My understanding of AFB resistance and resistance to other brood diseases
such as EFB and chalkbrood involves the housekeeping ability of the bees as
opposed to a genetic resistance to the disease itself.
 
AFB resistance involves the ability of house keeping bees to identify and
remove infected larvae at an early stage of disease development. Thus the
resistance is a whole colony resistance as opposed to an individual bee
resistance. This allows the breeder to then select queens from hives which
exhibit such behaviour if they are developing a line of disease resistance
into their breeder queen genetic pool.
 
I have seen this done with a reasonable amount of success for chalkbrood in
that selected queens had colonies with low levels of chalkbrood as opposed
to those not selected for house keeping qualities.
 
As AFB is the primary disease of concern in Australia I would appreciate
any opinions or scientific data available on resistance and control
methods.
 
Currently Terramycin is not permitted as a control method, leaving burning
or irradiationof hives the only options to affected beekeepers.
 
Regards
Rob Bowman
Bathurst Australia