Dean writes:
> but more importantly, I think what I posted earlier was a thoughtful (and not often discussed) aspect of evolutionary biology and how it relates to concepts in artificial selection such as "inbreeding", "outbreeding" "fixing traits", etc...at least that is how I intended it. I've been working with our own survivor stock while teaching others how to rear queens themselves...so these are things that have been on my mind, (the term "boom and bust" is on the handouts we've been using in classes and workshops for the last few months). I'd rather discuss them than simply present them.
So would I. I have been trying to get such a conversation going for some time now. I am sorry if it got sidetracked on what seems to be a semantic issue. And, I composed a thoughtful reply on this topic last night, but the phone rang, I accidentally hit the "back button" and my text vanished.
I have noticed several times over the past few years that Dean often expresses ideas that I held very strongly myself when I was his age. I am not saying that it is an age-related thing; far from it. It's just that my concept of the human relationship with nature has taken a radical shift during the intervening years.
I think many of us find that we are in sympathy with the biblical "fall from grace" where mankind took a serious wrong turn at some point and ended up with an antagonistic relationship with nature. Certainly the conquest of the new world was one of search and destroy. The continent bears a small resemblance to what it once was: a forested wonderland sparsely populated by tribes and lacking in the cities and pestilence of the old world (there were some major civilizations in central and south America, but nothing that really resembled the cities of Europe).
The turning point for me was when genetic engineering came to the forefront. I thought that this was just about as wrong as it gets, this was a final assault on the sanctity of nature. You can probably go back through the archives and find places where I wrote about it from that perspective. But then my mind was completely changed at some point, I don't recall when. I realized that nothing we can do is outside of nature, that all that we have done has been done within the "laws" of nature, that we are a product of evolution the same as bees and flowers. The whole "fall from grace" thing is a subconscious remnant of our biblical upbringing.
I am not saying that therefore what we do is always right. But nature is amoral, has no code of ethics, cares nothing for individuals or even whole species. If they can't keep up, they slip into oblivion. There are literally millions of species on the planet, and none is favored by nature. It is a contest to find a place in the race. And this does not always mean out-competing. Often survival can be assured by cooperation, mutualism, and of course, by becoming a parasite. Living off of somebody else is almost the rule in the natural world. If you look close enough you will find interdependencies everywhere.
Anyway, the topic at hand is the breeding of bees. I suggested that nature does NOT breed bees, and so there is little to be learned by studying the natural process. Left alone to work things out, nature might produce a survivor bee, but it might not have ANY of the traits we like. In fact, the ultimate survivor bee already exists in Africa (and in the new world where it has rapidly colonized any suitable habitat). In fact, the African bee resembles the human colonists of the new world: it's aggressive, ruthless, and on the move. So, from a survival standpoint the ideal bee already exists, and she's ugly!
But judging from Dean's videos, these are not the bees you are looking for. I have hives in the yard by my house, and hotheads wouldn't last a day around here. My bees, run of the mill Italians, are perfectly content to stay in their corner of the yard. Even if I get them ticked off, which sometimes I do because I am not as considerate a beekeeper as I ought to be, they rarely venture more than a few feet from the hive to punish me. They have already made a pile of honey and so far the mite levels are low. So we have good hives here, without any particular effort.
Whether I can get them through another winter, is the question. I know one thing, African bees wouldn't make it through a NY winter. I think luck is a very important factor, and I am not one of those who claims Italians are "not suited to our region". Northern Italy, where the Italian bees originated, gets just as cold as here. I am not sure that much progress can be made breeding a wild animal. Certainly not all animals respond equally to human efforts to breed them. Over the centuries some plants and animals have been singled out as more responsive to breeding than others. It may be a characteristic of some plants and animals that they are more responsive to selective pressure than others. You certainly see an incredible variety in things like dogs, roses, fruit trees, etc.
But is this because we have focused on these -- or did we focus on the organisms that responded most to our attempts to breed them? Is the honey bee particularly responsive to selection by humans or is it essentially conservative, always trying to hold on to genetically based traits that evolved millions of years ago, proved successful in the long run, and therefore are resistant to change. It is important to realize that there are just as many cellular mechanism that resist change, that repair errors, as there are mechanisms that promote change and recombination of genetic material. Because the cardinal rule of evolution is "don't
throw the baby out with the bath water." A little change can give an organism a competitive edge but too much change can cause it to be out of sync so badly that it cannot survive at all.
Perfect examples of this exist in human bred species. We have changed many species so much that they cannot survive without us.
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Peter Loring Borst
128 Lieb Road
Spencer, NY 14883
peterloringborst.com
607 280 4253
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