# General beekeeping > Native honeybees >  DrawWing and other traits

## gavin

Nice set of DrawWing plots Jon

Do the results correlate with other aspects - in other words are the colonies with higher proportions of bees outside the box also home to more bees with other traits suggesting admixture of other stocks?

best wishes

Gavin

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## Jon

I think I need to get more colonies tested before I can answer that with any certainty.
The 4 samples I sent off were from colonies with dark bees with very quiet temperament which I fancied using for breeding.
I have a colony and a nuc with a higher proportion of bees with yellow banding which I should get tested to have a reference point.
I would be surprised if they have as many bees in the AMM box. I will send off a few more samples at the end of March if Roger Patterson will do me the favour of checking.

Col19 and Col33 are headed by sister queens, daughters from a feral swarm from a roofspace I collected in summer 2008.
33 is the supersedure queen mated in August09 and 19 was mated at the start of June09. I think 33 is a darker queen than 19 but I haven't seen either since October and my Colony records are under the hive roof! (Cue Nellie with his database)
I noticed that in some batches of 5-6 sister queens there were jet black ones and others with yellow bands which must reflect the different drones the mother queen mated with.

I also have 3 colonies headed by daughter queens of 19 as this colony made a supersedure cell every week from mid July to mid August and I managed to make up 3 extra nucs with the  cells. It's odd that the colony wanted to supersede a 6 week old queen who appeared to be laying fine. As far as I know she is still alive. 

The wing morphology is certainly not the only thing to take into account. I wouldn't breed from a colony with bad temper irrespective of the number of dots in the AMM box.
In general I see some AMM traits in my bees such as clustering at the front of the brood box and small winter clusters. Most of them seem to be on just 2-4 frames at the moment.

Here is the link to the charts corresponding to my blather.
http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/en...rawWing-charts

PS. There is an article on DrawWing by Roger Patterson starting on P24 of the Winter Edition of BIBBA's Bee Improvement magazine.

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## Neils

> Col19 and Col33 are headed by sister queens, daughters from a feral swarm from a roofspace I collected in summer 2008.
> 33 is the supersedure queen mated in August09 and 19 was mated at the start of June09. I think 33 is a darker queen than 19 but I haven't seen either since October and my Colony records are under the hive roof! (Cue Nellie with his database)


oops. This is why I want people giving me feedback.  I suspect you're going to be underwhelmed at how the DB currently records information against queens, on the plus side, it is designed to track the lineage of the queen although none of that is immediately apparent in the front end right now.  As it stands, as long as you know which queens are responsible for which daughters it is possible to build that relationship back through the system.  I'd argue that while it appears that the colony is the focal point at the front end, the real (potential) power behind the system is the ability to trace the lineage of the queens back to the point you have records for.  I've got the advantage having designed it, that I can at least see that I can track the set ups you're describing here through the existing structure even if it might not appear to be the case through the front end.

I'm still trying to get my head around DrawWing though and trying to establish what the best course of action is to try an integrate it into the DB.

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## Jon

Hi Nellie
If the queen changes for whatever reason I consider it to be a new colony and the number changes.
The colony record number is really the queen number the way I keep records.
In the example above, 33 used to be 14 until a supersedure cell and a new queen appeared.
On the colony record sheet for 33, I have a number 14 in a circle on the top right corner of the page to show that the queen is a daughter of 14.
Sophisticated or what!
I am starting to see that I should have all this in a database as I am going to end up with heaps of propolis stained and slug ravaged sheets of paper.
I have already lost a few which went with several nucs I sold last summer.
I will scan a record sheet so that you can see the kind of scribbles I make.
I use the sheet that you can download from Roger Patterson's BKA here

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## Neils

That is certainly possible to do in the existing setup, you can simply rename an existing colony (the CommonName field) everytime you requeen although that certainly isn't a necessity in the system.  From a database point of view, the colony entity hasn't changed even though you've given it a new name, new queen, moved it to a different hive type, or even shifted it to a different apiary.  Actually the one thing that I'm not sure it would handle is if you decided to take an existing colony and make 4 nucs out of it or something similar, I'll have to look into that.

But that does mean you'd be able to trace back the entire history of that colony back to its origin in the database.  If you were to effectively mark that colony as inactive/Lost and actually create a new one every time, you'd lose the ability to trace that history back except through the queen.

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