& How Do They Differ Across Beekeeping Levels?
While researching how honey bees learn to forage I came across a paper titled “Beekeepers’ preferences for honeybee breeding goals: a French case study” and found it to be a far more interesting rabbit hole (beeline? Beehive?). How do the breeding goals of French beekeepers compare to the rest of the region, and the rest of the world?
It won’t come as a surprise that Apis mellifera queen breeding prioritises high honey production and/or disease resistance, and I’m sure this is desirable globally at the hobbyist and commercial level (Kistler et al., 2026). That said, investing in one trait will impact others. Breeding for superior Varroa-sensitive hygienic behaviour will impact honey production as bees spend more time grooming or uncapping cells as opposed to foraging or nectar processing or comb building. For better or worse, life is not Dungeons & Dragons; you cannot invest into one trait without impacting others.
Honey Yield & Disease Resistance are the Most Essential; Swarming Took Third Place
Of the 243 responses used in the survey by Kistler and colleagues, 94% “considered honey yield and disease resistance to be at least ‘useful’ to include in the breeding goal, with honey yield being more frequently rated as ‘essential’ (53% vs 39% [respectively])” (Kistler et al., 2026). Disease resistance was rated as “wished to improve” at 74%, whereas only 54% of the beekeepers wanted to improve honey yield.
In third place was swarming tendency, with ~ 91% of respondents stating it is at least “useful” to reduce the frequency of this habit. Swarm control is time consuming. It is sweaty work when managing four brood boxes, now imagine four hundred. As a testament to this, more respondents wanted to “improve” rather than “maintain” the frequency of swarming behaviour.
A beekeeper’s experience level impacted their desire to reduce swarming tendencies. The least experienced beekeepers (<5 years) more frequently rated it as “essential” compared to proficient ones (10-14 years) at 51% vs 24% respectively. As the skill level increased, so did the emphasis on honey yields; over half of professionals respondents (both small- & large-scaled) rated yield as “essential”, compared to 28% of the hobbyist respondents (Kistler et al., 2026). I can emphasise with the hobbyist’s viewpoint , as the resources needed to deal with disease and swarm management matter more than the seasonal honey harvests – with professionals, the management resources are abundant, so the focus is on honey as an income stream.
Optimising for Disease Resistance: VSH & Honey Production
Is there such a thing as “too much” disease resistance? In absolute terms, no. Such a trait would be welcome as it reduces the burdens of managing infections when they arise. In beekeeping (“real world”) terms, you can argue that too much disease resistance is a drawback for pollination, honey yields or comb building, however field experiments and other A. mellifera subspecies would prove you wrong.
The Africianised honey bees in South America have high Varroa-sensitive hygiene (VSH; a subset of disease resistance) and had greater honey yields (e.g. Masaquiza et al., 2021 in Ecuador [they also cite a similar result from Mexico, and after reading this paper I cannot verify their yield claims… dodgy?). Granted, AHBs are an outlier as they are less impacted by Varroa relative to their European counterparts. Early work on European colonies bred for hygienic behaviour produced as much as honey as unselected colonies, with the former having a lower mite count (Spivak & Reuter, 1998).
These results may come as counterintuitive since one can imagine the workers dedicating more time to grooming and brood uncapping-recapping relative to other hive activities. Indeed, later work showed that bees from “Varroa survivor stock” had reduced honey production relative to chemically-treated bees (Le Conte et al., 2007). A reduced mite load meant that bees were healthier and continued producing honey relative to other colonies with higher mite loads, which I’ve theoretical visualised below.
Perhaps the “high honey in Varroa-resistant bees” arose due to a combination of the VSH characteristics in Africanised honey bees mixed in with the local environment and floral landscape.
