How are you selecting your males?

Can you make a male flower female buds and test the male.

Or do you go on just smell and time of pollen drop?

Stem rub for smell and resin is always key for me, then structure/branching. However if I know the line I will take leaf shape into account as well to help determine the desired phenotype.

Usually I will try to determine which strain should be the male or female up front. The jury is still out for me when working with poly-hybrids as to what is right.

I hope this will help you:

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=99597

peace

bump.

Someone else mentioned this. sounds like fun.

I personally exclude males who are too quick.
then I evaluate the remaining males.

What I can say is:
Don't do it like me and think you can select a male straight out of veg just by looking at them and doing stem rubs.
Results are .... inconclusive at best.

Once I culled the remaining males, my "keeper" looked less and less great. I noticed smells coming from root balls that I did not notice from stem rubs and they were overwhelming while my "keeper" was just ok in the smell department.

I think males need to be flowered out before making a selection just like females.
Maybe you don't need to let them finish flower but can select after a month or so already. But I would say flower them and compare them then. Not just in veg like I did.


Most people seem to think that males which put on the frost early and often are the most desirable for "our purposes". Note that I didn't say early flowering (as many say those should be avoided) but i say they start producing resin early and a lot. Those combined with dense pollen clusters seems to be what most people go for along with loud smells from a stem rub.
I want to add to the stemrub thing that I find it inconclusive at best also. I have had no smell the one week from a plant's stem rub followed by a loud smell the next and the week after basically nothing again.
It changes over time and sometimes you need to rub different parts of the plant as well imho.

The smell of a seedling from stem rub changes while the plant matures. A plant can be very pure fruity at 30 days of age, but at 60 days+ it can have more spice, skunk or whatever coming thru.
So if the selection is really important to you, allow your seedlings to mature longer.

Also, when a seedling gets root bound in a smaller pot, the smell from a stem rub can be fairly faint. They can have a nice smell at 30 days but at 60 days, if they are stressed, the aroma can somewhat "disappear".

I grow in small cabs/tents and usually veg my seedlings in very small pots (10cm x 10cm x 10cm) till they show sex, so i experience the strength of smell changing all the time. But if you repot them and give them a while, the smell gets stronger again.


Resin production..

If you want to select resinous males and females without flowering them first, i suggest you get a 30x or 60x magnifying loop and look at the globular resin glands on the main stem and leaves; how many glands are there and how big they are. A good place to look at is the "arm pits", or the general area where the leaves attach to the main stem. Also the fresh leaves on the grow tip.

The little experience i have, i've seen that frosty plants show their resin at very young, some even on their first true leaves. Many (most) times if there aren't alot of globular resin on a young plant, the plant won't be the frostiest at harvest time either.

Some plants have smaller resin glands, so don't cull these plants unless you sure. it doesn't mean they don't have a nice frost on them at harvest time, it's just smaller resin glands. But if the globular resin is "far" apart, and maybe not so big in size, i personally wouldn't use it for seed making unless these kind would be the only plant(s) available.


For me, resin production isn't the most important thing. A nice marijuana plant, for me, is a combination of many things. i can give up some resin production for nice taste and effect. Same thing with potency; the strongest plants may not have the best effect.

thanks everyone. great info.

goat. yes did you read that thread that said fastest sucks and is hemp (fibre) haha.

smoking some...let's see....kosher kush. but it's not flushed i can tell.

female flowers on males. haha.

I really have to read my breeding bible I have. I lost interest in learning that part for now. I will pick it back up though. All i know is female and male plant = both kinds of seeds. haha. jk I know a little more, been helping people.

The advice I get and others has to be examined. The people asking the question do not give enough info and people have 80 different solutions and they all grow differently. So when someone said just breed collidal females and breed only this way and I've been taught otherwise. Let's just say I hate appeal to authority but what good breeder has no males. LOL. Then later he got burned for that and called a pollen chucker. I made a joke I was one too.

These faster plants do have less resin. I should probably talk a little more about that, so when I come back to this thread I can wonder more on this.

