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Date: | Thu, 2 Mar 2023 12:32:01 -0500 |
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Feral
1: of, relating to, or suggestive of a wild beast
2: not domesticated or cultivated : wild ;having escaped from domestication and become wild.
This from the The Heartland Honey Bee Breeders Cooperative.
"The Heartland Honey Bee Breeders Cooperative was formed during a queen program in June 2013 at Purdue University. It involves the cooperative sharing of information, techniques and disease-resistant genetics between queen producers in the states of Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Illinois. Returning each year for a Queen Insemination Event in early June, certified HHBBC queen producers bring virgin queens to Purdue University. Semen is harvested from Mite Biter drones and then used to inseminate the new queens. Those inseminated queens then go back into each state’s queen breeding program and evaluated for the following year to help us all make rapid progress towards Varroa Mite resistant, gentle, productive, disease-resistant, non-Africanized queens that are locally adapted to the conditions in each state."
My only point is that while I strongly support selective breeding in the quest of stock improvement this is surely not a case of letting nature take it's course. I submit that it is quite the opposite.
We should have an agreed definition of feral as concerns honey bees. Mine would be a self sustaining population free from recent inclusion of escaped domestic stock. What recent means is debatable but it would have to be enough generations to ensure that they have proven an ability to survive free of human intervention or genetic inroduction. If we are calling any unmanaged colony in a tree feral, I'll rest my point.
Paul
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