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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alastair" data-source="post: 14009" data-attributes="member: 13">My first beekeeping job we had a tad less than 4,000 hives, and the date and strain of queen was written on the hive mat of each hive, and they were evaluated each season to select the best breeders, true to each strain, for the next round. That is how I was trained, so for a while I did the same thing in my own hives. But then I read a very good article describing from a genetic viewpoint how breeding from a very few of the very best, is not necessarily a good thing. This guy advocated getting gradual improvement by excluding the worst 50%, and breeding from the rest. Thereby keeping better genetic diversity. As an example he talked about herds of animals on the African savannah. If you watch wildlife documentaries you see all the animals are superbly fit and healthy. This has been achieved over thousands of years by any weaker animals being picked off by predators and removed from the gene pool. But the herd is not bred from just the best few, it has been bred from all the animals, just not the weakest. It made a lot of sense to me so now I do something a little like that with my bees. But I also breed from a specific few which are artificially inseminated to preserve specific traits from both male and female, but I try to disperse those genetics through a portion of the other hives.</blockquote>

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