Delayed flight time of drones and queens as a method for mating control in small-scale honey bee breeding

Abstract

Lack of efficient mating control is often a limiting factor for honey bee selective breeding and conservation. One way to achieve selective mating of queens and drones is to restrict their mating flights to times when drones of the surrounding population have returned to their colonies (Delayed Flight Time Mating; DFM). Validated implementations of DFM require cooled buildings to refrigerate the mating nuclei during times of flight restriction. We here describe two simplified, semi-automatized DFM - protocols for small-scale breeders, and present first data on their efficiency. One of these methods abolishes the need for refrigeration altogether, while the other uses a simple insulated box and household freezer. Both protocols were tested against freely-mated and artificially-inseminated controls in the private beeyard of a breeder of Apis mellifera mellifera, surrounded by beeyards occupied by other breeds/subspecies. Mating purity was estimated based on the morphological analysis of 55 offspring workers of each of the mated queens. Both the cooled and uncooled variants of DFM significantly increased the proportion of A. m. mellifera-like morphotypes. Between 17 and 36% of mated queens only produced mellifera-like offspring, against 0% in the freely-mated control (total = 70 queens). These results demonstrate that effective mating control via DFM is possible even in areas with a strong presence of other subspecies/breeds, but that it has to be combined with post-mating selection of queens to avoid undesired crosses. It is likely that the method could be further optimized with regard to the timing of queen and drone release.