Hi Barry

> Give me the local swarm, that's the kind of bee I
> want.

What you say is fine, IF the swarm comes from a pool of bees that is large
and homogeonous and well adapted to the area.

It seems to me that we work somewhat differently on each side of the
Atlantic.

If we were to repesent the genes of each race of honeybee by painted wooden
bricks, say red for Carnica, Blue Caucasion, Yellow Italian... etc.   Then
it seems to me that US breeders are trying to plug individual brightly
coloured bricks together to synthesize a bee that incorporates these
characters. OK in the short term, but it rapidly degenerates and we have no
lasting effect.

We have that problem in UK with exotically bred queens and all sorts of
random imports. However we try to establish a uniformly coloured bee that is
made up of bricks of  many shades of the same primary colour. That is not to
say that the odd brick will not show up of a different colour, but we can
cull those "sports" unless they have some useful traits in which case
further breeding will blend that colour and shift the "mean" colour of the
group.

In the UK this breeding work is carried out against a background of a huge
amount of non indiginous stock ( I would suggest that 50% of British bees
are non native). Hopefully the pressures of varroa and the secondary
diseases associated with it will bear more heavily on the non native that
our original native strains and thus help to redress the balance.


Regards From:- Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping and Bee Breeding, http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman
IBList Archives, http://website.lineone.net/~d.cushman