>BRAVO - This is the news many of us have been waiting for. Personaly , I
>prefer this approach to roaming the globe in search of the perfect bee.
>If a project like this is supported, we should soon have a population of
>bees to work with that will be as good as those anywhere.>
>
How right you are.  The search for the better bee has been going on for a
long time.
L L Langstroth, who died 101 years ago, was a great believer in Italians,
which he considered far superior to the native American.  In 1882 a
respected Ontario breeder imported queens from Cyprus.  The bees turned out
to be vicious, stinging everyone in sight, an early taste of AHB.  There
have been many such failures, where bees have failed to adapt.  For fifty
years researchers have tried, by instrumental insemination, to increase life
expectancy, disease resistance, more vigour, longer tongues and so on.  We
are still waiting for that super bee to come into existence.  Human
intelligence has not changed in thousands of years.  Increased knowledge but
that is all.  Bees are reckoned to have existed multi-millions of years,
with very little change from the original, however that came into being.
Fixed development in any direction will not come overnight.
Many of us on our little island consider that we have all the material we
need for a decent working bee.  You in the States and Canada, with your
broad acres and extremes of climate, must already have as varied a
collection of bee material as anywhere in the world.
When Langstroth revolutionized beekeeping in the middle of the last century
there were true Italian, Carniolan, Caucasion and European breeds and so on.
Since then there has been so much criss-crossing of frontiers that I doubt
there is a true bred bee left.
I.I. queens, because of the work involved, will always be expensive and once
they have left the laboratory their offspring will be subject to random
matings.  It is said that a queen mates with six to a dozen drones.  What a
rag-bag of mixed genes must appear in the offspring.
Every breeder knows that sister queens bred from a selected mother do not
perform equally well, this in part presumably from fathers' genes.  The
average beekeeper is not a scientist.  True research is best left to them.
What we can do, commercial man and hobbyist alike, is breed continuously
from our best stocks,  raising more queens than we need and scrapping the
worst performers.  Choosing a queen from a thousand miles away is a gamble.
Selecting from bees that are accustomed to your particular brand of climate
is a far better bet.  If and when something outstanding is found then is the
time to hand it over for development.
_________________________________________________________________
Sid Pullinger                    Email :  [log in to unmask]
36, Grange Rd                Compuserve:  [log in to unmask]
Alresford
Hants SO24 9HF
England