Has anyone done any studies to provide estimates?  The recent news article about ferals in Arizona claimed millions of feral colonies which strikes me as simply nonsense.  In my local area when the nearest bee keeper was 1.5 miles from me and I had no bees it was very hard to find a single honey bee around my place.  When I go to other areas around here where I know there are no domestics for a couple of miles I see nearly zero honey bees on excellent nectar sources.  So, in spite of all our forests I think we have very few bee trees.  As a guess I would say under one per square mile.  I have talked to guys who make their living cutting trees and they tell me it is very rare to find a honey bee colony in a tree and much of what they are cutting is old trees, particularly maples and beeches which are 100% hollow.

Do we have say ten or twenty million feral colonies country wide?  If so that could be a significant reason why trying to breed for any trait in domestics is hard as the wild bees would dilute out any improvement fairly fast for anyone who was only keeping a half dozen hives.  The back yard bee keepers stock would revert to a lot of wild genes fairly fast unless the person requeened regularly with stock from a big breeder with the short queen life so often seen today.

On the flip side if there are few feral colonies, say one every few square miles, those ferals might survive mites pretty well if the founders were clean as they would have few sources of infection.  Could low population density be the key to feral survival and explain why ferals often survive poorly when brought into captivity?

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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