Lloyd said:
  She reminded me that Australia did not (does not?) have chalkbrood, so the
bees may have been especially susceptible.

I never heard Australia did not have chalkbrood before.

Even the queen breeder we dealt with has seen chalkbrood problems with stock
sent in the past into Canada. Allen Dick documents the problem on his web
site.

He since has changed queen lines and told us chalkbrood is almost non
existant now.

Which concurs with my going though a 150 hives last week and only finding
three hives with a few cells of chalkbrood. I imagine if we looked through a
150 of my production hives we would find at least three with a few chalkbood
mummies!

We were making splits and finding queens in each hive so our examination was
a complete examination.

The Missouri State inspector is inspecting those same hives this week so
will report what he finds.

Lloyd asks:
But why would anyone today want Australian breeding stock?

We want the alleles in our breeding program as the U.S. gene pool in my
opinion has problems.

 A perfect example you wrote about the beekeeper inbreeding the chalkbrood
queens in Canada and making the problem worse. The proper method (in my
opinion) would have been to remove all queens which headed hives with
chalkbrood and requeen with a line known not to be susceptable!


Another point for the Australian import  is being able to import a Buckfast
line from England and a top notch line from Italy with the Australian
package queens.

With instrumental insemination we can pull ,preserve and later use those
genes.

What ever cross we choose to play with we should be able to produce hybrid
vigor if nothing else.

Bob

Ps. Back to feeding bees. I Buried a four wheel drive one ton (with 250
gallons of syrup in a tote) to the axles a couple hours and had to walk a
mile to get a farmer to pull me out. (no cell phone service).
 He brought his Chevy half ton four wheel drive to try first but it  took
his big Oliver tractor to get the job done. Cost me two hours time and a
gallon of honey but cheaper than a wrecker call!

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