>> my contention is that so called ferals are not different from bees in colonies that are raised from locally available honey  bees and/or simply allowed to requeen themselves

Randy:
> I don't come to the same conclusion.  The authors state: "Our current genetic data support demographic evidence... that populations of Australian feral honey bees are self-sustaining and that they do not rely on escapees from commercial colonies for continued existence."

That isn't what I was addressing. I was referring to the view in the
summary, which reads:

>The feral population is genetically distinct from the closed population, but not from the genetic stock maintained by beekeepers outside of the program.

The authors were trying to find out if the closed population was
overly inbred and in some way inferior to bees not subjected to such a
strict breeding program and/or ferals. My opinion is that non-selected
bees in hives and non-selected bees are the same (by non-selected, I
mean actually: subject to natural selection instead of human chosen
for some particular criterion other than survivability).

The bottom line is: how to get healthier bees. One could beat the
woods for survivors, as Joe apparently does, or let susceptible bees
die off like Mike Johnston and Kirk Webster does. While intensive
breeding has not made bees that are vastly better than the ordinary,
according to these authors it has not appreciably narrowed their
genetic diversity either. Still, bees that are allowed to requeen
themselves more closely resemble unmanaged bees.

Genetic diversity within the colony, however, was not studied here and
following the work of Dave Tarpy, Heather Mattila, and Freddie-Jean
Richard -- this may be part of the key to success of non-inbred bees
and so-called ferals. By the way, I use the term "so-called ferals"
because it implies that bees in the wild are different in some radical
way from bees kept in hives.

As I mentioned earlier today, I am not trying to rewrite the Gospels
here, just present different points of view. Better others should see
things very differently than to all think alike and pat each other's
backs. These are just observations that I make and I am not so afraid
of being wrong that I won't write.

 --
Peter L Borst
Danby, NY USA
42.35, -76.50
http://picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst

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