> When Dr. Shiminuki selected queens in Russia one the reasons was bees which would tolerate a high varroa load without PMS showing up. ? Shimanuki in Russia? That's news to me. This is what I thought happened: A preliminary fact-finding trip was made in autumn 1994 by two of us from USDA-ARS (Rinderer and Delatte), joined by Dr. Kuznetsov in Primorsky. The trip was partially supported by the office of International Cooperation and Development of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS, lCD). Because a chief goal of the trip was to assess possible resistance to varroa, a wide variety of colonies was sampled for mites by burning fluvalinate smoke strips in the hive and measuring the resulting "mite fall" within the ensuing half hour. The bees were not immune to varroa; mites were present in all colonies tested. Almost all the queens were chosen from colonies showing low varroa populations based on mite fall following treatment with fluvalinate smoke strips. With the Tilia flow soon to begin, we saw one potential negative trait of the bees - a very strong swarming tendency. Almost all colonies we saw had swarm cells, with as many as 84 cells seen in a colony. Most of the colonies were far less populous than we would have expected for the degree of swarm preparation we saw. A USDA-ARS Project to Evaluate Resistance to Varroa jacobsoni by Honey Bees of Far-Eastern Russia by ROBERT G. DANKA, THOMAS E. RINDERER, VICTOR N. KUZNETSOV and GARY T. DELATTE Reprinted from Volume 135, No. 11, November, 1995 American Bee Journal *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html