My Friend Bob Harrison asks, "What have our U.S. queen breeders came up
with in the same period of time? Are any even looking for a bee which will
tolerate varroa?"

To which I give my opinion:

What really gets to me, and I know that it gets to you as well since you
have said it more than once is that the Russian queen that US queen
breeders are producing as production queens simply are not what the USDA-
ARS folks have been breeding, they are unchosen crosses not only with
Italians, but with every race of bees around or as George Imirie so
vividly declares ( I am paraphrasing ) �gany lucky old buck in the
vicinity�h of the producers�f open mating yard. Dr. Thomas Rinderer and
his team including Charlie Harper have done wonderful carefull painstaking
work in producing lines of Varroa resistant Russian queens that is IMHO
being compromised by the open mating of Russian daughters, which some are
being used/treated as �gRussian Breeder Queens�h which will produce the
queen again which open mates and eventually goes to the buyer who has ten
or twelve hives in Wooster, Ohio.

Glenn Apiaries produces queens that are instrumentally inseminated from
carefully chosen lines, why can�ft these other folks that are
selling "Russian Queens" do the same? All you have to do is mark the
drones as they pop out at day 24 and then upon sexual maturity at day 46
or so catch and collect semen. Laidlaw once said that he could build the
necessary instrumentation for a hundred bucks; perhaps if we all had our
own I. I. equipment and breeding programs we could get the bees with the
traits and genetics that we require. The queen breeders selling Russians
crosses need to advertise that the bees that the general public are
purchasing is a cross, not a truly hybridized Russian bee, not a Russian
bee.

Folks talking to me are saying that they are buying pure Russians queens
and packages; and, they unfortunately believe it!  After they have spent
their money they do not want to hear from me or others that the bees that
they are raising in their back yard are only part Russians. They do not
want to listen to calm logical truth about the parentage of their bees.
They believe the writing in the advertisement, �gRussians".

There, I�fve gone and opened another can of worms!

Chuck Norton
Norton�fs Nut & Honey Farm
Reidsville, NC

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