Nice summary, Peter.  Thanks.

To clarify, I'm not disputing *any* of your points, although we can talk a 
bit on any of them.

FWIW, I wasn't saying that the moveable comb was/is a bad thing in itself, 
but rather what I was saying, or trying to say, is that the continuing bans 
against non-movable comb hives were and are steering beekeeping development 
on a different course than it otherwise would have taken, and, overnight, 
made beekeeping a much more expensive (industrial) pursuit. (That last item 
is a whole different subject I've tackled here previously, and elsewhere). 
Other such inflection points were the arrival of cheap sugar manufacturing, 
the invention of the extractor, and the conversion of the honey market to a 
mass market (with a subsequent race to the bottom in terms of freshness, 
quality, purity and authenticity).

Moreover, the bans and inspections brought about a political change, and the 
inspection process became an 'industry' --an end in itself--and in many 
places a strong political tool to manage and control beekeepers. I know, I 
was an inspector a more than a quarter decade ago and inspection at that 
time was a mini-empire in the beaurocracy.

That very fact is why some states, like Arizona, have no inspection. 
Beekeepers revolted.  In Alberta, as an expression of the wishes of the 
beekeepers of the province, we have inspection only on request, although we 
deliberately kept and updated recently the law that permits mandatory 
inspection.

I said:
>> Banning non-movable comb hives was a turning point in beekeeping and 
>> turned
>> us away from selection for resistance toward mechanical and chemical 
>> methods
>> of disease management.

Of course the history is written in a way that completely explains and 
justifies our arrival at the present state.  It always is. I am just 
considering possible alternative histories that might have taken us 
somewhere else, and figure the banning of fixed comb hives (*not* the 
invention of bee space and moveable comb) was a critical turning point.  It 
made frame by frame inspection easy and non-destructive, and thus enabled 
micro-management of the hive, and distracted from a holistic understanding 
and holistic solutions.

This you seem to consider a good thing:
> The invention of the movable comb was the single most important change
> in beekeeping. It made possible the complete management of the honey
> bee colony and opened the way to the great understanding of honey bee
> biology that we now take for granted. Before that it was basically a
> black box.

Was that necessarily a bad thing?  Up until the universal adoption of 
Langstroth hives and moveable frames, beekeepers encouraged swarms and 
killed the heavy and light hives each fall, leaving the middling ones to 
propagate the next year.  To me that seems to be a pretty good low-tech 
breeding program.  Low budget, low effort, and not subject to bias. 
Followed faithfully, possibly with some additional intervention, it should 
also have dealt with AFB in time.  Why didn't it?

As an inspector, I saw hives with no apparent AFB thriving in abandoned 
yards where deadouts were riddled with AFB, and always thought, ever since, 
that there are bees that can resist AFB if we are tough enough to do what is 
needed to see that the susceptible bees vanish.  It's the same quandary we 
have faced with mites: our measures to maintain our stocks (and our 
livelihoods) in the short term have prevented nature from solving our 
problems for us.

I recall clearly sitting in a dark room in Niagara Falls, listening to a 
talk by Marla.  At the end, she suggested beekeepers deliberately leave a 
yard or two untreated and see what happens.  To beekeepers, the idea is 
almost unthinkable, but I have pondered on that ever since.

> The banning of non-movable combs was initiated by the need to be able to 
> inspect hives for disease.

This was the  rallying point and overt justification, but the politics were, 
and still are complex.  The various underlying agendas are not always 
revealed or explained.  There is no justification for the continuing ban.

> While many beekeepers attempted to "treat" with various chemicals, most of 
> these treatments failed and burning was the recommended method.

Burning seemed to work, too.  Ohio, for example had impressivly low stats, 
if they were honest.  (We have found in Canada that provincial government 
bee stats can be pure fiction, and for long periods. (The career span of a 
specific individual?)).

> The idea of breeding resistant bees appeared very early on. Antibiotics 
> did not appear on the scene until much later...
> In my opinion, the reason that interest in bee breeding has had its ups 
> and downs is that it is very expensive to develop better strains of bees 
> and the characteristics of these bees rapidly disappear as the bees 
> interbreed with local stock.

Agreed.  Another reason is that the products of the breeding programs prove 
less fit than the local bees, and that the characteristics are not 
sufficiently fixed to endure.  That IMO is due to the methods used, creating 
ephemeral proprietary hybrids, and/or selecting from the top in a small 
program in a limited population, rather than culling from the bottom in a 
mass breeding program involving all local stocks.

> In order for a breeding program to work, it would have to be undertaken on 
> a national scale, and steps would have to be taken to eradicate the 
> mongrelized local stock. While this has been done in some countries, I 
> doubt if it will happen in the US, where beekeepers seldom agree on 
> anything.

Good points.  Frankly, I think, though that 'eradication' would be a 
mistake, and rather that their good points and adaptation should be used in 
any such program.

Thanks for the response, and all those good points.

allen 

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