Selective Breeding in Honeybees:
Enhancing Hive Health and Productivity

Figure 1: Cordovan queen – a recessive phenotype in Apis mellifera L. that turns the black color of the bee to a red/brown color. Pc: L. Cutts

Throughout our blogs together you will find that a beekeeper isn’t only a beekeeper. We are a chemist measuring out the proper amounts of treatment for mites; we are botanist with identifying plants that will provide pollen and nectar for our bees; and we are breeders. The honeybee, Apis mellifera, is the world’s most important pollinator and is ubiquitous in most agricultural ecosystems. 5 major evolutionary lines, 8 recognized species, and 43 known subspecies are recognized and within this blog we at the Green Jean Foundation will aim to shed some light about the importance of treating the bees we manage as the livestock that they are and perform selective breeding within our apiaries.

For many years my family bred queens, selling queens and packaged bees to other beekeepers. So, the idea of selective breeding for desired traits is a part of the foundation of my knowledge. Like any type of livestock, the beekeeper should seek out the “cream of the crop” to produce new queens by manipulating various colony attributes. This includes, but is not limited to their temperament, honey production, propensity to swarming, tolerance to mites, disease resistance and the list can go on and on. Any beekeeper can produce new queens, and most do it accidently. But a queen breeder produces new queens with the goal of maintaining and improving high quality and diverse stock(s). Many honeybee behaviors are influenced by heritable genetic traits. As the mother of the entire colony, the qualities of a particular queen are expressed in every one of her off-spring. These traits can have profound effects on the behavior and health of the whole colony.

Queen breeders should take care to select only colonies with the most desirable characteristics from which to propagate new queens and their drone stock. There is no perfect bee for all situations or conditions. For example, a stationary Florida beekeeper has little use for a queen that is cold tolerant and lays small amounts of brood at a time – likewise a heat acclimated queen that produces copious amounts of brood during a dearth period will quickly fail in the colder regions. Furthermore, it is rare that any single colony will possess all the most desirable characteristics, but over successive generations, a beekeeper should continue to select for preferred traits. When selecting the breeding stock, beekeepers must consider their own criteria regarding which characteristics are most desirable. That is the beauty of it though – diversity is what makes them stronger. Would a cattleman let weak and sickly cattle continue to dilute strong and healthy bloodlines? No! Therefore, why should a beekeeper reject the practice of culling out the bad ones and practicing an artificial process to promote health? A successful one does not reject such a practice.

Figure 2: A highly populated hive with bees “blossoming out” of the top. Pc: L. Cutts 

You may wonder “Why the queen, shouldn’t you focus on the work force?” Well, the queen bee is the foundation to the continuation of the colony. She is the sole repository of the colony’s genes: her own and those of the drones with which she has mated, and from these two comes the work force. A queen honeybee stores the millions of spermatozoa from multiple drone suitors in a special organ within her abdomen called the spermatheca. These sperm remain alive and viable for several years, allowing her to fertilize eggs as they are deposited. Healthy queen is capable of laying 1,000 to 3,000 eggs per day from these thousands the queen should lay one egg per cell. There are two types of eggs: fertilized (diploid) and unfertilized (haploid). The fertilized eggs are laid in small wax cells (worker cells), while the unfertilized ones are laid in relatively larger cells (drone cells). In addition to eggs, she constantly produces chemical pheromones that regulate hive behaviors which are transmitted through self-grooming from the mouthparts and the head to the abdomen of the workers. One of the coolest pheromones, are two that involve the eggs. Firstly, the queen marks her eggs with specific signal which known as egg marking pheromone. Such signal is important to guide police workers to discriminate between eggs laid by the queen than those laid by the workers (Ratnieks, 1995). Workers are sterile but they can lay eggs in queen-less colonies and in colonies headed by diseased or aged queens. Such workers are called egg laying workers. The second is the main pheromone of the queen, it is called queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) (also known as queen substance). QMP plays a crucial role in suppressing the initiation of queen rearing. The reintroduction and release of QMP to queenless colonies within 24 hours of queen loss leads to a significant reduction in the production of queen cells and nurturing of present ones.

