Talk:Honey bee race

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I have written to the abbey where the Buckfast bees are being developed for more information on whether they are working for an analog to hybrid corn (every year variety X is pollenized by variety Y and the resulting crop is sold as "hybrid XY seed), or are they doing what was earlier done to produce the thoroughbred horse. P0M 03:37, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Anything back? Thanx 69.142.2.68 05:50, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

No, they didn't reply. I am pretty sure from what I have read about the process that they are trying to develop a variety that will "breed true." In the 1950s Dadant, and maybe A.I. Root as well, used to sell queens that had been artifically inseminated. At the time people apparently hadn't figured out that in nature a queen will mate more than once, so a one-time insemination by a single drone held with forceps will produce a number of fertile eggs and with an appropriate choice of queen and drone the offspring would have been hybrids. But those queens usually were sold with clipped wings. Maybe people started to realize that their "hybrid queens" became infertile after a couple of seasons and had to be replaced. Usually when bees raise a replacement queen they don't stop with making a single queen cell, and multiple virgin queens in a hive can lead to swarming, which is bad for the beekeeper's bottom line. P0M 19:42, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

Problematic changes

Retaining the article name "List of honeybee races" and then making the species of bees into sections of this article creates a kind of inside-out maze. The articles should be structured as follows:

List of honeybee species

• Apis mellifera
  • lingustica
  • carbuca
  • caucasica

etc.

• Apis dorsata
  • What?
  • What??
• Apis florea
  • What?
  • What??
• Apis cerana
  • What?
  • What??

Remarks on the Buckfast bee do not belong here, but under Apis mellifera.

Prematurely making major changes without engaging in discussion can often lead to unnecessary trouble in reorganizing articles. P0M 11:15, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

What, what're you saying? As it stands now, there's NO list @ all on that page... Thanx 69.142.2.68 05:50, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

That's the problem, I guess. The title says "list of races" and then there is no list. On top of that, however, there is another problem. It's a little easier to see if we use the synonym of "races", which is "subspecies."

The article title, slightly reworded, says, "List of subspecies", but then it doesn't give a list of subspecies. It mentions several species, and each species would have its own list of subspecies, as I have outlined above. What I was suggesting to the other people who have contributed to this subject, in the hope of avoiding an edit war or other hostilities by making a major change without prior discussion, was to retitle the article "List of honeybee species, give a list of all the species of bees that are used over the world for honey production, and then either give lists of the subspecies in this article or give a list of subspecies in separate articles for each of the species. You seem to have been the only one to have even noticed the problem that I brought up a long time ago. I guess it is time to "be bold" and try to fix things. Too bad that I am behind in preparing for classes tomorrow.

The part about "problematic changes" was just to say that it would have been better if we'd discussed whether we really wanted to move things around the way somebody did a year or so ago. This article used to be a list of subspecies of the Western honeybee, so the title sort of made better sense back then. P0M 19:33, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

I have added a list of races (from the Black_bee article. I am not clear what the lineages are - in the journal I cited, it referes to M & C etc as subspecies. Is that right? or are they lineages, used for convenience but not have proper taxonomic status? Anyone?

It seems to me the final paragraph on A. cerana, A. dorsata, and A. florea is out of place in this article, as they are different species to A. mellifera, the subject of this article. except perhaps as a clarification of what is and is not race, in the bee context.. No essential nature (talk) 13:28, 22 July 2011 (UTC)

The Link attached to the Reference "Gene flow within the M..." takes you to a different unrelated web page, therefore the Link should be disabled, or the correct Link added to correct it. Is123Biblio (talk) 22:43, 17 October 2018 (UTC)

Classifications

The last section starting "Within the lineage 'M' there are three races" is incorrect. The citation states that there are two sub-species within the M lineage, not "three races", in fact it makes no reference to "races", and no reference to "Lehzeni (heathland bee)" or "Nigra (black bee)", therefore this part should be corrected to reflect the source upon which this is based. In fact we should take this opportunity to try and list the sub-species within the various Lineages. Bibby (talk) 22:27, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

This sentence doesn't make sense, "Lineages of known hybrid origin..." it has it the wrong way round. A Lineage, such as M, has sub-species within it, such as A.m.m. and A.m.i., the sentence would read more accurately as, "Hybrids of a known Lineage..." the first sentence implies that the Lineage is descended from the Hybrid, while the second sentence is saying that the Hybrid is descended from a particular known Lineage. BUT even this would be inaccurate as Hybrids are a crossing / inter-breeding of two known sub-species within the same specie (if one or more of the pairings is unknown it would be defined as a mongrel) to obtain Heterosis (A.m.buckfast is a breed, in which it's characteristics are stabilized through sub-sequent generations, unlike a hybrid). So it should be like this: First Lineage, then Sub-specie, then if you want you can state the Hybrid or instead state the Breed. This is more scietifically correct and the only way that this makes sense.

