There are different aspects of this:  the hobby beekeeper, the small local
commercial honey producer and the commercial pollinator.

My guess is one queen will not rule them all. A tolerant queen will probably
fare well in the first two groups but not in the third because of the number
of colonies involved and the proximity of different genetics in the area. If
you have a massive collapse in an adjoining operation, I doubt if the
tolerant colonies could handle the massive Varroa load that would be picked
up by robbing, the classic sequence that leads to rapid collapse of strong
colonies.

The hobby beekeeper would probably fare the best and look like they have
tolerance, since, like my area, the ones who did not treat or manage for
Varroa are long gone and those who do show up and try to be "organic", lose
their bees fairly quickly, as was the case with my closest beekeeping
neighbor.

So if I have even mildly Varroa tolerant (I know of no resistant bee) bees,
I will get by fairly nicely if there is no major Varroa sink in the area.
Even so, there are enough new beekeepers popping up that I do detect Varroa
and treat with OA. I lost my bees last year when I ran my small cell test,
but lost zero this year since I treated with OA. I have a new non-treater in
my area who lost all their bees, so it was only prudent for me to treat.

Even the small localized commercial beekeeper is better off than the
pollinators, and I would put more stock in their bees actually being Varroa
tolerant than hobby beekeepers.

Even with that, in too many instances, I have heard from people that they
are organic, natural, or never treat with chemicals only to find that they
in fact do add a little of this or that but they are not "store bought
pesticides", therefore they do not treat.

The magic bee may be out there and some strains have shown promise, but I
will wait until I see commercial pollinators with no treatments to know we
have really rounded the corner.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned 
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html