Hello Brian & All,

I only explained my contact with Australia in the last post to show the list 
I am perhaps one
of the best informed U.S. beekeepers on the Australian import. I have done
five articles in the American Bee Journal on the Australian import bees from
Browns Bees Australia. I have explained in all the articles that my first
hand experience has been with only the bees & queens from Terry Brown. That
said I will answer the below.

Brian said:
>Furthermore the facts are the Aussie bees have no resistance to Tracheal,
Varroa or chalkbrood.

"the facts are"

Myself and my beekeeping partner Glenn Davis ( nor retired but consulted
whenever problems arise) received 400 packages from the first import. I
followed those bees for the first year and personally went through a 150 of
those hives ( with 5 helpers) finding the queen in each hive and checking
for varroa, tracheal mites amount of brood, brood pattern, disease, sealed 
honey & pollen  and chalkbrood. The results were presented in
my articles in 2005. I found 3 hives out of 150 with slight signs of
chalkbrood which cleared up as the season progressed. All 150 were
queenright and had low varroa loads in spring. I am on the road so I can not 
provide
the month and issue number of the ABJ articles but if a member wants to look 
back at my article
and verify the above was what I wrote please do.

I was very concerned that the Aussie bees would crash the first year from
both tracheal & varroa mites and I said so in my first article.

Did not happen and the Aussie hives ( due to my insistence) were left 
untreated in
spring 2005. The hives were placed in apple pollination. Splits were made
( 300 nukes I believe were sold) and then placed on Clover locations. Then
when the supers were pulled In August I returned to examine the hives. I
found low enough varroa load I felt the hives could be left untreated. Glenn
Davis ( Bell Hill Honey) and I had long discussions on my advice that the
bees could be left untreated until spring. The final decision was of course
Glenn's as he owned the hives. The hives were treated for mites and I was Ok
with his decision and went back to working my own hives but now wish I had
pulled 6 pallets ( 24 hives ) and left untreated but in a commercial
operation experiments cost money and all the original package bees were
shipped back into almonds in spring 2006 and graded top dollar.

Glenn & I have used over a 1000 Aussie queens since 2005 not counting the
400 original import. Our largest order I think was a 500 order and a few 100
orders in one year. The 500 queens came about as we needed queens and called
all our U.S. suppliers and none could supply. We called Terry Brown and
although his queen rearing season was basically over he supplied our needs.
Down under our winter is his summer and vise versa.

This post is getting long so will continue in another post part two. Hope 
the above is not to boring for those which have read the articles or 
followed my posts on the subject but good information for the archives. Here 
are a few commercial beekeepers you can contact about their experience with 
the Aussie bees.
Richard Bordin ( California 6000 hives all Aussie headed)
Shad Sullivan ( California 13000 hives mostly Aussie headed)
Dennis Potts ( Britten, South Dakota  Not sure the exact number of Aussie 
headed colonies Dennis has but I traveled to South Dakota and looked through 
some of those hives and took pictures for article 5. Dennis said the Aussie 
package bees had been in almonds, apples, cherries and cranberries before 
producing a drum of honey on average from each four way pallet of bees.

The 24 hive test  of Spriotetramat ( including controls) does not hold much 
weight in the circles I travel in. The above numbers does! The above year 
end and overwinter losses were very low not all dead.

Part two to follow!


bob

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