Comparative Evaluation of Performance for Improved Iranian Honey Bee queens (Apis mellifera meda Skorikov 1929) in the Climate Conditions of Kurdistan Province

The use of improved queens with desirable functional and behavioral traits is one of the most important factors of success in beekeeping. The current study was conducted with the aim of evaluating the performance of improved Iranian honey bee queens with control ones in the private apiaries of Kurdistan province during 2017 to 2021.

In this study, the queens of the third layer, which were the result of the improved queens of the Iranian honey bee breeding project, along with unimproved native queens (as control) were evaluated in six private apiaries of Kurdistan province based on honey production, calmness, aggressive, swarming, and overwintering traits. To evaluate the queens, special questionnaires were designed and provided to the beekeepers to evaluate the improved queens along with the control ones in their private apiary during the years of the study.

Variance analysis results showed that the effect of the queen was significant at the 1% probability level on all studied traits. The effect of year was significant at the 1% probability level on honey production and swarming traits and on calmness on the frame trait at the 5% probability level, but it had no effect on the overwintering trait. Also, the effect of the city was significant on swarming trait (p<0.01). The interactions effect of queen type – year and year- city were significant for the trait of swarming and honey production triats at the 1 and 5 % probability level, respectively. The results of the present study showed that the colonies with improved queens were significantly superior to the colonies with native queens in terms of calmness on the frame, aggressive, swarming and overwintering traits (p<0.05). An acceptable relative superiority and progress were observed in terms of honey production trait in the improved queens in all the studied years compared to native queens, but this superiority and progress was not significant due to the low heritability of this trait.

In general, the results of this study showed the progress and improvement of the target traits and the superiority of improved Iranian honey bee queens compared to unimproved native queens in the climate conditions of Kurdistan province. Considering the superiority and significant improvements in the majority of studied traits in the improved queens of the Iranian honey bee breeding project, it can be concluded that the Iranian honey bee can improve genetically. Therefore, in the continuation of this research, it is suggested to deal with the new problems of the beekeeping industry through more efforts towards the genetic stabilization of resulting improvements, preventing the homozygosity of sex alleles (which has a direct effect on reducing the performance of the colonies) and also using new breeding methods.