John Berry on Breeder Selection

By John Berry

Bees are livestock.

Like all forms of livestock, they have been subject to selective pressure for a very long time. Over that time some of the things selected for have changed, but selection has had a profound effect on our bee stocks. Some think this is a bad thing and that we should go back to more natural i.e. nasty, disease ridden, unproductive and swarmy hives. Me, I like to enjoy my beekeeping and occasionally make a small profit.

It has been argued that bees are not truly domesticated as they are still quite capable (apart from varroa) of surviving in the wild, but then so are most of our domesticated animals and they can go feral within a few generations. In general, feral populations are interesting, but not commercial. They exist for themselves. Done well domestication can benefit both parties.

The odd missed cell, but ultimately a good brood pattern to breed from.

In breeding bees we have a huge disadvantage because, apart from artificial insemination, it is impossible to totally control the dozen or more drones that our virgin queens mate with. This problem can only be overcome with either isolated mating yards or by totally swamping an area with your own preferred genetics. Both of these have been difficult given the huge increase in bee numbers. It helps when neighbouring beekeepers are all working towards the same goal.

In breeding bees we also have a huge advantage in that we can raise hundreds or even thousands of daughter queens from our best hives and, even when open mated, their drones will still carry the maternal line because they come from unfertilised eggs.

Given the difficulties you could wonder if any great improvements have been made over the years. This is something that is very hard to quantify, especially with the ongoing influence of feral hives.

However, this influence works both ways. Wild bees are not as wild as they used to be. I believe there is nothing that cannot be selected for given enough hives and enough generations. New Zealand bees have a huge amount of genetic variation and it is just a matter of selecting and stabilising desirable traits. It’s not just a matter of finding a queen that lays continuously, I have had hives like that and while they can be very productive they are also very expensive to keep alive and usually end up getting a Darwin award over the winter. Productive bees can also be frugal bees that know when to shut down for the winter.

Initial gains from good breeder selection can be huge and gains over 100% in overall production are not unheard of when improving really bad strains. There is probably a ceiling above which you can’t get, but even a 5% crop increase can have a profound effect on your bottom line.

Regionally Desirable Traits

Hawke’s Bay is not Northland and the West Coast is not Canterbury. Having said that, really good bees generally perform well anywhere, but they will do better in their own environment. I once sent my uncle a beautiful breeder which he couldn’t use because it showed bad chalkbrood in his environment. Years ago, when I was working for my father, we had some big winter losses after requeening with caged queens from up north. They were beautiful queens, but had no resistance to our local wasps.

If you have a really intransigent genetic problem, then try and get a breeder from an area that has worse conditions for the problem than your own. I.e. if you have trouble with poor spring build up because of lousy spring weather, then try some bees from someone with even worse weather. There will be, somewhere.

Selecting a Breeder

John Berry knows he might be going out on a limb, but says experience has taught him that “yellow” queens, which age to a “universal leather” colouring such as this, excel in production and temperament.

I always had two main criteria and these were production and temperament. Health is important too, but the healthiest hives are usually the most productive. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that colour is also important, for no other reason than experience has proven to me, time and time again, that a yellow queen with no black at all is far more likely to excel in those two criteria. If that yellow queen ages to a universal leather sort of a colour, so much the better. Remember, I have always selected for a consistent strain rather than hybrid vigour, which is not sustainable in the long term.

My requeening is done in the autumn and I expect my queens to be productive for two full seasons. Longevity is also something that can be selected for.

Each year I would have a thousand hives to select from. It can be difficult to select for production in a good year when almost everything is full and I’m sure we missed plenty of potential breeders because of this, but I have always been happy to choose breeders from hives that are full when a lot of their neighbours are not.

Any hive that showed a tendency to swarm, chalkbrood, sacbrood, lack of resistance to wasps, aggression or we just didn’t like it for some reason, would get crossed off. We would normally end up with 20 or 30 one year old queens marked with ‘possible breeder’ on the box. The following year they had to be just as good and were generally whittled down to four or five hives which I would bring home and then these would be subjected to working on a bad day as a final temper check.

In practice I would normally do most of my grafting from only one or two hives and, in theory, this would lead to a lot of inbreeding, but in practice it never caused a problem. The reality is, with the way queens mate, you are far more likely to have problems with undesirable outbreeding.

Breeder selection is even more important if you are trying to produce comb honey, as a lot of otherwise good hives show a marked resistance to drawing boxes of foundation.

After many years of this selection the vast majority of our hives were both very quiet and very productive and also even, i.e. all full at the same time, all of which makes beekeeping a lot more enjoyable and profitable. We also started leaving a lot of the best hives to raise their own cells after we killed the queen at the end of the second autumn. We would also find a lot of really nice autumn supersedure queens and these were left, provided their bees were quiet. Natural supersedure has been connected to swarming, but I have not seen this connection and supersedure is something I encourage as you get some magnificent queens.

Now I am semiretired with only 30 hives I can no longer dominate the local gene pool, but I can still breed from the very best hive I have and this is important. If you want hives that swarm continuously while producing very little honey and stinging the crap out of you and your neighbours, then simply stop selecting the best and you will very quickly get what you’re looking for.

Varroa is a whole different ballgame and breeding for resistance is something we are all going to have to do. It will probably initially, at least, be largely dependent on those few of us (not me) who have the necessary AI skills, but the needed resistant genes are out there in the population and selecting them from already good bees makes sense.

My bees are not due for requeening this year, but I do have a breeder picked out for next year. It has already produced two full depth boxes of honey plus one full depth box of comb honey, while the rest are at least one box behind that. It’s a really good hive, but it’s also showing the amount of variability in the local gene pool. Variability that really doesn’t need to be there.

John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.