Honeycrisp is a hybrid.
I just read up a little on it and it seems its "parentage" is more than a little confusing and maybe even a bit mysterious.
A US patent states that it is a cross between the 'Macoun' and 'Honeygold' apples. But maybe not. Genetic fingerprinting makes it look like neither of these apples is its parents.
and like many other hybrids, the Honeycrisp does not breed true. the flowers of Honeycrisp are sterile so a third species has to be used to make seeds. than those seeds won't generate Honeycrisps but some other hybrid. So I'm not sure where you actually get Honeycrisp seeds from. But in order to get Honeycrisp trees, you have to resort to grafting. Most of the fruits and nuts at the grocery store are hybrids and most of them come from trees that are grafted.
Some of these hybrids are pretty obvious - like plucots. But what is less obvious or at least not well known is that all the apples in the grocery store are not only hybrids. but they are hybrids of hybrids of hybrids. I may have to look up in The Botany of Desire to see if anyone knows what is the original apple. Probably the crabapple.
I just learned while looking some of this stuff up that most apples are "extreme heterozygotes". What I think that means is that if you take an apple from the grocery store and plant the seeds you will not get the results you intended. So what growers do is plant a bunch of apple trees. Then they take buds off the trees they want to grow and graft them to the bole of the apple trees. You can propagate thousands of Honeycrisps from just one tree.
If you ever shopped for a fruit tree or taken a closer look at an orchard as you drove by you probably were already aware of this at least on a lower level.
But to get back selective breeding. Not all selective breeding involves hybridization. and not all hybrids are the product of selective breeding. but when you get to the grocery store the products are usually the result of selective breeding AND hybridization.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secrets-of-hybrid-fruit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycrisp#cite_note-uspto-1
https://permies.com/t/10469/Apples-seeds
