1 post tagged “ed yong”
Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science has a highly informative post about a study showing the advantages of genetic diversity within a bee colony.
As you know, a virgin queen may mate with several males on her nuptial flight, including males from other hives. When researchers compared hives where the queen was artificially inseminated (!!) with a single drone's semen to those where the queen received semen from multiple males, the latter did much better.
A couple things in the article that were peripheral to the main story struck me:
Young says that 80 percent of colonies starve over the winter. I assume he means wild colonies; he goes on to say of the experimental hives,
In late August, a cold period killed about half of the single-father colonies and by December, they were all dead. But the multi-father ones all pulled through the autumn cold and 25% made it past the winter freeze.
In other words, this seems like a really low survival rate.
Regarding the continuing questions about Colony Collapse Disorder, I wonder if commercial beekeepers -- as well as us backyard beekeepers -- are simply expecting a higher survival rate than is possible.
