Talk:List of honey bee races

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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)

[edit] 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)