I've been breeding queens for 20+ years.  In my experience, you can breed
bees that can do nearly anything.  Color, temperament, honey gathering,
hygienic behavior, tracheal mite resistance were relatively easy.  Varroa
resistance has been really tough, since the availability of resistance genes
was initially very low in the U.S. bee population, and due to the wholesale
use of chemicals that perpetuates susceptible bees and virulent mites.

I've selected from survivors for years, and resistance gets better each
year.  I'm using the Bond method to some extent, but it is tough when you
make your living taking strong colonies to almonds in February.  Therefore,
we can't count on California breeders to practice much survivability trials.

SMR is the most promising trait I've found, but is very tough to get into a
good bee.  Virtually all my SMR crosses have performed poorly.  However,
last year I got a Minn Hygienic x SMR II queen from Glenn.  This cross was
golden!  A great bee, and virtually no mites one year later with absolutely
no treatments in a survivor yard with collapsing colonies all around. You
can see them tearing out any infested worker cell.  My hat's off to Marla
Spivak and John Harbo!

Unfortunately, her daughters aren't performing as well.  IMO, it seems that
we will likely need to go back to a program like the Starline queen.  The
families of supersisters in the MH xSMR cross compliment each other
perfectly.  I'm not sure that it will be easy to have one line of purebred
bee that can handle the mites.  Perhaps it would be better to maintain
several inbred lines (as for Starline) and determine the best "hybrid."

I suggest we find funding for Sue Cobey to maintain a genetic repository of
resistant and productive queen lines in California.  Lines for short
development time, grooming behavior, superhygienic (SMR), coccoon trapping,
etc.   Then we could work on determining the best combinations by trial and
error, or let Nature work the odds in survival yards.

Randy Oliver
California

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