Keith said:
 there are in fact feral honey bees surviving without any beekeeper help.

I have worked with many hives of so-called ferals removed from buildings
etc. I never got any useful genetics from ferals. All I found survived by me
adding frames of honey each fall. The story of the  one is in the archives.
Pitiful bees but alive.

Efforts at breeding a varroa tolerant bee at the Baton Rouge Bee lab with
ferals failed. I do know of three areas in the world which has documented
ferals. These bees obviously carry some of the traits deemed neccessary to
survival. The big problem with ferals in the three areas I know of is all
other bees in the area have died from varroa so the gene pool  is too small.
I raised daughters from ferals and then applied varroa pressure and they all
died.

Feral genetics pale in my opinion compared to the Russian bee genetics of a
hundred years of natural selection but to each his own!

A friend  has been trying to get genetics from Tom Websters feral hives but
we would subject those bees to varroa pressure testing before ever using the
genetics.

Bob

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