Swarming & Absconding as Disease Resistance
Swarming and its more-aggressive counterpart absconding involve the departure of bees from the hive. Absconding is the complete (and sudden) evacuation in response to major stressors, whereas swarming is more controlled over the course of days. The Asian honey bees A. cerana use swarming as a way to control pathogens and do so far more frequently than A. mellifera (depending on location – e.g. up to eight times per swarming “season” in Japan [and this number is increasing!]; Morii & Sakamoto, 2024).
This keeps the pests and pathogen load low, at the expense of having smaller nests with lower populations and less honey stores. Good for bee, not for thee – a hobbyist beekeeper may not keep up with such frequent swarming management, whereas a commercial beekeeper will not have this issue as they would have done the sensible thing of switching to A. mellifera long ago.
Colonies with low swarming tendencies are a positive-sum outcome in managed settings – any “stress” that comes to the bees as a result of staying in one spot for too long can be mitigated by the beekeeper, either by chemical treatments, replacing frames, adding supers, supplemental feeding or perhaps relocating the entire colonies to (literal) greener pastures. In exchange, the beekeeper (theoretically) spends less time on swarm management and has bigger populations . I state “theoretically” because swarming is how honey bees naturally reproduce, and it is hard to suppress that tendency. Besides, monitoring queen cells and drone brood is a normal part of apiary management.
Dearth Resilience: Improving Summer & Winter Feed Autonomy
Feed autonomy is defined as the capacity of a colony to survive and become productive again once the dearth is over without needing supplemental (or “emergency”) feeding from their keepers. This was another trait considered “at least useful” and “to be improved” for a majority of the survey respondents; 55% for winter and 51% for summer feed autonomy (Kistler et al., 2026). You don’t hear as much about this in literature and it is poorly studied, even beekeeping clubs advise you to feed the bees during dearths before suggesting keeping bees who can self-manage in summer and winter.
The French beekeepers ranked summer and winter feed autonomy higher than gentleness, with 53% of queen breeders saying it’s essential, relative to beekeepers. Docility is a classic trait and often features as a goal of bee breeding programs. The negative effects of dearths can compound when combined with the monocultures of migratory beekeeping, loss of plant biodiversity and/or Climate Change™. Bee breeders are thinking ahead when they express their desire for feed-resilient colonies – perhaps they view sugar feeding as placing bandaid on a considerably-sized wound?
Earlier work from the survey authors provided genetic analysis on a honey bee population used within a breeding plan aimed at improving feed resilience in addition to the “classic” traits (honey production, gentleness, disease resistance; Kistler et al., 2024). Although their results were derived from a small sample size, they found some correlations between the classic traits and how they could also enhance feed autonomy (termed “RESERVES” in their data), and hope that future studies can expand on their work, explicitly mentioning the BeeBreed projects (see below).
Biases & Preferences for Adopting Varroa-Resistant Bees
A 2019 paper surveying Swiss beekeepers using European dark bee A. m. mellifera found that the majority of respondents support breeding bees for greater VSH even if it means they produced less honey, swarmed more often or were less gentle (Guichard et al., 2019). A caveat is that of the 413 surveys sent, 99 responded who “[owned] a total of 2823 colonies of A. m. mellifera…Respondents were mainly small-scale beekeepers (only 4 of them owned more than 50 colonies) with various experience in beekeeping (from less than 4 years to more of 40 years of beekeeping practices)”1.
Beekeepers were more likely to adopt a Varroa-resistant colony if it came from the same subspecies (A.m. mellifera) and locally sourced (i.e. also A.m. mellifera from Switzerland). One benefit of keeping local stock is that these bees are already adapted to climate. Another is that by keeping a “pure” strain, beekeepers can be confident in its genetics and behaviour. With hybrids, you never know which traits will be expressed, a lesson that the creators of Africanised honey bees learned a posteriori.
The authors cite previous studies where beekeepers who used VSH bees described them as “having less favourable characteristics for beekeeping, with frequent swarming, small populations and low honey yield” (Guichard et al., 2019 citing Fries & Bommarco, 2007 and Le Conte et al., 2007). As such, there would be a divide between what the beekeepers stated they would do, and what they will actually do should the survey scenarios become reality.