In fact the Article should be renamed to be about Bee Lineages not about Bee Races, otherwise it appears we have an article trying to explain beekeepers slang, non-scientific, terminologies for variations within bees, in which poor attempts are being made to try and create a scientific foundation for, in which we're getting tongue tied in the definitions!Bibby (talk) 11:20, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Article Helpful But Makes Little Sense

The positioning of race below subspecies contradicts the general use of race as a synonym for subspecies when it comes to trinominals. 124.169.136.60 (talk) 08:35, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Bottom line, "race" shouldn't be used at all, it's a word now only used within the human context, with it's racial connotations...

But it is unfortunately used my many older beekeepers, or those seeking to promote a "race of bee" and they are using the word "race" in the human racial tense...

Instead the only thing below subspecie should be such things like haplotypes, ecotypes, etc. but we have what we have! Bibby (talk) 17:49, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Why is the Buckfast bee not a subspecies and are bees racist?

When do breeds become subspecies? Or when do breeds become races? Here it says the Buckfast bee is not classified as as a sub, but if you go to the Buckfast wiki, it is designated there as a subspecies of A.m. Is the distinction between breed and subspecies one between nature and culture, or what Darwin called artificial and natural selection? It’s just that the Buckfast bee is probably just as phenotypically and behaviourally distinct as many of the native/national subspecies of A.m. The same question could also be asked about the Africanised honeybee, which is described on its wiki page as a hybrid and not even a breed. Here it seems like Frankensteinian rejection on the part of humans. Surely this bee is also not simply a hybrid but what Darwin and von Seibold, called a mongrel bee? I wonder if the bees, themselves, ever notice? I wonder if bees are racist? 124.169.136.60 (talk) 17:20, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

I don't think bees are racist, although I'm aware of research that suggests A. m. mellifera do not mate outside their subspecie?! Maybe it's just that some beekeepers still are using outdated terminology, which became ingrained in the 1930's? Bibby (talk) 19:56, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

If it's beekeeper terminology then it's not racist. Those who do not keep bees should accommodate ourselves to their terminology. Invasive Spices (talk) 1 August 2022 (UTC)

Any idea when bees were first racialised?

Butler, Swammerdam, Aldrovandi, Reaumur, Bonnet Huber, Kirby, and most bee related naturalists up until 1830s do not speak of the races of bees. This seems fairly obvious and logical , and from what I can determine race became prevalent in Europe and North America after Dzierzon’s and Mendel’s experiments in breeding bees, but i am not sure if beekeepers knew of races before this? I think maybe Schirach did, because he seems to have been breeding bees intensively, and in an area where the German and Austrian subs overlap. I also wonder if bees were being traded across vast geographic regions in the medieval period so that keepers knew of regional types? By the 1870s, however, the bee was completely racialised, particularly in German speaking states where papers were being read on how to use racial terms like mongrel and degenerate correctly! I think race began in German beekeeping culture because central Western Europe was a crossroads for bee trading and a place where subs overlapped? The racialisation of bees may have even triggered the broader trinominal movement, which was strongest in Germany, and bee race discourse seems to hold primacy over its appearance in ornithology and amongst the lepidopterist in scientific discourse? 124.169.136.60 (talk) 15:53, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

It's worse than you think. Bee breeding doesn't just reflect societal attitudes to race, a lot of what breeders accept as mainstream science originates with Friedrich Ruttner who seems to have imposed his own views on race and racial purity on the poor bee. The whole business of defining bee races by wing morphometry originates with him and is highly suspect, given that his career as professor of Racial Purity under the Nazis was cut short by defeat in WWII before he turned to the innocent study of bee species.

Many people don't use the word race in biology because it is essentially a metaphor for race in the context of humanity and as such has virtually no scientific meaning, but carries a lot of distasteful historical connotations. Wiki articles like this one will one day start with 'An archaic and discredited concept...' The sooner the better.Timbow001 (talk) 12:35, 23 May 2023 (UTC)