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Subject:	Re: The Ins and Outs of Diversity
From:	"[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:	Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:	Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:01:45 GMT
Content-Type:	text/plain
Parts/Attachments:	text/plain (50 lines)

Peter Borst wrote:
>> Honestly, what is the point you are trying to make? If the bees aren't 100% mite resistant, you don't want them?

Randy Oliver added:
>I'm with Pete on this one! One can't always eat filet mignon, but
settle for the next best. Any line of bees that cuts my mite
treatments in half is better than one that doesn't.

well, yes. I want to keep bees without treatments, so bees that need "less" treatments don't really help with that.

Let me preface this by saying that I do understand how food is produced in this country, and there is probably no bee that can be run the way migratory commercial bees are run and not get treated...the stresses are too great. I don't think this is the only way to produce food, provide pollination, or keep bees.

For those for whom treatments are necessary, using less treatments is better (on a cost basis alone this is true), but for those of us that don't treat at all, less treatments still contributes to contamination and interference with the microflora of the hive...from this perspective (which is my perspective), 1/2 the treatments is like 1/2 pregnant or 1/2 dead.

Now, Randy, on your website (in the HSC trial report), you state:

"Clearly, there are beekeepers successfully keeping bees on small cell without other mite control."

and

"The skeptic will say, “Well, then you are simply selecting for bees that are genetically resistant to mites, and “retrogression” has more to do with selecting for mite resistance, rather than for cell size preference. Indeed, this is the very process that happened in South Africa, and anywhere else that mite-tolerant honey bees have evolved.”

Bingo!"

If it were so simple for beekepers to breed for mite resistance, why hasn't everyone done it? Why has the USDA been working on this for so long? Why has no one (to my knowledge) followed Dr. Ericson's "recipie" for mite resistant bees and succeeded?

One reason, I believe, is impatience. The use of artificial metrics to attempt to predict survival is flawed...there are too many interacting traits that lead to mite resistance (and other disease resistance) to be able to simply select based on mite counts and have such results lead to success.

The hygenic trait is an interesting one. If you will indulge me an an analogy, I think I can demonstrate the flaw.

Let's say you are going to staff a restaurant kitchen. You decide that you want a sanitary kitchen, so you look for workers that wash their hands...but more specifically, you look for workers that wash their hands THE MOST. What you end up with is a staff full of individuals with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) who wash their hands ALL THE TIME. The result is a less productive workforce (because they are always washing their hands), and they end up with fungal skin infections because the constant washing wipes out the naturally occuring bacterial cultures on their skin, which leaves them wide open for a fungal infection. This is not the result you were after, even though on the surface the selection critera seemed to make sense.

The only way to select for survival is to allow a colony to survive or perish...and this has to be over the long term (at least as long as the beekeeper thinks their hives should survive). a 6 month study, or even a 2 year study simply isn't enough.