Dr. Lewis Bartlett was recently on Two Bees in a Podcast with Dr. Jamie Ellis and Amy Vu to present his take on Darwinian Beekeeping<https://open.spotify.com/episode/6a8jAA6E4i552EUBxU3dr1> in connection with a soon to be published paper.

The talk is well worth the investment IMHO and can likely be summarized by two big-picture ideas (quoting Dr. Bartlett):

‘I think the hallmark of this Darwinian bee breeding approach is to have in your mind a bee you're trying to get towards that you don't currently have. And so you're selecting and adapting and breeding towards that goal. So I'd say it's kind of outcome-driven bee breeding.’

‘That way, you're able to tier, essentially, your priorities, where maybe the first thing you're measuring is honey - production, and then after that is low mite number, and so then you're only allowing breeding from high honey, low mite bees. And I think that's really the lesson that Tom has taught us all quite intentionally in his discussion about this. You have to measure the things you want about your bees.’

He also spends a good bit of time talking about how selecting for resistance (as opposed to tolerance) is a key distinction between ‘Darwinian Beekeeping’ and other survival-based selection paradigms.


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