Hi Randy

 > ever since 20 year's of my work was wiped out when varroa first
 > decimated my operation.

I sympathise, I had a disaster myself, not to do with varroa or any 
disease, but due to lack of a selection pressure that had been 
commonplace...

In UK we have a crop known as Oilseed Rape, although you have a crop 
called Canola it is not exactly the same in the two countries. When I 
first started beekeeping OSR was a new thing and after about three weeks 
of foraging on the crop a build up of toxins occurred that made the bees 
a bit touchy, it did not matter much as the crop only flowered for about 
four weeks so it was easy to leave the bees alone for the fourth week.

Like all things this situation changed and multiple sowings of different 
varieties brought about an overlap of flowering, which extended the 
period that the bees were nasty, but this problem went away very quickly 
when newer varieties that were lower in toxins became available and 
widely planted as the could be consumed by humans.

A few years ago we had a foot and mouth epidemic in UK and farming 
practices became disrupted. Some farmers planted the older varieties of 
Rape for use as bio diesel (I suspect the seed was cheaper).

I had two lines of AMM bees that I was very proud of after twenty one 
years of development, one of these was docile in the extreme, you could 
take the lid off at any time without smoke and the bees would not even 
fly they just carried on as if nothing happened, but as soon as these 
gentle bees started foraging the bio diesel rape they became monsters.

Because these bees had not been exposed to that crop before, there had 
been no de-selection going on for this bad behaviour during the 
development process.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)

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