a couple of Pete B snips followed by > my comments... 
You keep going on about personal stuff. I am not trying to paint you or anyone else a different color than they are. Most of my postings are pulled from other people's writing, and I encourage everyone to come to their own conclusions. 

If you read what I write and come to a different conclusion than someone else, it doesn't matter to me. I am not trying to persuade anyone, not having any sort of an agenda other than to *look more closely* at certain topics, such as bee breeding. 

>That is a large IF Peter.  Which is to say some folks read a lot meaning (which basically ain't there) into stuff that someone else writes... and of course (as you suggest above) an inability to differentiate between what you write and what other's (with credentials) have said about he subject.  I am not certain if this tendency is a matter of an over active imagination or a fall back strategy to shoot the messenger?  

To me the real question is not who is swindling whom, who is getting a bad rap, etc. The real question is why have so few advances been made in bee breeding compared to other livestock and agriculture, despite many decades of promises. 

> Of course the bee business could make great strides (as has milk producers} by using more II techniques (which in the milk business is called AI). The unintended long term consequences of this strategy is (if we take the model from milk producers) this will give very larger producers a large competitive advantage over small producers. A lot of pro forma data would have to be collected to make this work.... which was an essential component of AI work in milk cattle.  

>Might I suggest there is (has been for some time) a disconnect between large queen operations and honey producers (but perhaps more connection to the pollination business). This disconnect is similar to the disconnect between manufacturing and research here in the US > a good reference for this is the May/June 2018 issue of The American Interest which I recently tagged onto due to it reference to certain short coming in how economist traditionally looked at this question.
>Lastly I would suggest that the kind of bee people want for pollination purpose is not the same for honey collection. My own experience in doing consulting work with commercial bees (used for both honey and pollination) did suggest to me that this stock (obtained from large well known queen rearing operation) was not very robust.  However at this time I am not certain if this tendency to die at any bump in the road was about genetics or contamination within the hives themselves. Of course it could be both but if my own bees died at the rate those hives died (sample size about 480 hives) I would certainly no longer be in the bee business.

Gene in California enjoying the fine weather...   

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html