Failure to Select: The Cause of Weakness in Bees

The Principles of Breeding: Seed Selection

All beekeepers are animal breeders, and their stocks breed relatively fast. The effects of good, or poor breeding, are therefore felt quickly. A large part of our problem lies in the fact that the great majority of beekeepers do not adhere to the critical principles of breeding that are essential to successful stock-keeping. The following short account of the principles of seed selection will show why it is crucial that beekeepers understand, as they once did, that they are, de facto, animal breeders, and must follow the principles of breeding against diseases.

Human Breeding: The Selection of the Best Seed

Way back in the 1960s, when I was perhaps six or seven years old, I remember helping my father shell matured runner bean pods, to collect the seed for next year's sowing. Once we'd separated shells from seeds, he began sorting the good-looking beans from the less-healthy looking ones. I asked why. "Because we need the best seed to grow the best plants next year" he replied. I didn't need to ask anything more. We had made the simple and critical exchange that countless fathers had made with their children for, thousands of years. I had received the understanding; you keep the best seed to make the next generation. This is The Principle of all breeding.

Breeding for good health is so simple that a six year-old can understand, that quickly.

In those days many people grew their own vegetables. Most understood that saving seed, year after year, gives you the best plants for your particular locality, as the plants evolve to suit the local conditions. And everyone understood The Principle: you grow from your best seed. It was common knowledge. Nowadays this folk wisdom appears to be a rare understanding. Yet the principle remains critically important to all breeding practice.

We can usefully take a moment to fill out our understanding a little more, by looking back further. For thousands of years farmers saved a proportion of their crop for the following year's seed - it was our ancestors who discovered that using the best seed improved the chances of a good crop. Quite by accident, and perhaps without even realising what was happening, the farmers slowly modified the varieties they grew. This is where all our modern vegetables and fruits come from. As they were bred, from wild plants, each generation took on the qualities that the farmers valued.

Usually the desired quality was size – a bigger crop means more food - or more trading value, and by selecting from the best cropping plants their edible parts were slowly enlarged over the generations. But characteristics of flavour, or evenness of shape, or things like longer or shorter cropping seasons can also be improved, or 'bred in'.

The most important quality to breed for however is good health. Resistance to pests and diseases, is necessary to ensure a crop at all, and seed for future years. This is infinitely more important than mere flavour or shape. The foundational principle of breeding is therefore grow only from the healthiest looking seed, taken from the healthiest crops.

The same techniques were discovered in animal husbandry. Controlled breeding could result in better animals and eventually in new varieties, or sub-species. This is how we got our dogs, cows, pigs and so on - the domesticated species.

The trick is then easy to comprehend, easy to follow. The single, overarching, all-important principle of plant and animal husbandry is: always breed from the healthiest stock in order to supply the best chances of heath in future generations. Unless there truly is no other option, you never, ever, breed from sick or diseased stock. That would be to breach The Principle, and, to those who understood the way the principle worked, that would be obviously stupid. Until quite recently this folk wisdom was understood by all gardeners, all farmers, and anyone who took an interest in animals including beekeepers, who were usually also farmers.

Natural Selection of the Best Seed

It is then very easy to understand the principles of good breeding on the basis of human seed selection, as outlined above. But we can deepen our understanding by looking at how husbandry mimics nature, which is the original selector for the characteristics that are suited to thrive in the new generations. Natural Selection is the scientific term that describes the way the best seed is pushed forward, carrying the good health and the advantageous traits and characteristics into the new generation.

The characteristics nature selects for are many and varied. Some concern the ability to respond well to the most essential things, like sunlight, water and nutrients. Some concern secondary things like the ability to live in the presence of competitors and predators - including diseases. There are many more - countless factors bear on whether a particular species can thrive in a particular environment. These reasons can be grouped by the expression fitted to the environment, or well adapted. This means that in the particular environment at hand, with all its varied features, the species is able to flourish. It can find the things it needs to grow, defend itself from predators and diseases, and it can reproduce.

