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Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:22:10 -0400 |
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What Peter said about pathogens not being local even if you are trying
to keep your bees that way made a lot of sense to me. Adding to that, it
seems to me that relying strictly on natural selection for overall fitness
for a particular geographical area would depend on everyone in that area
doing the same thing. If your neighbor is getting New World Carniolans and
specially bred Russians every year or two, then you are breeding out
whether you like it or not. Is that not so? If it is, then you would in
essence be mixing natural and man made selection and not having much
control over either. But since the only way to have complete control is
through instrumental insemination, what is one to do.? In the natural
selection scheme that Dave advocates, you are choosing which queen to make
queens from, (the one from the colony that survives?) while in IM you
choose both the queen and the drones. Either way you have to make choices
as to which characteristics you like in a bee colony. It would seem to me
that the best way to go about this would be to place the highest value on
the most general characteristics which would be things like persistent
survivability and overall vitality. After that more specific factors could
be considered like hygienic behavior, gentleness, early and rapid build up,
etc. The general tendency to be healthy and to survive as a colony from
one year to the next would probably include many if not most of the more
specific desirable characteristics but not necessarily. You might have to
allow some of those to drift which ever way they want.
Up until now I haven’t had enough hives to really do any breeding other
than to make walk away splits from strong hives, so it’s an area I really
don’t know anything about. I know there are beekeepers out there on this
list who have a lot of experience in this area and who do think they know
what they are doing. What I would like to know from them is how much can
we really expect from any kind of bee breeding program? Is there a limit
to what we can get out of the gene pool for our seemingly limitless
demands? There does seem to be a significant difference between bee
breeding and other kinds of domestic animal breeding, although I couldn’t
explain it myself.
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