>The big diffeence, of course, is that Brother Adam thought the native
>British bee was extinct,

Really, it was probably right and the current dark bee is an hybrid
whose gene(s) of resistance to the acarine desease is that (are
those) of the Mediterranean bee. The Nature strategy makes it
possible "resistant"  to survive and it kills all the "sensitive
ones". In this case, the current dark bee is no more the native
North-European bee.


>and looked for useful stock elsewhere, which could be  combined
>into the perfect hybrid. I regard this as a fundamental strategic
>error, and find what I want in the native bee!

In French we say "La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce
qu'elle a!" (The most beautiful girl in the world can give only what
she has!).  And the glaciation process was very unjust with respect
to the European honeybee. Year after year, it killed colonies only
according to their position : too much in North, it's death!
And at the end (about -30000) the very small whole population of bees
(and the human) were confined in a very small area in the French
Basque Country, between the Pyrenees ices and the frozen, without
trees, North plains.  No more possibility of crossing with other
populations => Number of interesting qualities were lost of this
manner (unjust killing and no more crossing).
The dark bee has single qualities that other lines of bees don't
have, but it misses certain qualities which one can find elsewhere.
=> explanation of the Brother Adam strategy.

Regards
Jean-Marie Van Dyck

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