Dear Beekeeping Friends,
 
Andy Nachbaur posted an article quoting Rodney Holloway suggesting that there
might be some Varroa resistant bees in Texas and asking for comments or
discussion.  I will venture an opinion.
 
I can't really answer for Rodney and he may want to disagree with me, but my
best guess is that his statements were more along the lines of wishful
thinking and hoping that bees resistant to Varroa would appear through the
process of natural selection.  I don't believe there is enough evidence yet to
strongly support the hypothesis that we have "arrived" at the point where those
genetic lines that are resistant to Varroa have appeared in Central Texas.
Rodney watches for feral swarms and feral colonies and tries to get feral
queens in the hopes that he will at some point find some with genetic
resistance, and then he monitors them for mites and mite damage.  I've never
heard him say that he thinks he's identified any resistant bees.
 
How many hives of bees survived the Isle of Wight disease in the United Kingdom
after the beekeeping industry was almost totally destroyed there?  It may be
possible that if we let natural selection take its course and destroy all
susceptible European Honey Bees that are not resistant to Varroa by not
treating for it at all, that there might be a few survivors (and again there
might not).  That's about an impossible task considering the economic impact.
Rodney is hoping as I and others are that some verifiably resistant genetic
material will turn up in feral bee populations that can then be used in
breeding programs to "save the beekeeping industry" in the United States.
 
Feral colonies surviving the mites could also partially be the result of the
colonies being so few and far between that the mite is less easily spread to
them--they're just isolated.  Rodney has all my "feral" queens from swarms or
colonies I've removed.  I wish him luck.  It's nice to not have to depend on
the survival of the bees in order to make a living.  Then you can afford to
experiment and lose them.  I hope somebody finds some resistant material pretty
soon (maybe the "Russian queens") but I don't think Rodney has found any yet.
It makes sense that natural selection ought to ultimately get the job done,
assuming that there is some genetic resistance out there somewhere to Varroa in
EHB.
 
Now that I've finished this post, I suspect that I probably haven't said any
thing new that hasn't been said before, except maybe that "the last time I
talked to Rodney about it,
(resistance) he didn't say he'd found any resistant
bees yet."  He hopes he will.
 
Layne Westover
College Station, Texas
30.4 deg N, 96.2 deg W, altitude 308', mean ppt 38.6", max 106 F, min 2 F