Have any of you ever seen a flea resistant dog?????? Or Cat???????

What the bond method is doing is waiting for either recombination or for a mutation or two to happen.  If it is recombination the needed mutants are probably in low natural concentration and if a mutation it might only happen once in a million queens or less.  In either case it is going to take a lot of new queens before anyone gets lucky.  That does not mean it will not happen.  But, it might take a long time.  Mutations have the added problem that most mutations that are not fairly harmful to overall survival are going to be recessives based on what I know about some other species.  So, just because you get the mutation it can very easily be lost or take many generations before it is homozygous and does any good.  Yes, the chance of a good dominant does exist.  But, good dominants are more like one in a billion or some very small number.

Rarely a hetero recessive can help.  In humans for instance hetero cystic fibrosis likely gives some survival advantage to plague or perhaps some other disease.  But, that same mutation when homozygous is lethal.  It is thought that the survival advantage of hetero CF is why one in about 25 Europeans is hetero for one specific CF mutant while this same mutant is very rare in other populations not derived from Europe ancestry.  To my knowledge, such situations are pretty rare.  We could use a situation like this in bees.  You simply have to realize that half your queens would be ok, 1/4 would die and 1/4 would have no resistance.  Two good ones out of three is better than what we have today.

The bond method is basically waiting for one magic bullet to happen.  On the other hand selecting for hygiene traits is faster as we can, at least crudely, measure hygiene.  So, from a genetic standpoint selecting for hygiene would be expected to produce positive results much faster because you could accumulate several minor mutations that added together give an advantage.  Hygiene is likely mainly mutants in control regions rather than in coding sections of genes and there are lots and lots of control regions.  Lots more than the number of coding genes.  In any of these cases the objective is likely gaining enough genetics to offer tolerance and not elimination of the parasite.  I think we would all be pretty happy with bees that held varroa down to one per 100 bees or less.

I have seen honey bees in places pretty far from any domestic colonies.  Last summer I saw a lot of honey bees on top of the highest point in W Va.  That was quite a vertical distance from where any humans lived.  So, maybe given enough time ferals will supply some help.  But, I fear ferals present defense is mainly by swarming a lot and that does not help us any.  At least that is my experience with ferals.

Honey bees do not lend themselves to inbreeding programs very well so that is an added factor that slows progress.  All in all a hard problem and progress should not be expected to be fast unless someone gets real lucky.

Dick

" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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