> So the hundred years of breeding for resistance have some new things to look at and choose from.

As a matter of fact, the earliest attempts to develop mite resistant bees relied heavily on the prior understanding of disease resistance, which was seen to be behavioral. Hygienic behavior, the rapid and thorough cleaning out of dead brood, is linked to AFB resistance. So, researchers try to find hygienic bees that detect and remove mites and/or damaged pupae. This are behavioral mechanisms, either innate or learned, not immunological traits. The fact is, 100 years of work has shown how hard it is to get and keep a strain of bees with a particular trait that is wanted. Also, traits are linked so that feral bees might be mite resistant but at the same time never form large colonies and/or be much more prone to swarm. In fact, those could be the behaviors that prevent them from being overrun by mites.

PLB

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