The resins attracts: what?
The seed has energy for how long?
The season is how long?
Does it need protection or can it been half eaten and still produce seeds on a fervent scales, trading off the energy for resin production for other means of surivial?
Or in higher temps does it need the resin to delete cells that are penetrated and could infect the plant (apoptosis) and short season cold weather plants aren't prone to the same warm climate bacteria/viruses/fungus?

It gets the animal attracted with scents. The animal eats and shits out the seed with fertilizer. Now the plant that produces fiber gets tall and relies on plant numbers and height MORE SO, they it's beloved resin that promote apoptosis when cell walls are penetrated and exposed to THC and then it also doesn't need the animals for spreading THAT much?

Damn. So smoking female flower on a male plant. Sounds nice. DUnno if that works a good one though. I will STILL PICK THE FASTEST MALE. while i figure out exactly why the plant chooses that over resin production!

goat yes. I have a VERY cheap laser pointer lens I use for macros. People love the pics. So are so close that newer people or people who haven't read up see them and ask what is it? Then it tell them it's resin glands of cannabis and they have a face of "I believe in ghosts" You know. Anyway 170 pics atleast of resin glands I have, but it's like 6 pics per shooting of one pic. So divide by six and that's the solid number of good pic takes I have.

Now peeps say the resin like smell, isn't indicative of THC, but yeah, it's part of the high. I guess in ways.

Should I expose a plant to prickers and UV light? What would I get?

What would I get if I rootbound plants? Plants like corn that mature faster because they know they'll seed the ground so densely they find they're root zone is small and flower before they use the alotted amount of nutes in the soil for that space? Rootbounding has been known to force flower. Couple generations and you might have the genes working more like tomato plants. My toms flower when root bound or stress.

I wonder what's the best way to stress plants to think the season is ending. Light time manipulation or does it not matter with autos? 24hrs. Or cold? (winter is coming. hahah)

On an ending note my thoughts may not be very CORRECT. I'm using intuition on a lot of things I do. This can make one delusional.

You can smoke test males too.

Of course before you had any flowers.

Smoke tests of males have been reported to be inconclusive at best as well.
Most seem to agree that while possible and a source of information, it can just as easily lead to a bad selection as it could to a better/good one.
Even if you go the extra mile like Sam and others and actually reverse the males into females, flower those out and smoke them, it seems to lead to inconclusive results as well.

As annoying as it is, for whatever method to select a male, there will be voices saying "yeah but the result was completely different than expected in my case".

Maybe lab analysis will change this drastically.

Best way is to get a few potentials, do the crosses, grow them out, look at what has the best features you are looking for and then you will know for sure.

maybe it's best to track lines of male keep them separate, then breed as normal to backcross it so it regains the trait when you need it to it doesn't gain instability through normal genotypically combined traits that are recessive and pop up at the right time with the right selections. is that right? I might be just talking. Anyway I learn a little.

maybe the female sometimes is more potent than the male. I don't know WHY though.

maybe the plant has different strategies. depending on what you expose them to...epigenetics. not to mention cannabis mutates that's how it does stuff. Why do you think it produces ALL different types of smells and effects. To affect a wide range and to tweak variation so animals spread the seed. Plants are smart. Look at prickers, or those fuzz balls that stick with seed in them. Now just think about how a plant thinks and responds and already knows what to do somewhat.


I don't want to smoke sacks friends.

Ethylene?

Goat gave a very good description.

For me its about waiting long enough with a male in flower that it will make small clumps of trichomes on the leaves by the new growing tips. I will rub these trichomes with my nose close and smell what the male smells like. This gives a much more accurate terpine profile to smell than a stem rub. If you are going to check stem rub smells, make sure to rub very lightly up and down the upper stems with your fingers to collect the trichomes growing on the stem and not to break the surface and release other smells from the sap.

I have also noticed that some plants will make trichomes on the leaves from the first set of true leaves. Sometimes you need a scope to see them or bright lighting.

