>  I cannot see that bees could have such a mechanism as their lives are
> too short.  So what mechanism do you imagine they could be bred for that
> would allow them to resist viruses?

I think you are taking a narrow view here. The bee is not the unit, but the colony. Individual colonies can develop resistance strategies over time. Beyond that, if they are genetically based the strategies will spread throughout the population. We have seen this in colonies that resist AFB and populations of honey bees that develop resistance to varroa. 

A learned behavior could provide a survival advantage over time, but I would be hard pressed to prove that particular learned behaviors can become dominant in bee populations, the way that they do in populations of animals. Be that as it may, it is not hard to imagine how a successful learned behavior could be passed from generation to generation via swarming and that could become the predominant strain in a given locale.


P 
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