> Is this really the right approach?  I find the idea of finding a colony - or even several colonies - that have resistance and then re-stocking the entire world from that small genetic base to be a recipe for the extinction of the honey bee. Do we not need to manage bees in such a way that resistance can be allowed to develop gradually over as wide an area as possible? That must mean allowing bees and varroa to interact whilst keeping varroa numbers low enough to avoid catastrophic damage.

Thanks for spelling this out so clearly. I was thinking pretty much along these same lines. The honey bee mating system seems to have evolved to avoid line breeding, and favors changes that affect entire populations. A beneficial trait could arise multiple times and propagate throughout the population, raising the quality of the entire population. This, rather than arising in one lineage and spreading in a linear fashion, which is less likely due to the constant outcrossing. 

* * *

The field of population genetics is now so well supported at
the empirical level that the litmus test for any evolutionary hypothesis
must be its consistency with fundamental population-genetic principles.

Lynch, M. (2007). The frailty of adaptive hypotheses for the origins of organismal complexity. 

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