I like to stress my males a bit and see how they respond. Root bound, too dry, too wet, change the light cycle, put in an area with low airflow and watch for powdery mildew. If the plant passes the tests and I like its structure and smell then I'll give it a go.

I put a lot of selection pressure on my plants being strong and resistant to powdery mildew (which can wreck my harvests). Then terpines come next. Then effect. Then potency.

- Yea macro close up of the stem is a good idea. Those photos look cool too.

- Yea, like mentioned, don't scratch the stem too hard cause you might actually wipe most of the aroma off the plant and get green-smell from the plant tissue. Just lightly pass your finger thru the area you're about to smell. Next time try a different spot on the plant. Always on the fresher growth, not the older, bottom parts of the plant.
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The reasoning behind "cull the fast sexing males" could be outdoor grows from seed, like they did decades ago (no clones). Because if the seedling/plant will start flowering too soon, the plant stays quite small because there was not enough vegetative growth before the budding started and the yield will be poor.

Early sexing males aren't problematic for indoor cause you can veg the plants as long as you like before changing the light cycle. Some plants in landrace genetics (Moroc, Lebanese, Nepali) have semi-autoflowering traits and this would be problematic for indoor grows also.

But are these early- plants inferior to longer veging siblings in any other way then just veg-time, i have no idea.
I prolly would cull early-males myself, because the few really early plants i've seen, seemed almost freakishly early. Back then when i saw these i wasn't thinking about seed making much, so i wasn't paying attention to other traits they had.
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About my personal seed projects.

I live in the North, so we don't have much of a problem with powdery mildew and such things, thou the cold and dry winter air causes it's own problems. I've had bud rot during summer grows but i have never seen pm on my plants.

What my uneducated thinking about seed making is "I'm making MARIJUANA seeds", personally. For smoking, bud or resin. Very simple.
Aromatic, Tasty, interesting, nice effect ,nice potency, nice resin and ofcource the growth factors i like. Usually i don't like my plants to be too short, cause many times these can be quite leafy and/or thick bushes, and the buds insides can't get enough light = lots of fluffy pop-corn bud. But i don't like too lanky plants either.

As a small-op cab hobbyist, i can only dream of starting 50 seeds at a time, keeping clones etc. But stand out males are standout males, you'll know when you have these.
It's a bitch to keep clones, flower few males from the same line in small cab and pollinate few sets of same females so you have seeds from few different males, let me tell you. LOL, i'm pretty fed up atm.

You just have to grow enough seeds to get an idea about how nice female marijuana seedlings appear in veg situation. Males are exactly the same thing; aromatic, resinous, great looks, yields, good calyx to leaf ratio, flowering time, but you really don't know how the parents matched or how the male is before you grow some of the seeds.

But once you have grown and especially smoked nice marijuana from the particular seed line, you then have some basis for thought about good males that might suit your needs. Web is full of grow reports and pictures from which you can see the better phenotypes.
I like to surf the internet when i'm about to grow some new seeds that i'm really excited about. I look at the leaf shapes, serration on leaves and other growth factors, so i can try to pick the best ones before i have had time to flower them.

It's not rocket since once you know the basics from the old timers like Sam and Nevil and whoever. We all like nice weed, it's very simple.
Imo, some botanist people just like to make it seem more complex than it really is.(to feel important abit, i guess)
...And they prolly don't even smoke that much, most of them, LOL.

One tip for beginners, that i find handy..
Look at the seedlings you grow, hoping for keepers, from the very first set of true leaf the tiny seedling grows. Take photos. This way you'll know/remember how your special keeper looked when he/she was very small, and so once you grow the seeds you made with this plant, you'll know how to spot the parent-phenos from very early on.

For mother-backcrossing (Bx) seeds, this way you could grow and go thru a large amount of seeds in small spaces, cause you could cull many unwanted phenotypes at very, very early stage when you can tell what phenotype you're looking for.

goat ill read later. but you re-ignited my idea - thanks. I'll re-remember it when I come back to this.

Great post Goat, thank you for that!