Figure 3: A picture of a good “solid” brood pattern. Most of the cells currently occupied by developing pupa to replenish the colony of its population. Pc: L. Cutts

 Her attendant workers, known as her court or retinue, feed and groom her throughout the day so that she can focus her attention on egg production to maintain the colony’s population. Through their association with their queen and their interactions with other workers, these attendants distribute her pheromones throughout the hive. (Eny-166/IN1102, UF, Dr. Jamie Ellis, et al.) While a healthy queen bee can live for a couple of years, most workers live close to a month during the warm foraging season. The workers never sleep, they are constantly trying to find ways to be of service to their colony. Therefore, a colony of honeybees must have a laying queen, or their population will dwindle within a few weeks. A colony perpetually monitors the performance of its queen. She is, “royalty at gunpoint” is what my Granddaddy would say. If she does her job, she is protected with their lives and treated as the queen that she is. If she fails to perform her duties as an “egg maker” or is killed, they will quickly try to raise another queen from a suitable larva. As mentioned earlier, if the queen begins to perform poorly, perhaps laying only unfertilized drone eggs or not as much as she once did, their population will decrease and the bees will notice this, then she will be superseded by a new queen.

Figures 4 and 5: A docile hive feeding a thirsty bumble bee during the peak heat of Florida summer (Figure 4). Me handling a small group of workers with my hand. (Figure 5). Docile colonies should be promoted in all apiaries.

Pc: L. Cutts

A colony will also rear multiple queen larvae when they become overcrowded and are preparing to swarm. The old queen will leave with more than half of the colony’s workers just prior to a new virgin queen emerging from her cell. New queens are reared from young female bee larvae. There is no fundamental difference in any female bee larvae when they are small. Each has the potential to become either a worker or a new queen. All young bees are initially fed a rich diet of nutritious jelly by the workers. Around the third day of their larval stage, most larvae are changed to a diet called bee bread/bee milk, which is a mixture of pollen and honey. When the larvae are switched to this diet, they develop into worker bees (drones are also fed this mixed diet, but they will always be drones). If a female larva is continuously fed a diet of royal jelly throughout its larval stage, however, it will develop into a queen bee. Once sealed drone cells are apparent in the hive, a beekeeper can begin rearing queen bees. Drones are sexually mature after 14 days. Therefore, enough mature drones should be available by the time newly produced queens are ready to mate. Queens can be reared into the fall if drones are still present in the hives. Once drones have been expelled from the hives for winter, queen rearing should not be attempted as it is sure to fail and the colony, or the superorganism will die. (Raising Quality Queen Bees, UA, David Barnes, et al.) honeybee colony can be considered a superorganism, where the colony itself functions like a single organism. Each bee within the colony can be likened to a cell within an animal. The colony is the fundamental biological unit, not the individual bees. So, when the collective organism “splits” or “swarms” into two that is considered their reproduction.

Figures 5 and 6: A visual comparison in honey stores (Figure 5) and pollen and bee-bread stores (Figure 6). Good productive colonies should be promoted in all apiaries. Pc: Orlando and Kassandra Roberts, Roberts Farms, LLC.

There is an increasing ideology in the beekeeping industry that must be addressed, the ignorance or unfortunate rejection to the artificial selection of traits. Many believe feral colonies are the “future” of honeybees. There is a misconception that these bees as some in the industry claim are, “Methuselah colonies” – which insinuates that the colony has survived on its own without human intervention and is then considered superior in tolerance to pest and disease. Though as great as this may sound – it is unfortunately hope that is misplaced. The true scenario that is happening is a feral colony builds their comb somewhere, they succumb to mites and then another feral swarm overtakes the “free real estate” and repeat the process until we find them. I heard it said from a wise old head, “You can spend all your time chasing the survival stock and even if you do by the grace of God find the needle in the haystack and raise queens off her, who will she mate with? If you don’t practice honeybee husbandry, then you will just saturate her genes with poor drones and be back to square one.” My Granddaddy used to give out free queens to the small-scale beekeepers around him and they used to exclaim how he kind and generous he was, but you know what he was doing? He was ensuring the drones that were mating with his new queens were of good stock. The drones play just as much of a role in selective breeding and husbandry as the queen – I don’t need to explain further.

Some beekeepers say it is natural process for the bees to swarm so they, “leave them alone”, not only is this poor management practice professional unrealistic. If a queen is prone to swarming, she isn’t going to stay in the box for you, which should be considered a poor trait. Yes, you want the bees to reproduce, but as the beekeeper that is your job to promote and facilitate. If they leave, you now have lost not only bees, but money in various facets as well (potential hive, as well as potential honey production yields). If you are in Florida, beekeepers must follow Florida’s Beekeeper Compliance Agreement—Best Management Requirements for Maintaining European Honeybee Colonies produced by FDACS-DPI (see references). Within this, beekeepers have been given 10 guidelines that if practiced will ensure several practices are promoted such as swarm management of some fashion. These must be followed by all registered beekeepers, even if the honeybee colonies are located on county or state property or are used for educational purposes. So, we cannot be poor stewards when it comes to the bees that we care for. Sometimes life gets in the way and sometimes the bees grow too fast on us. That’s okay! But please do not fall victim to these ideologies found on the internet today that promote, less than optimal stewardship.’