In nature, all species came to be adapted to their environments, and remains so, through the process of Natural Selection. To deepen our understanding of this magical mechanism, it is useful to observe that all environments are competitive. That is; lots of different plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and virus all try to grow in the same place. All need food and living space; and most of them try to eat each other at every opportunity, in order to gain nutrients, deny the others living space. They attack each-other whenever the opportunity arises both for food and in self-defence. It really a jungle out there!

Among any particular species, those individuals that are best at attacking and defending and eating in that particular place, with the particular life-forms that surround them, survive, and reproduce. They are, in technical terms, adapted to their environment. Those that cannot survive and reproduce there, cannot exist there. They are not adapted to that environment.

Nature herself thus ‘selects’ the best seed for each and every environment. Her mechanism 'chooses' the best individuals and varieties, in the competitive battle to survive and reproduce. This picture is universal in Nature; that is, whether you can see it or not, these battles are raging everywhere. Watch a speeded-up film of plants competing for light, or read about the continuous battle between the human immune system and the billions of viruses and bacteria that try to eat us every day; the story is exactly the same. We fight or die; and those that die before they can reproduce do not pass on their qualities to a future generation. That is the preserve of the winners.

The Need for Continuous Selection: The Ever-Changing Environment

Both humans and Nature are then selectors of seed; and it is the process of successful selection that ensures the next generation is fit to thrive in its environment. This process is continuous – it never stands still, because environments change all the time. The climate might alter, a new species invade, and, continuously, disease organisms themselves evolve.

Failure to Select for Heath

We can see then that Natural Selection is Nature’s mechanism for sending forward those traits that do best in the ever-changing environments. The genes of those seeds that are able to grow well in the new environment naturally take over from others that do not flourish in the new environment.

And we can understand that farmers have to mimic natural selection if they want to go on growing their plants and animals successfully in the face of changing environments including disease environments. Nowadays professional animal breeders and seed merchants mostly make the selection. (Whether that is always a good thing is a question I will leave to one side) But beekeepers of course pass genes forward to the new generations every time they let a swarm live, or produce new nucleus colonies artificially.

Breaking The Principle

Now, suppose we break the fundamental principle; suppose we breed from stock that is not adapted to its environment such that it can survive and reproduce? What might we expect? Well, of course, the very same traits that make the species unsuited to survive and reproduce will be carried forward into the new generations. Our new stock will carry exactly the same flaws as the parents.

In the case of the quality of resistance to disease, if we repeatedly break The Principle, and do so on a wide scale, something far worse happens. We effectively supply the disease organism a nice permanent home; and here, where it can happily thrive, it will in turn naturally select and evolve to best suit that home. Nature will enable the parasite to exploit the new resource to the full.

If our species is able to breed with wild counterparts, something still worse occurs. Mating dilutes the genetic resistance of the feral populations, causing undermining the development of resistant strains through natural selection. The outcome will tend toward the extinction of native sub-species, severe repression of local wild populations, and loss of their genetic variation.

The act of keeping sick species alive we can call medication. We can see that medicating will save individual plants and animals, or insect colonies, and allow them to reproduce, but will severely weaken the species as a whole. The more widespread the medication, and the longer it goes on, the weaker the species will become. It makes no difference whether we are talking about plants, or bacteria, or animals. The principle is the same.

Medicating stock is harmless; but breeding from medicated stock is in direct opposition to the highest principle of husbandry.

Selection and Beekeeping

Breeding from medicated stock is the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. CCD is a symptom of a species that has not been able to adapt to a changed 'disease environment'. This has happened because bee breeders – by which I mean beekeepers as well as ‘professional’ breeders - have not selected for disease resistance, and have very effectively inhibited the rise by natural selection of resistant varieties in the feral population.

According to both the empirically demonstrated tenets of traditional breeding practice and the well-demonstrated scientific theory of natural selection for the fittest, the only possible outcome of the current practice, and of any alternatives currently envisaged for the future, is: for beekeepers, the continued misery of trying to farm with sick and dying stock; for feral stock and the plants that rely upon them continued drastic suppression. Along with this the reduction in the Honeybee’s genetic variation worsens with time.

What beekeepers are doing, with the active support of pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and regulators, appointed and controlled by the governments we ourselves elect, is causing permanent damage to one of the oldest and noblest species on earth.

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Michael Bispham

Last updated 31st May 2009