Gene narrowing in Western honey bees: each generation weaker than the last as humans play God with queen breeding

A big misunderstanding: after hundreds to thousands of years, humans have still not succeeded in domesticating honey bees. Even today, the common honey bee remains as wild as ever.

The most widely kept honey bee, the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), is often called the "domestic bee," as if it were poultry or livestock domesticated by humans. Italian entomologist Paolo Fontana pointed out the contradiction to a reporter from Shangxiayou: "Domestication has two basic conditions: first, food comes from humans, but bees forage for themselves most of the time; second, humans control the animals' reproduction, but queens and drones mate freely."

The notion of the domestic bee makes people forget that the tireless honey bee still hears the call of the wild. For example, regulations in almost every country treat beekeeping as livestock or farming management, underestimating the honey bee's close relationship with nature. Fontana said, "When laws protect species like the giant panda or the wolf, bees are treated like chickens or sheep. The law protects 'beekeeping,' not bees."

Mistaking honey bees for domestic animals and keeping them as such has narrowed the gene pool of the Western honey bee, making it ever harder for them to cope with various challenges and plunging them into a survival crisis. The alarm bells ringing for bees have set off a chain reaction. It affects not only the beekeeping industry but also agriculture that depends on pollination, and the preservation of biodiversity and the balance of natural ecosystems are at stake. Taiwan, China, which rushed to follow the West in keeping Western bees, now likewise faces frequent bee crises and ecological imbalance. He said, "The solution lies in returning to native bee species, exploring beekeeping models adapted to local environments, and not repeating the West's mistakes."

Bees domesticated humans, not the other way around

Bald, heavily bearded and with a prominent belly, Fontana spoke in the interview as if addressing a lecture hall full of students, his voice booming from the diaphragm and reverberating in the small room, buzzing like the perfect spokesman for honey bees.

Ten years ago, Fontana fell in love with bees. With a scientist's cool head and a passionate heart, in 2017 he finished the 648-page Il Piacere delle Api (The Joy of Bees). The English edition of this declaration of love has just been released (see the end of the article). The editor praised it, noting that Fontana's tone is cautious yet brimming with sincere Italian flair. Italian ecology program host Sveva Sagramola put it even more vividly: "After reading a few chapters, I suddenly felt that this book was written by bees."

The Joy of Bees is a family history of the honey bee that Fontana wrote based on more than thirty years of research and field experience. Before falling in love with bees, he explored organic methods of fighting agricultural pests at university, and later studied common household insects such as mosquitoes and cockroaches, which deepened his understanding of human-insect interactions. He also observed grasshoppers, mantises and earwigs (pronounced "jue sou") in nature, traveled all over the world, and discovered 14 new species.

After teaching at a university for many years, in 2009 he was hired by the Fondazione Edmund Mach agricultural research institute in Trento, northeastern Italy, to take charge of honey bee research and train beekeepers. "I study insects from a naturalist's perspective." This approach quickly made him realize that so-called "modern" beekeeping techniques have serious flaws.

What exactly does it mean to "keep" bees?

At first, he followed the mainstream, focusing on honey yields, pest and disease control, and queen breeding. Before long, a big question arose in his mind: "What exactly does it mean to 'keep' bees?" In his eyes, even the most docile Western honey bee is born free to come and go, obeying the call of the wild.

More than a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution, wondered the same thing: although humans have a long history of keeping honey bees, apart from feeding them in winter, the bees fend for themselves the rest of the time. Moreover, queens and drones always mate in flight, making it hard for humans to intervene in selective breeding.

Fontana said the more accurate statement is that "honey bees domesticated humans, using their ecological traits to make humans serve them." The closest analogy to the human-honey bee relationship is a fisherman using cormorants fitted with neck rings to catch fish: because their necks are bound, the cormorants cannot swallow, and the catch is handed over to the fisherman. The cormorants are trained as the fisherman's helpers, but they are not poultry raised by the fisherman.

Large-scale crossbreeding of queens narrows honey bee genes, each generation weaker than the last

Very different from chickens in a coop or cattle in a shed, honey bees appear domesticated but spend most of their time roaming nature. And the variables in nature far exceed human imagination. Fontana said earnestly, "So bees should be allowed to mate and reproduce naturally, maintaining a rich gene pool, so they can evolve naturally and cope with all kinds of unpredictable challenges."

However, emboldened by rapidly advancing technology, humans have actively developed artificial queen-breeding techniques. The most famous example is the tracheal mite (Acarapis woodi), which nearly wiped out British beekeeping in the early twentieth century. Brother Adam, a monk at Buckfast Abbey, collected Western honey bee subspecies from around the world and, through crossbreeding, selected bees resistant to the tracheal mite.

"Even more tempting was that Buckfast bees were also highly productive," Fontana continued, pointing out the fatal weakness. "They are like mules, docile and hardworking, but you cannot mate a mule with a mule to produce the next generation. You always need a horse and a donkey to produce another mule. In other words, ordinary beekeepers can hardly breed new Buckfast queens themselves."

Queen breeding became a specialized industry: carefully selected queens are artificially crossed with different drones, and then the offspring are observed to see which are most productive. "Ideally very obedient and not inclined to sting, so you don't need gloves or a veil when working." Fontana raised his voice. "The problem is that they have lost the genes for resisting disease and adapting to the environment. Worse still, these queens will mate in the natural environment, and after one or two generations their genes weaken rapidly. The bees become too frail to reproduce on their own, so beekeepers have to keep buying new queens."

Monster drones, frail and sickly, struggle to reproduce

Beekeepers specialized in queen breeding pick out the most productive queens and, through crossbreeding, make them produce thousands of offspring, leading to genetic narrowing. Fontana said, "You buy a queen and see her mate with ten or twenty drones, as if her genes were very diverse. In fact, she probably mates with only two or three different gene lines, because many drones carry the same genes."

In the world of honey bees, a fertilized egg cell has two sets of chromosomes, and what hatches is a female queen or worker. In contrast, a drone has no father; it is the product of parthenogenesis by the queen, from an unfertilized egg, with only one set of chromosomes. Sometimes an egg cell is fertilized and has two sets of chromosomes, but the sex gene from the "father" is the same as the "mother's," creating a false positive. If a drone with two sets of chromosomes does hatch, it too is frail and sickly and struggles to reproduce.

"Fortunately, worker bees are sharp-eyed. While these eggs are still at the incubation stage, they know the eggs are neither properly male nor female, drag them out of the comb and abandon them, or simply eat these monsters." Fontana then explained, "When many empty cells appear in the comb, if it is not disease or parasites, there is a high probability that the bees' genes have gone wrong."

The problems caused by genetic narrowing go far beyond "empty cells." He offered an analogy: "On a ship, if everyone aboard is a plumber or electrician, you can rest easy if there is a leak. But if someone falls ill, everyone is helpless; if just one table breaks, no one can fix it. To deal with different problems, it is best to have plumbers, electricians, a doctor, a carpenter aboard - passengers with different skills."

These extraordinarily valuable queens raise yields for a time, but their descendants are often weaker with each generation, so beekeepers have to keep buying new queens. "We imagine that artificial queen breeding can produce more honey, but ironically, honey production now is lower than it was fifty years ago." Fontana smiled wryly. "Beekeepers' work has also increased. These bees need more human care, requiring more investment and cost."

In 1960, an outbreak of Varroa mites in Western honey bees occurred in Japan and spread worldwide, and the tedious work of mite control became a nightmare most beekeepers cannot escape. (The article is not finished; please continue reading)