On Fri, 1 Mar 1996, Morten Brixtofte Petersen wrote:
 
> Hello Beepeople.
> The current discussion about mite resistant bees made me wonder what
> happened to some apparently good breeding material:
>
> In an article from 1992 in the journal "Apidologie" F. Ruttner et al.
> describes a strain of
> Apis mellifera carnica with active defence against varroa. The article is
> referred by E. Southwick in the American Bee Journal sometime in 1992 (as
> far as I remember) he included a picture from the original article as well.
> The bees of this strain apparently mutilate the mites e.g. "bites" off the legs
> of the mites. According to the article this strains of bees had good
> owerwintering capability WITHOUT treatment. The bees were selected by
> an Austrian beekeeper named Alois Wallner.
>
> Does anyone out there know what happened to this strain of bees?
> Is it possible to by breeding material (queens or semen) from this strain?
>
> References: Apidologie (1992) 23, 173-187 Active defense against Varroa
> mites in a Carnolian strain of honeybee (Apis mellifera carnica Pollmann).
> >
 Morten,
  Thank you very much for your informative post. You hit the nail on the
head. I have been told that they have carniolan bees with the traits that
you mentioned. There is a researcher in Austria that will send semen to
the US. It seems to be a problem in getting the ok to import the semen. I
want us to focus on the problem Varroa.We will need to lobby as a group
if need be to get some of the semen over here to work with. Given the
nature of our problem with Varroa , we need every tool that is out there
to win.We need to have control over what is brought into the US.  The
USDA has a tough job to control what comes in to the US. FACT: in my
state a beekeeper with a 1,000 ++ hive used a drug that was not approoved
and the state went out to fine him $ 10,000 . The beekeeper has a lot of
money and went out to sue the government for not aggressively working on
control of the mite. The state dropped  everything.We see now that there
is an effoft to get some good breeding stock for them to work with.I
belive that we need to voice our feelings on what we want out of our
helping hand, the USDA. If there is any way that we can help them , then
we should. This is not a small problem.All the tools have to be used.
 The power we have with this machine alone , makes it an outstanding tool.
Thanks again for your post. It is very timely. I hope to read more info
on more breeding stock that is on this globe.
 Roy Nettlebeck