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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
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Wed, 9 Jul 2008 14:30:09 GMT
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-- "Peter L. Borst" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>The question should be: Why, after working on this for
almost twenty years, are we not farther along? 

one clue might be (from you original post on this):

"the African bees resurged due to natural selection of mite resistant bees."

to me, natural selection does not imply a breeding program, it implies an unmanaged population, with the susceptible being culled via natural selection.  i don't have the article you cited, so i can only comment on the excerpts you have posted.

we do have some interesting examples to study in this country:

1.  dee lusby, who of course, both regressed her bees in size, and let nature take it's course.  lots of losses upfront (1000 to less than 100 colonies at one point), but has bounced back without treatments.  we went through about 600 hives with her.  i saw one mite, and then, in a photograph of the same hive after the fact, i saw one more on a bee.  some of dees bees are quite isolated...these particular ones are not.

2.  michael bush largely works with bees of feral origin.  his claims are that even the commercial stock he has put on small cell has shown good enough mite resistance to not have to treat...and his official inspection reports are on his website, showing virtually no mites.  he uses no treatments.

...our operation isn't old enough to draw any conclusions from, but i'm happy to go through it first hand with anyone if they are interested (email me offlist)....especially if they are interested in repeated visits to track things over time.


>"SMR -- This Honey of a Trait Protects Bees From Deadly Mites" was
published in the May 2004 issue of Agricultural Research magazine.

...the whole article can be found here:
http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/may04/bees0504.htm

what seems to be missing, is a comparison of how these bees do completely without treatments, vs the examples i cited above.  michael's bees are not isolated, and some of dee's are not.  how are they surviving without mites?  how does michael bush either achieve near zero (or zero) mite counts?
http://www.bushfarms.com/beescerts.htm

it seems to me that we have breeding programs that are designed to produce bees that don't need to be treated for mites...yet they have not demonstrated having achieved this, have they?

then, we have people, using a combination of sc and simple natural selection who have demonstrated populations of bees that do not require mite treatment.

the example i gave of apples in this country (which is largely from "botany of desire" by michael pollan) is, i think, a good one.  these apples are not the result of a breeding program, but a result of planting _lots_ of seeds, and selecting from the best results.  yes, this is more complicated in honeybees (as mendel discovered), as the multiple drone matings make things...interesting :)

deknow

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