The African honeybee (Apis mellifera scutellata) was introduced from the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa to the eucalyptus forests of São Paulo Brazil by Professor Warwick E. Kerr in 1956. Kerr described the colonies as “the most prolific, productive, and industrious bees.” His intention was to breed a race of honeybee that would be more adapted to the tropical climate of South America than the temperate climate adapted European races of honeybee. Although African bees were originally considered to be “accidentally released”, several studies including those published by Kerr (1967), do not uphold that view. Kerr performed hybridization experiments, reared, and artificially inseminated African queens with Italian honeybee (A. m. lingustic) drones, and distributed these bees to beekeepers in southern Brazil (Kerr 1967). Although the spread of the African honeybee was quickly recognized in Brazil and Argentina, the first English language published accounts of problems with defensiveness of the African bees came in 1964 by Nogueira-Neto. By 1972, the US had taken notice and published a report of the impending problem. European bees may send out 10–20 guard bees in response to disturbances up to 20 feet away and African may send out several hundred guard bees in response to disturbances up to 120 feet away. (Ellis, J., Ellis, A., 2008) These bees are extremely defensive in nature and will turn on you at the slightest trigger. There is not within their nature to remain docile when they have something to defend. During a dearth you may never know they are Africanized, but when there is a “honey flow” … It could be fatal.

There is a growing audience to the pseudo-sciences revolving around the Africanized hybrids. There are some that are now promoting the breeding and legalization of keeping them in Florida (Another Best Management Requirement is to keep known African stock). Some of the claims that I have read regarding the alleged superiority include longer wings, FALSE! (African Honeybees Questions Answered, Dr. David R. Tarpy and John Ambrose, NCSU) Africanized honeybees are slightly (approximately 10%) smaller than European honeybees. However, this size difference is very subtle, and it is nearly impossible to differentiate between the two without specific measurements and/or laboratory testing. (ENY-147/IN784, UF, Dr. Jamie Ellis, et al.) Another claim is the proboscis (straw-like tongue used to collect nectar) of Africanized honeybees are longer than the proboscis of Europeans, therefore she (the Africanized worker) is the better forager. This is FALSE too. The average length(s) are the same. Even if the proboscis was longer – if the crop that holds the nectar isn’t bigger that means she would have better access to selective, highly specific blooms that, that would benefit. Furthermore, these very selective blooms aren’t considered major honey producing crops – they are more so considered brood building crops and pollination contracts, IG blueberries that have a “small and tight bloom”. So, to have a longer proboscis would mean very little in the grand scheme of things.

There are two more claim that are clumped together. The claim is the Africanized hybrid bee is allegedly both mite tolerant and is a better forager through their highly defensive temperament. FALSE! It is true hygienic grooming is indeed a positive trait. Moretto et al (1991) found grooming behavior of TRUE African bees in Brazil to be eight times more efficient at removing Varroa than Italian bees and that this grooming is much more aggressive comparably. As well as the African bee does have a tolerance to mites, once they interbreed with European stock and become the Africanized hybrid, keeping such a tolerance to high infestations of varroa is unreliable to track and will eventually be unnoticeable. There is also already a lot of mite tolerant and hyper hygienic European queens on the market for anyone to buy, my favorite come from certified breeders in Louisiana. However before we close out this one, tolerance and resistance are two different things, and we should recognize this. Tolerance doesn’t last forever, eventually their higher threshold is met, and they too will succumb to the varroa mite that is rightly given the scientific name, Varroa destructor, because they cannot groom a capped pupa that is being fed on by sexually reproducing mites.

When I was in Kenya I worked and saw the true African bees, they were indeed tolerating to pest and disease, beautiful brood patterns with no sign of parasitic mite syndrome, but it arrived at that point via natural selection taking her course. From our perspective in American, a country that relies on the 1% to feed the 99%, and just a fraction of that 1% being beekeepers, we cannot feasibly allow “sick bees” to die to keep the food on the table. Also, I want to note that as soon as I opened the first hive, they were the most aggressive colonies I have ever seen. The whole apiary was already in a fully defensive “mode”. This transitions us to the second part of the claim above – The last point is, if she is too busy bullying the other bees off the flowers with the same intensity that she has in defense of her home, she isn’t doing the job she is on the flower to do – pollinate.

