Peter’s late post purports for creating healthier bee stocks by using 
kept/managed colonies because 1) vigorous sisters “bred from as many 
different lines as possible” will help them fight against varroa and other 
pathogens and 2) any new pathogen can and will “wipe out” the ferals once 
it finds its niche among them.

Precisely the reasons, Peter, why we need the ferals.  

Feral bees will, indeed, 1) mate with as many different lines as possible, 
unlike kept and bred bees in isolation, and indeed 2) a new pathogen will 
wipe them [the ferals] out clean, making them a lean and mean survival 
machine, a do or die somersault rendered by relentless nature “red in 
tooth and claw” that could not care, one whit, if they survive or perish.  
What coud be more scientific or objective or impersonal than this brutal 
cut-throat experiment?  Life is 50/50; you either eat or don’t.

A pathogen, however mighty, clever, and enduring, cannot and must not and 
should not and will not wipe out its host completely, a self-defeating, 
self-anihilating process because its own survival depends on the very 
viability of its host.  What is it going to eat when all the bees are 
gone?  A cod?  (They are pretty much gone, too)

Just as in beekeeping, following nature, the pathogen must strike a 
sembiotic relationship with bees, never one side dominating the other; the 
current practice of industrial beekeeping is more like a mushrooming 
monocrop of a few selected stocks dominating the cropland, lacking the 
very diversity you speak so well of, on and off.  This type of monoculture 
will be wiped out sooner than the wild variety of, say, rice growing along 
the Mississippi river bank, for the latter has never been treated or 
medicated by all-knowing and caring humans.  It took care of itself, a 
simple yet brutal and brilliant fact.  Any so-called disease-resitant 
strain itself, bred in managed colonies, en masse, will soon dominate the 
landscape, succumbing, given time, to yet another pathogen like CCD, 
defeating the very diversity you are seeking because every Joe Sixpack in 
the land will want it and have it.

Recall the Dutch Elm Disease (DED) that has wiped out nearly all the Elms 
in America (There are more streets in our beautiful America named “Elm” 
Street than “Main” Street, in fact; similarly, a large elm often serves as 
a symbolic backdrop in many American plays).  Well, guess what?  They are 
coming back, gradually, like the ferals; the pathogen could not wipe them 
completely out, and the staggering survivors can now withstand the DED, 
verified by a side-by-side experiment.  The elms are bouncing back thanks 
to non-human intervention: no IPM and no Intensive Care Unit for the 
sickly and dying elms.  To help bees, we too should do absolutely nothing.

Let them bee!

Only those who walked, barefoot, across burning charcoals of Hades and 
River Styx shall inherit the earth, just as we are the descendants of the 
survivors of the Plague.  We inherited those mutated DNA strains (the 
importance of diversity, again) against the rodent-borne pestilence that 
worked on us during medival period, like a human CCD (many deserted the 
colony, disoriented though no cell-phones yet invented, unattending the 
young at home and the crop in the field; no other humans robbed the empty 
nest full of store for a while; and milions perished nearly overnight).  
Yet the Plague impacted on us differently at the individual level due to 
different leves of mutation among us.  Most perished; some lingered, and 
others survived thanks to the shuffling of genes via sex, the biological 
gambling that shuffles and reshuffles the deck against the potential 
pathogen yet unforeseen, a continual struggle for existence for most 
living organisms.  There will be more pathogens like mites and CCD’s in 
the future.  For example, SHB is a new kid in town.  Sure, we lose some; 
they lose some in this game of give and take. 

There will be a day when we can do a similar side-by-side experiment 
between kept bees and the ferals.  The sooner we stop medicating the sick 
and the sickly, the quicker the necessary trainsition will come.  Again, 
nobody kept IPM or Intensive Care Unit for sick elms.  They just died or 
fought back on their own.  Killing off the dying and the sick happens all 
the time in the plains of Serangade.  Intergrated Pest Management (IPM) 
maintains the Intensive Care Unit to sustain the sick and the sickly on 
tubes and inside the bubble, prolonging the sickbed unduly, however 
unwittingly, promoting a germ-bed that will kill others and the ferals.  
It was not the ferals that came down with mites in the first place; if 
they are not healthier than the managed hives, they have long gone: they 
should have.  Give me an example where a feral colony gave managed 
colonies mites; it could very well be the other way around.  Left alone, 
the ferals may have now learned to coexist with mites, a status of 
equilibrium between the predator and prey.

The day of ferals may have already arrived, espeically in the south, for 
the AHB’s have rendered yet another DNA-spin on bee’s gene pool.  Hence, 
collecting feral swarms, with or without AHB strains, is promising, for 
they must harbor that rare combination or mutation in their DNA, which 
have helped them survive and hang on, tooth and nail, in the wild.  These 
bees are telling us, “Thanks, but no thanks” to our scientrific “help.”  

Speaking briefly of science, scinetists have long identified that the 
aggressive gene in AHB is a dominant trait and the gentleness in EHB, 
recessive; thus, all their cross will be aggressive.  Not so simple.  I 
live in AHB-affected area DNA-identified since 2004, but we have not had a 
single incident of mass-stinging common elsewhere.  How come?  I have also 
seen EHB’s as aggressive as any AHB’s in my practice before the arrival of 
the latter.  Could it be that AHB’s aggressiveness is being diluted at the 
level of individual colony?  Or truly nasty AHB’s have already been 
eliminated in Texas before they hit Oklahoma?  In other words, are we not 
already a factor in their selection and survival process as we always have 
been?  A firm beliver of science, I trust the ability of science to 
correct itself in time, always fearing any absolute statement coming from 
science, because absolutism belongs to religion, not science.  A good 
science admits its shortfalls, periodically, as we have moved, 
painstakingly, from Arsitotle’s physics to Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galilleo, 
Keppler, Newton, Einstein, and finally to Quantum Mechanics, for the time 
being.

Regards,

ysk

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