Bill Truesdell: " I think we are making much of nothing."    

     I agree, a much better case would need to be made for the conclusion 
that lack of genetic diversity may have become a problem, especially when 
you consider those factors which Bill pointed out.   
     For purely academic reasons, though, I do wonder what the potential is 
for diversity within a relatively small, closed mating system.  I mean even 
if it came down to the last honey bee in the world, what would that mean in 
terms of diversity assuming you could expand out from there and re-
establish honey bees in the world.  In other words how much of the total 
honey bee genome is packaged within one queen?  When you breed you are 
mostly making adjustments in the frequency of certain genes, not creating 
new ones or eliminating others although obviously as the population gets 
smaller and smaller some genes have an increased chance of dropping out 
altogether.  But they would tend to be ones that you would not notice if 
you were selecting for what you considered desirable characteristics.  They 
may become important later though if some new challenge were to arise.  
     Likewise the population that has become isolated for long enough to 
have become a separate “race” may have no problems as long as it is able to 
maintain its isolation and its environment doesn’t change significantly.   
Otherwise the ability of a few bees to retain a significant representation 
of the total A.m genome may be a thing to consider as we try to reinvent 
the honey bee through breeding schemes like the one that was so poorly 
reported in the article that began this thread.  The author of that article 
didn’t seem to have the foggiest idea of what he was writing about.  Beyond 
that it didn’t seem like anything that isn’t already being done by high 
tech breeders all over the place; Purvis, Cobey, Taber, etc.  Still the 
article mentioned 50 queens.  How much diversity would be represented by 
such a number?  How much adaptive flexibility would that population have 
starting out with only that many queens?   I realize these are not easy 
questions to answer, but could they be more important than we realize?

Steve Noble 

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