When making Bumble Bees....

[Royal Hijinx]

the genetics of the parents and grandparents will greatly affect the outcome. If the ancestry looks nice, the offspring is much more likely to look nice.

But you also have to ask: Do you breed an awesome looking pastel to an awesome looking spider, for a 25% chance to hit a bee, which will then hopefully look REALLY awesome?

Or do you breed a nice looking killer bee (super pastel spider) to a nice looking pewter (cinnamon pastel)? Ok chances to hit just a bee with only pastel+spider get quite slim, and unless you are breeding over multiple generations and have your own lines the quality of these bees will be hard to predict.

Both approaches produce awesome-looking snakes that can be stunningly beautiful. And both are completely justified, one approach creates the best picture-perfect bees and the other approach puts out new combos and decent BPs with 3 or more genes.

What are you on about? How is using multi-gene animals with unknown lineage going to help ensure the OP gets nice Bees? The question was not how to get 4, 5 or 6 gene animals.

THIS is part of the thought process that floods the market with sub-par Bees. Many of the not-so-great Bees we see are cast offs from multi-gene breeding where the base ingredients were not well considered.

The best bet for producing solid spectacular bees is to pair the cleanest, brightest Spider with the absolute brightest Pastel that can be found. THIS is the building block that have the best chance of netting great results. THEN those offspring can be used to make spectacular 3 and 4 gene animals. Not the other way around.