I was fascinated by this article. 
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2617784&blobtype=pdf
 > This suggests that, compared to the Western honeybee that has a  
longer history of domestication, selection on the Asiatic honeybee has  
favored the generation of more variable antimicrobial peptides as  
protection against pathogens.

"Selection", oft-touted by many including myself, as the solution to some of the beekeeping worlds serious disease and pestilence problems, may well prove to also have been the cause of some of these problems. 

PeterB may not subscribe to the notion that Apis m has been more highly selected than Apis c (equating "domestication" to "selection") but I have my doubts. 

However the statement that ....  "I am not sure that the breeding of bees has been beneficial overall." does require some elaboration. I may/may not agree with this.

Certainly the authors of this paper point to an important difference between the immune capacity of cerana and mellifera that they imply could be related to a lesser degree of selection away from the wild state in cerana. This presumably confers a greater ability of that species to cope with bacterial infections.

I have heard it said that todays racehorse industry can trace the ancestry of most of the succesful horses to a single sire. I have no idea if this is true but maybe it is close? Is beekeeping in the western world any different?

PeterD 


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