The authors attempted to address this “stated versus revealed preference” by having participants state how much they’d be willing to pay for Varroa resistance, or some other favourable trait. Another possible flaw could be in the sampling bias, as the 99 respondents were more likely to respond to this survey since they are attentive to Varroa resistance. All up, awareness exists about the threats posed by the mites and beekeepers are interested in management strategies that go beyond the chemical treatments.
Queen Bee Breeding Strategies: An Australian Example
In 2024, the Australian honey bee industry launched a breeding strategy to produce queens that are more resistant to Varroa. They acknowledge that selecting for VSH alone is not enough, as the colonies may end up producing less honey, or become more aggressive, so the selective breeding ought to focus on multiple traits. In the ye olden days of pre-Australian-Varroa (the year 2022 AD), queen breeders focused on honey production, bee health and docility. Now, they want to add mite resistance in hopes of avoiding “the treadmill of synthetic chemical treatments for varroa by harnessing the power of statistical genetics and genomics”2 (page 6).
The strategy builds on a previous program “Plan Bee”, which was “Australia’s national honey bee genetic improvement program, [initiated] to provide the infrastructure necessary to implement modern genetic breeding techniques in the honey bee industry.”. From this program came the queen bee Estimated Breeding Values (EBVs), which are calculated by “scoring” the desired traits from a group of colonies in the same location at the same time, averaging them out and then adjusting for local environmental variables. I’ve extracted Figure 7 from the Plan Bee breeding manual for a better example.
By breeding a high EBV queen with a high EBV drone, the resulting colony is much likely to have a stronger expression of the desired trait (e.g. Varroa resistance), hence the value of generating and maintaining these values for the Australian beekeeping landscape.
How an Estimated Breeding Value is Generated
According to the Breeding Plan, the “central hub” for EBVs will be held at a genetics evaluation centre (Page 10 & Figure 1). This centre will receive data from:
- Commercial breeders, who provide samples and performance data (objective information like honey yield, number of swarms, etc… and probably some subjective data points like “they’re very gentle girls”)
- In return, they receive advice & training based on their colony’s genetics, as well as EBVs for their breeding stocks
- Data analysis centres, which provides EBVs to the genetics evaluation centre based on collated data from breeders and those from the reference data collection sites
- The reference data sites are a population of ~200 hives established in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia “for intensive recording and controlled exposure to varroa to breed for varroa resistance” (Page 10)
- These reference populations feed performance data and samples for genotyping back to the genetics evaluation centre
The data gathered from these three locations is provided to beekeepers like you and me (well, the commercial beekeepers matter much more). The final EBVs are then used by commercial beekeepers to guide their purchasing choices when requeening hives.
Outcomes of Bee Breeding from Around the World
Breeding plans have been used around the world with a focus on honey production, gentleness, low swarming tendency and general brood health. For example, the Beebreed initiative provides estimated breeding values for colonies sourced by mainly German and Austrian bee breeders, and one such project has been ongoing since 1993 (“Development and implementation of a breeding value estimation of the honey bee”; Beebreed.eu). Two more examples:
- “Selection and propagation of vital honey bees to lessen colony losses and the use of veterinary drugs in a control concept based on threshold of damage”, conducted from 2008-2012 (linked here)
- “Use and trial of test parameters for the selection of a Varroa-tolerant honey bee in practice”, conducted from 2003-2007 (linked here)
Pol-line Bees & Hygienic Behaviour
In the U.S., the Department of Agriculture continually breeds and tests various honey bee lineages for desired characteristics. One study by Danka, Harris & Dodds investigated colonies from the “Pol-line Hygienic Italian honey bees” lineage for their ability to retain Varroa-sensitive hygienic behaviour over successive generations relative to their parent colonies (i.e. those A.m. ligustica colonies used to breed the Pol-line bees; Danka, Harris & Dodds, 2015 [yes I’ve decided to forgo “et al” when a paper has three authors]).
