Pete, You quoted Cobey, S., Walter S. Sheppard, and David R. Tarpy as saying the following with my comments in brackets:

" Most economically valued livestock species are not native to the U.S. and are derived from selected strains as a result of well-designed, scientific stock improvement programs."  [I agree 100% and would add that in more and more cases the breeding program is heavily guided by DNA data.  In some cases that DNA data is so good today it can come quite close to predicting the animals performance,.]

"These programs are dependent upon long-range breeding programs, as well as the routine and systematic importation and evaluation of additional resources (mostly germplasm) from within the original ranges of the species under consideration." [I have no idea what else there is besides a long-range breeding program.  This is all man has had available to improve stock for the  last few thousand years.  Adding new resources, often called fresh blood, is generally practiced by breeders who have few skills and whose stock is not going to improve with the rare exception of doing a species cross to introduce genes that simply do not exist in the species being propagated.  Unless Cobey, Sheppard and Tarpy can provide lots of good examples of such new blood being helpful I feel they do not know what they are talking about.  I know of plenty of counter examples where such new blood has set stock back by many generations or even permanently.]

"The beekeeping industry does not have access to stocks of origin or standardized evaluation and stock improvement programs."  [If anything based on many examples in many other species this is good fortune to the bee keeper as he does not have fresh blood to cross into his stock in general.  The last major such effort gave us Africanized bees.  That was sure a wonderful experiment was it not?]


" Consequently, the beekeeping industry does not share the increased productivity that result from such programs, as have served the poultry, dairy, and swine industries."  [This totally ignores the strides that have been made in temper, honey production, lack of swarming and any number of other desirable traits generally found in commercial queens and thus is misleading if not an outright falsehood.  Just to take one example of what a mild selective breeding program can achieve consider the U or Wisc experiments as reported in "ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture, Copyright 1972, page 96.  More than doubling the per hive honey production in five years does not sound shabby to me.  This experiment did not use fancy outside genetics, artificial queen insemination or anything to do with DNA measurements, yet accomplished quite significant yield improvements  with only a small number of hives.  In fact, the lesson in this data is the commercial honey producer should either raise his own queens so he could select genetics that will work in his local area or he should contract with a commercial queen producer to raise cells from his best queens and mate those cells with his own drones.]

Dick

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