Guiding selective breeding in honey bees using protein biomarkers

BACKGROUND The Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) is a critical component of human agriculture through its pollination activities. For years, beekeepers have controlled deadly pests such as Varroa destructor with... [ view full abstract ]

BACKGROUND

The Western honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) is a critical component of human agriculture through its pollination activities. For years, beekeepers have controlled deadly pests such as Varroa destructor with acaricides but widespread chemical resistance is appearing. An alternate management strategy is to identify and select bees with heritable traits that allow them to resist mites and diseases. Breeding such bees is difficult as the tests involved to identify disease-resistance are complicated, time-consuming, expensive, and can misidentify desirable genotypes.


METHODS & RESULTS

We used proteomics to correlate protein expression with measured behaviours in 230 honey bee colonies. This involved pipelining data analysis on a local cluster because of the requirement for high memory/processor and a need for Windows to run one proprietary library. Over the following three years we used the markers discovered initially to guide a selective breeding program for HB and benchmarked these selected bees versus bees selected by conventional means or not selected at all. For the whole project data were stored partly on SILO and partly on local drives.

CONCLUSIONS

Selective breeding in A. mellifera is particularly challenging because of the haplo-diploid sex determination and the tendency for queens to mate with up to twenty different drones. Nonetheless, this is the first use of marker-assisted selection in honey bees that will enable more sophisticated breeding of this critical agricultural service provider. This is also the first demonstration of marker-assisted selection in livestock using expression markers, opening the door for approaches to select complex, polygenic traits.