The results were promising, finding that some degree of VSH was retained even after those colonies swarmed and mated with non-Pol-line bees (up to four generations from their now-great-great-grandmother colonies). “This suggests that the VSH trait, once infused into a population, subsequently can be maintained for at least several generations by relatively simple selection.” – Danka, Harris & Dodds, 2015.
Another study found that Pol-line were just as resistant to chalkbrood disease relative to “generally hygienic” colonies (Dyrbye-Wright et al., 2025). The Pol-line populations remained more mite-resistant than the commercial populations, and this “two-birds-(bees?) one-stone” approach suggests that VSH-selected honey bees respond to both mite-infested and disease-infected brood. The authors state that future work could test the hygienic behaviour of bees exposed to Paenibacillus larvae (causative agent of American Foulbrood) to determine the extent of their disease-response behaviour, and in my case, assess their honey yields relative to that same commercial bee line.
What Does Commercial Queen Breeding Look Like?
This section is better described visually, and I encourage you to search for “Commercial queen breeding” videos.
If you’re still here, I’ll close with an overview that compliments one of my earliest articles, raising bee queens… Ah, the contrast in content and writing style… I cringe.
Commercial queen rearing begins with selection. Find a queen whose colony contains desirable traits – high honey production, Varroa-sensitive hygiene, low swarming, general disease resistance, temperature tolerance, strong propensity to sting any dog smaller than a beagle, etc.. The rest is logistics according to the size of your operations. Larva is grafted3 into an artificial queen cup and that cup is placed in to a queenless colony with plenty of nurse bees, who begin feeding her royal jelly. You may keep the larva in this “starter” colony or move her to a strong colony to continue growing.
The soon-to emerge queen cells are placed in queenless nucs where they’ll sexually mature for a few days before partaking in their mating flight (Drone congregation areas & matings flights are covered here). The queen is then inspected for her mating sign, packed into a cage for shipping, or kept in the nuc if the whole box is up for sale.
Small scale & hobbyist graft queens by hand, and since there is (little-to) no artificial insemination, sperm quality varies based on the local drone congregation areas. Commercial operations have high tech bee yards with dedicated drone mother colonies that directly influence the composition of a DCA, incubators for nurturing the capped queen cells, amongst other high tech – go look at videos.
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Footnotes
- Unrelated sidenote: this is a lesson in the extreme distributions of numbers in real life. If I asked you for the average colonies per beekeeper, you do not divide 2823 by 99, as that would give you 28.5 hives. Even on paper, this seems off, for it is wrong to include commercial, non-commercial and hobbyists into one category – Few hobbyists would have that many hives. In reality, the average beekeeper may have “two hives” and it is the commercial blokes that skew the results with their hundreds or thousands of hives. This property of the numbers is “fat tailed”. ↩︎
- It’s called a treadmill because treatments are applied for life. Year on year, season on season, different chemicals on rotation to prevent mite resistance. There are also integrated pest management techniques, however chemicals remain faster and “most effective”, and when you’re dealing with thousands of hives per apiary, chemicals become a better use of the time. ↩︎
- You often hear “graft larvae that is 12-24 hours old” with little discussion of the consequences that occur should selection occur outside of this window. “Too old” is easy to explain: after three days old, the worker-destined larva is switched onto a diet of “worker jelly” rather than the royal jelly immersion it previously enjoyed. In theory, this means you can graft larvae that’s up to 72 hours old, but this is pushing your luck in terms of acceptance rate and the quality of your queen.
How about younger than 12 hours? By that stage, the cell’s royal jelly content is low, and the larva itself is more fragile – when you graft them, you either damage the larva, or the cups dry out. You could get around this by priming your cups with royal jelly or just pick one-day old larva and saving yourself the hassle altogether. ↩︎