Killer Bee Pied????

[kc261]

Spider het pied * pastel het pied:
1/16 Bumble Bee Pied
1/16 Pastel Pied
1/16 Spider Pied
1/16 Pied
3/16 Bumble Bee 66% PossHetPied
3/16 Pastel 66% PossHetPied
3/16 Spider 66% PossHetPied
3/16 66% PossHetPied

Breed the BumbleBee Pieds from both lines (breeding siblings causes genetic defects, so mating pairs should always come from separate lines) together for the best probability of producing Killer Bee Pieds. This is a valid genetic path to Killer Bee Pieds. You may be new to genetics, but you seem to have a firm grasp of this one!

Technically, breeding siblings does not "cause" genetic defects. It does make it much more likely that a hidden genetic defect will show up. Based on what I've read, a lot of people have in-bred and line-bred BPs for at least a few generations without seeing negative effects of it. There are some exceptions; I think Ralph Davis is working with something (I don't remember the morph, sorry) that produced a clutch of badly deformed snakes which he thinks may be due to inbreeding. I agree with you; it is better to use separate lines when possible to avoid the possibility.

Also, while this is a valid path, it is not one that is likely to produce a killer bee pied very soon. You could go years with the first crossing before you produced a pair of bumblebee pieds. Actually, you'd only need one if it was the opposite sex of the pastel het pied parent, or if you got a pastel pied of the opposite sex, so that would increase your odds somewhat.

The real problem with this path is that if it isn't a visual pied, you don't even know if it is a het or not. To deal with that, if you didn't get the bumblebee pied, you do have a 1/4 chance of getting some sort of visual pied, or 1/8 chance of it being a male, so you could breed him back to the female parent and any female siblings. That would produce a lot of different possible snakes, and most of them could increase your odds of eventually hitting the killer bee pied. At least you know even the ones that aren't visual are het pied. But now we are talking 3 generations to get there, although it might be fewer years than waiting to hit the 1/16 odds of the bumblebee pied before you can even start on the second generation, depending on your luck.

It would be simpler to go this route:

(bumblebee * pied) * (bumblebee * pied)

In the first generation you'd get:
1/4 bumblebee het pied
1/4 spider het pied
1/4 pastel het pied
1/4 het pied

You can either breed 2 bumblebee het pied together, or one bumblebee pied to a pastel het pied. Using this route you have better odds of getting the morphs you need in the first generation, plus you know every one of them is het pied. You'll still have long odds of getting the killer bee pied in the 2nd generation, but overall it seems better this way. Of course, it probably costs more to buy a bumblebee and a visual pied than a pastel het pied and a spider het pied, and for some people the initial investment might be more of a concern than how long it takes to get to the end product.

I don't even see the point of producing this snake anyway, since I'm not terribly fond of the spied in the first place. But it is fun to think out the genetics problems. Imagine something like an axanthic killer bee instead!