserve owned by the MOD I set out some jars with honey to see what was attracted to them. There ware no honeybees attracted therefore I thought it would be a good isolated site.
I did a similar honey pot trap in my garden more than 3 miles from the site and attracted a number of bees. 
There are a number of beekeepers within 3 miles of the garden. 
I did a wing morphometry on the bees and found then to be only 35% AMM. I now know not to keep my important stocks in my garden until the beekeepers in the local area change their queens. I have an agreement with them to do this as soon as we have enough good black stocks

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## Jon

I would have at least a dozen beekeepers within 3 miles of my main apiary and at least one of them is a Buckfast fan who buys in queens all the time.
I like to swamp the area with drones so with luck I get mostly matings with my own drones. (cue talk of inbreeding!)
I think that drones can fly much further than workers or queens so I would say you need a radius of much more than 3 miles to get the matings you want all the time.

The history of the galtee group is interesting with respect to winning over neighbours.

If we get our breeding group running well next year it could make quite a bit of difference as it will introduce far more native type colonies to the general area.

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## Jon

I checked a few wings from this colony and it is showing only 30% or so AMM.
Most of the queens I reared last year showed 90% -100%
It is rearing a lot of brood and building up nicely.
If it develops into a double brood colony like a lot of yellow bees do it could make a good cell raiser.
Its drones should be ok.


col45.jpg

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## gavin

Hi Jon

I'm curious.  (I know, I know, people have often told me ... )

Anyway, this intrigues me (a little).  Is it right that dark colour is dominant to pale?  I remember seeing some bees that were dark until you peered closely at them, when the underlying patterns could be seen.  If so, your Buckfast-looking workers would have to be from a hybrid queen crossed to Buckfast (or ligustica)-like drones.  And if that is so, then the drones from this colony should be unwelcome if you'd like to keep the stocks free of non-native influence.

If M is mellifera and B is Buckfast, this colony probably has:

(MxB)xB and (MxB)x(MxB) and (MxB)xM workers

Its mother made the (MxB) virgin so she must have mated with at least one B drone.

If this is all correct there might be more in the way of exotic genetics in your apiary than you hope?  Is the presence of pale workers an indicator of prior hybridisation rather than just the generation you are looking at?

all the best

Gavin

PS Unless you are seeing drifting workers.

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## Jon

The mother of this one is 33 so I am reasonably confident.

col33-dec-2010.jpg

There is no evidence of yellow banding an any of her offspring.

Is colour just controlled by one or two genes or what way does that work?

The other possibility is that a virgin flew out of one apidea and into another so I could be wrong re. the origin of the queen but I think I was only grafting from two queens at the time. Mervyn also had apideas in the area but his are all pure Galtee.

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## Rosie

> I checked a few wings from this colony and it is showing only 30% or so AMM.
> Most of the queens I reared last year showed 90% -100%
> It is rearing a lot of brood and building up nicely.
> If it develops into a double brood colony like a lot of yellow bees do it could make a good cell raiser.


I would be careful Jon.  I had a colony like that except that the bees were all black.  I knew they had been crossed though with Buckfasts from Greece.  I thought that, being so prolific, they would make good cell starters as well as raisers so I took the queen out in preparation for putting in grafts and they went absolutely berserk.  It's the infamous colony that killed my cockerel and stung farm workers in the neighbouring field.

I have a theory that colonies like this stay reasonably docile because the queen is decent but as soon as you remove her the workers go loopy.

It would be interesting if you could try to replicate my experience but I would not attempt it in a garden or where any other form of animal life exists within a 200 yard radius!

I think Gavin's point is a bit academic as even Galtee bees will have some exotic blood in them even when the wings are suggesting that they are 100% pure.

Rosie

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## Jon

I remember you posting about that cranky colony.
This one is in a 7 frame nuc at the bottom of my garden.
Maybe need to be careful when it gets a bit bigger.
I have another at the allotment with yellowish bees and that queen is going into her third year and the colony has always been docile.
I have half a dozen colonies I would like to requeen for various reasons and with a bit of luck I will have a few mated queens by the end of May.
Taking into account what Gavin suggested above, it would be daft to let a colony produce dodgy drones as I have plenty of other drone colonies which I am confident about including one headed by the daughter of a Galtee.
There are enough of those in the area anyway.
You get the odd colony which makes bees rather than honey but these are really useful for producing the brood to make up nucs with better queens.

Gavin in your (M*B) example above would this not produce 75% black worker offspring if black is dominant and it looks to me like 75% have yellow bands, certainly much more than a quarter.
Is colour not a polygenic trait anyway?

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## Jon

> Is it right that dark colour is dominant to pale?  I remember seeing some bees that were dark until you peered closely at them, when the underlying patterns could be seen.  If so, your Buckfast-looking workers would have to be from a hybrid queen crossed to Buckfast (or ligustica)-like drones. 
> Gavin


Hi gav. Did you dig up anything re. colour?
I found this paper if you want to cast your eye over it.

http://www.apidologie.org/index.php?..._2_ART0008.pdf




> Woyke (1978) summarised the literature
> on the heredity of colour patterns. From
> his experiments, he concluded that the inheritance
> of colour patterns in the honey
> bee is governed by 3 major allelic genes
> having their expression modified by 6-7
> polygenes with alternative alleles for light
> and dark.


What does modified mean here - is it switched on or off, or do we need the fruit bowls and chairlifts if not the full alphabet!

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## Jon

I found the Woyke paper.
He says:




> Production  of  two  distinct  groups  of  haploid  drones  by  the  hybrid
> queens  can  be  explained  by  the  existence  of  two  major  allelic:   genes  :
> one  resulting  in  the  yellow  group  and  one  in  the  black  group.  The  major
> genes  are  modified  by  several  modifiers.  The  results  presented  above
> showed  clearly,  that  the  yellow  color  is  dominant  over  the  black  one.
> Thus  the  yellow  major  gene  is  designed  as  Y  and  the  black  one  as  ybl.


http://jerzy_woyke.users.sggw.pl/hercol.pdf

Does this mean that if a pure amm queen crosses with one or more yellow drones some yellow banding will always appear in the offspring as yellow is dominant over black?

Gavin? Jimbo?

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## gavin

Yeah, rather late, it does.  Thanks for persisting with this one.  Yellow is indeed dominant, so a dark brown pure Amm queen mating with drones from a pure yellow colony will make workers with yellow coloration.  The proportion will just depend on how many drones and what contribution of sperm.  My post in March was garbage.

There are other genes that influence body colour in bees, but the yellow/dark brown one is the big one.

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