Luis Rommel Beutelspacher wondered (relayed via Allen Dick):

>WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF VARROA RESISTANT HONEY BEES?
>How much tolerance is considered "resistant"?

   <br>

>I believe that a great portion of this hives are never treated for
>varroa, since they are kept by rural beekeepers with very rustic
>techniques.  I am fairly new into beekeeping (two years) and I have not
>treated any of my hives (included the first 10 that I purchased two
>years ago). In how long is varroa supposed to kill a hive?  After how
>long of having varroa in a hive is this considered "resistant"?

   <br>

   In an experiment on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of Santa Barbara, we
found that all colonies survived the introduction of varroa a good two
years with no treatment.

   That means that one should not run an experiment on varroa resistance or
tolerance for less than three years.

   In the third year, colony demise occurred quite rapidly on the island.
A few of the monitored colonies survived that year, but by the beginning of
the fourth year all monitored colonies had perished.

   In Santa Barbara proper, we now have good survival of feral colonies ---
obviously without treatment.  I consider that survival to be a POPULATION
phenomenon, in that queens mate with drones from colonies that have also
had no treatment.  I treated this possibility more fully in this network on
21 April.

                                                        Adrian


Adrian M. Wenner                    (805) 963-8508 (home phone)
967 Garcia Road                     (805) 893-8062  (UCSB FAX)
Santa Barbara, CA  93106

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*
*     "I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this:  The
intensity
*  of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it
is true
*  or not."
*                                                           Peter Medawar
(1979)
*
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