>
> But regarding natural selection: do you think selection for beneficial
> traits is enhanced or retarded by the honey bee mating system?


Absolutely enhanced!  The beauty of the combination of genetic diversity
within any population of bees, combined with their high rate of
recombination and polyandry, continually creates new combinations of
alleles.  These new combinations are then put to the test in the drones, in
which, since they are haploid, cannot mask any deleterious effects of
recessive alleles.  Thus, only successful genetic combinations are passed
on to the next generation.


> What are the factors involved and how can a breeder enhance the effect of
> selection for, say, hygienic behavior?
>

Selective breeding involves bottlenecking the population by applying an
artificial selective pressure--either breeding for or against one or more
specific traits.  For example, we may select only daughters of queens whose
colonies (or rather, some proportion of patrilines in those colonies)
exhibit hygienic behavior, in the hope that such behavior is heritable, and
will reduce the transmission of some pathogen.

Better perhaps to simply expose a large number of colonies to that
pathogen, and select for those that do not get sick, regardless of the
genes involved.

>
> Finally, is it fair to regard natural selection as ongoing with the honey
> bee, or is the bee (at least in US, Canada, etc.) entirely within the realm
> of human selection by now?
>

Pete, I know that you and I disagree on this.  But I feel that the evidence
is very strong that there are feral populations of bees in the U.S. that
are able to maintain genetic integrity apart from the managed bee
populations.  I also suspect that those feral populations may offer great
promise for allelic combinations for healthier and mite-resistant bees.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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