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Date: | Thu, 11 Oct 2007 17:45:12 +0100 |
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Hi Randy
> ever since 20 year's of my work was wiped out when varroa first
> decimated my operation.
I sympathise, I had a disaster myself, not to do with varroa or any
disease, but due to lack of a selection pressure that had been
commonplace...
In UK we have a crop known as Oilseed Rape, although you have a crop
called Canola it is not exactly the same in the two countries. When I
first started beekeeping OSR was a new thing and after about three weeks
of foraging on the crop a build up of toxins occurred that made the bees
a bit touchy, it did not matter much as the crop only flowered for about
four weeks so it was easy to leave the bees alone for the fourth week.
Like all things this situation changed and multiple sowings of different
varieties brought about an overlap of flowering, which extended the
period that the bees were nasty, but this problem went away very quickly
when newer varieties that were lower in toxins became available and
widely planted as the could be consumed by humans.
A few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic in UK and farming
practices became disrupted. Some farmers planted the older varieties of
Rape for use as bio diesel (I suspect the seed was cheaper).
I had two lines of AMM bees that I was very proud of after twenty one
years of development, one of these was docile in the extreme, you could
take the lid off at any time without smoke and the bees would not even
fly they just carried on as if nothing happened, but as soon as these
gentle bees started foraging the bio diesel rape they became monsters.
Because these bees had not been exposed to that crop before, there had
been no de-selection going on for this bad behaviour during the
development process.
Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)
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