What Peter said about pathogens not being local even if you are trying 
to keep your bees that way made a lot of sense to me.  Adding to that, it 
seems to me that relying strictly on natural selection for overall fitness 
for a particular geographical area would depend on everyone in that area 
doing the same thing.  If your neighbor is getting New World Carniolans and 
specially bred Russians every year or two, then you are breeding out 
whether you like it or not.  Is that not so?  If it is, then you would in 
essence be mixing natural and man made selection and not having much 
control over either.  But since the only way to have complete control is 
through instrumental insemination, what is one to do.?  In the natural 
selection scheme that Dave advocates, you are choosing which queen to make 
queens from, (the one from the colony that survives?) while in IM you 
choose both the queen and the drones.  Either way you have to make choices 
as to which characteristics you like in a bee colony.  It would seem to me 
that the best way to go about this would be to place the highest value on 
the most general characteristics which would be things like persistent 
survivability and overall vitality.  After that more specific factors could 
be considered like hygienic behavior, gentleness, early and rapid build up, 
etc.  The general tendency to be healthy and to survive as a colony from 
one year to the next would probably include many if not most of the more 
specific desirable characteristics but not necessarily.  You might have to 
allow some of those to drift which ever way they want.  
   Up until now I haven’t had enough hives to really do any breeding other 
than to make walk away splits from strong hives, so it’s an area I really 
don’t know anything about.   I know there are beekeepers out there on this 
list who have a lot of experience in this area and who do think they know 
what they are doing.  What I would like to know from them is how much can 
we really expect from any kind of bee breeding program?  Is there a limit 
to what we can get out of the gene pool for our seemingly limitless 
demands?  There does seem to be a significant difference between bee 
breeding and other kinds of domestic animal breeding, although I couldn’t 
explain it myself.

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