Honeybee breeding programmes to improve health and production

Led by Laura Strachan

Summary

With the recent global declines of honeybee populations, more effort is being put in to create breeding programmes that will improve production and health as well as manage genetic diversity. While there is a wealth of knowledge in animal and plant breeding that could be useful for honeybee breeding, there is a number of biological specificities in honeybees. In this project, we are first working on developing a stochastic simulator that will accommodate the biological specificities in honeybees and enable flexible modelling of alternative future breeding programmes. We will model such alternative breeding programmes in the second part of the project.