To close, selective breeding is important, and it worries me for the security of the industry when we believe pseudo-science over the real deal. I heard someone say, “I am willing to work with mean bees.” I’m sorry, but I am not, and I find that phrase as willfully ignorant to the obvious solution. So here at the Green Jean Foundation we must press on and continue to promote better practices and actual science through proper and safe selective breeding of queen bees. If you have a mean hive, pinch her; if you have gentle bees that their queen has a good brood pattern, and they are good producers? Take notice and promote similar attributes into your operation. No one should settle for bad tempered subpar bees.

I would rather a reader that believes these “wives-tales” be mad at me for a day than an unfortunate alternative of the loss of life. I welcome any type of argument providing there is sited sources. An open discussion is important. Understanding we will never see eye-to-eye on everything is what makes America special but let us believe in tried-and-true methods and science, rather than preferences and opinions. When we educate each other and bring our unique perspectives to the table to better the industry that is when our bees will flourish. Here at the Green Jean Foundation, we want to not only bridge the gap between the farmers and the consumers, but also cultivate agricultural excellence through education. So let us be better by doing better and create a better future for our children’s generation.

Citations (12):
Ellis, Jamie, and M. K. O’Malley. “Eny-147/IN784: Differences between European and African Honeybees.” Differences between European and African Honeybees, 2019, edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/IN784.
Ellis, Dr. Jamie, et al. “Eny-166/IN1102: The Social Organization of Honeybees.” PUBLICATION #ENY-166: THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF HONEYBEES, 2019, edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/IN1102.
Ellis, J., Ellis, A. (2008). African Honeybee, Africanized Honeybee, or Killer Bee, Apis mellifera scutellata Lepeletier (Hymenoptera: Apidae). In: Capinera, J.L. (eds) Encyclopedia of Entomology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6359-6_92
Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Division of Plant Industry. 2013. Best Management Requirements for Producing Honey Bee Queens in Florida. http://www.freshfromflorida.com/content/download/24006/486787/bmp_hbq.doc.
Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services Division of Plant Industry. 2013. Beekeeper Compliance Agreement—Best Management Requirements for Maintaining European Honeybee Colonies https://www.fdacs.gov/content/download/71086/file/08418%20cleaned%20up.pdf.
Kerr, W.E. 1967. The history of the introduction of African bees to Brazil. S. Afr. Bee J. 39: 3-5
Kerr, W.E., S. de Leon del Rio, M.D. Barrionuevo. 1982. The Southern limits of the distribution of the Africanized honeybee in South America. Am. Bee. J. 122: 196-98.
Moretto, G. 1997. La relación entre el comportamiento de limpiadura del nido de cría y el comportamiento de quitar los ácaros Varroa en las abejas melíferas africanizadas. Apiacta, 32(1): 17-20
Moretto, G., L.S. Gonçalves, D. De Jong, and M.Z. Bichuette. 1991. The effects of climate and bee race on Varroa jacobsoni Oud infestations in Brazil. Apidologie, 22(3): 197-203
Ratnieks, F. L. W. (1995). Evidence for a queen-produced egg-marking pheromone and its use in worker policing in the honeybee. Journal of Apicultural Research, 34, 31–37.
Tarpy, David, and John Ambrose. “Africanized Honeybees: Some Questions and Answers: NC State Extension Publications.” Africanized Honey Bees: Some Questions and Answers | NC State Extension Publications, content.ces.ncsu.edu/africanized-honey-bees-some-questions-and-answers#:~:text=No.%20Africanized%20bees%20are%20closely%20related%20to%20European,are%20slightly%20smaller%20than%20our%20common%20European%20bee. Accessed 3 June 2024.
Zawislak, Jon, and David Barnes. “Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service: University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.” MP518: Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service | University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, 2015, www.uaex.uada.edu/. Accessed 3 June 2024.

My name is Logan Cutts, and I am a 5th generational beekeeper and one of the largest beekeeping consultants on the East Coast consulting over 2,000 hives within the state of Florida, as well as being an international beekeeping instructor. I serve as a board member on my counties Florida Farm Bureau Board. The proudest titles I hold are Christian, father and husband.