One thing I would disagree with:
I too like to surf the web and read as many reports as I can and soak up what I can find there BUT
There really isn't that much info on male phenos online. I rarely find threads where people show of their males and give reasoning to their selection etc. ...

I have seen analytical reports of males being tested for cannabinoid profiles testing as high as 9.24% thc. Analytical testing is as it seems to be the best way of knowing the potency of males...how that translates to phenotypical expression in outcrosses is another thing entirely though



This particular male was from AKBeanBrains skunk qabbage bx6 and the analytical tests were submited by him

Not true at all, not inconclusive, I would transform any male I wanted to use for breeding, that allows me to know the terpene and cannabinoid profiles and what they will likely be giving to any hybrids that use them.
I was never so good at smoking males, it means little to me, you could lab test them, but very few do. Now if I transform a male to female and smoke it I get a lot, and the transformed male to female can also be lab tested for the Cannabinoids and terpenes, to understand exactly what genes can be transferred to a hybrid using it.
The best way is to test progeny, use a male to make crosses with many select elite females and test the progeny in large numbers organoleptically and in a lab.
-SamS

bigbadbiddy said:

Smoke tests of males have been reported to be inconclusive at best as well.
Most seem to agree that while possible and a source of information, it can just as easily lead to a bad selection as it could to a better/good one.
Even if you go the extra mile like Sam and others and actually reverse the males into females, flower those out and smoke them, it seems to lead to inconclusive results as well.

As annoying as it is, for whatever method to select a male, there will be voices saying "yeah but the result was completely different than expected in my case".

Maybe lab analysis will change this drastically.

Click to expand...

Yea progeny. that takes more time and effort. more data. i have it, but still.

yea the reversing and watching trichs. not stem rub but bud or sack rubs.

I still have to read goats thing though.

bigbadbiddy said:

Great post Goat, thank you for that!

One thing I would disagree with:
I too like to surf the web and read as many reports as I can and soak up what I can find there BUT
There really isn't that much info on male phenos online. I rarely find threads where people show of their males and give reasoning to their selection etc. ...

Click to expand...

I think, but i'm no expert, that there's no difference between males and females other than sex and perhaps a bit of height. But they're about the same when it comes to smell(taste), resin production, potency, type of effect, calyx to leaf ratio etc.

Full blooming males even look like their female counterparts at a distance. Males have a calyx-to-leaf ratio just as females do. Some have fat colas others abit less and so on.


I have been making some seeds for myself for some years now and so i'm very interested in nice male plants as well. Even if a pack of seeds was full of males, if there's even one nice one, it wasn't a total waste of money for me. Then i flower the male and freeze some pollen for later use.

For few years now i have started judging the seedlings on a 5-10 scale (aroma and resin) from very early on, way before they show sex, and i REALLY have to say that i don't know which plants are females and which are males before i see preflowers on them. More than few times, after germinated some seeds i have found a very nice resinous and aromatic plant i was hoping it to be a female, it turned out to be a male after all = This tells me that when it comes to marijuana the characteristics of males and females are more or less the same.

Ofcourse with males it's a bit of a guessing game cause i don't smoke any plant material from them, so i have to grow their offspring to really KNOW what's in them, but when we talk about just the characteristics plants show in veg females and males are about the same, imo.


So if you've seen and read about, and perhaps smoked nice bud from a certain line, just find similar looks and aroma in a vegging male and i'd say you might find something in the direction of the nice female. Of cource you'd need to know how this female looked when she's in veg, but you can match leaf-type and stature from a flowering female to a male plant that is still in veg. Just use your eyes.

..many times a blooming plant has little narrower leaves on the top half of the plant, but on the bottom half you can still see the leaves as they'd be on a vegging plant. Look at those on a nice female and try to find a matching/similar male from related lines.


Short and sweet:

If you know how a nice female looks like, finding a somewhat matching male is the way to go. A good start anyways. And this makes sense doesn't it.
You guys just have to stop thinking that males would be hugely different to female cannabis plants. They're not, imo.



PS.
i just noticed i used the word 'nice' quite a few times.