> Allen, the overwhelming majority of queens produced in the continental 
> U.S. come from colonies kept alive by the use of synthetic miticides, 
> fumagillin, and antibiotic (mostly Tylosin these days), so I can't imagine 
> how you can support that statement!  You are right that there are a few 
> produced without such treatments, but they constitute only a tiny fraction 
> of queens sold.

Actually, Randy, that is not what I said, so we are off to a bad start 
already, but I'll deal with this and see how this works out.  This myth is a 
very damaging one and to hear well-educated people repeating it worries me, 
so I will spell my objections to it more carefully and in greater detail.

IMO, the  colonies which are used to raise the queens do not matter and the 
use of drugs and chemicals in those hives is not the issue, but is something 
that distracts people from the fact that the better queen suppliers are 
sourcing breeding stock which was developed not to be reliant on treatment, 
often in hives which were untreated for long periods of time.

I think that it is well known that most queen producers have special breeder 
queens which provide the eggs and larvae, then separate colonies for raising 
the queens and sometimes drones.  The queen-raising colonies may have 
undesirable characteristics from the buyer's perspective,  but it is not 
those genes which should be coming out the other end.

We can discuss the drones in the mating yards and that may be an issue in 
some cases, but not necessarily.  It is difficult and often logically fatal 
to generalize.  Of course the drones contribute to the genetics in different 
ways than the queens so, ideally the drones should come from the breeding 
stock too.  In many case they do, in others, they don't.  IMO, that is an 
important thing to control.

In short and to summarize, the breeder queens are or should be the major 
contributor to the genetics of the queens produced and sold, not the cell 
building colonies.

> Actually, there is a fair amount of data word wide that does not support 
> your contention.  If most areas, unmanaged colonies have rebounded about 
> 6-8 years after varroa introduction.  Dr Jose Villa's records from 
> Louisiana are a great example, in which he tracked the number of swarms 
> captured in bait hives over a long term as varroa moved in, decimated the 
> population, and then the population recovered.

Are the resulting bees commercially useful?

How narrow are the genetics of the survivors? Can they handle a new 
onslaught from something else coming next or has their fitness been 
sacrificed.

What would have happened in the meantime to people and crops depending on 
bees for livelihood and income in large areas if that were the only route 
chosen?

How much did the constant replenishment of the wild colonies from escaped 
swarms from managed hives help maintain the critical mass of colonies and 
genetics that was necessary for the wild colonies to pull through.

South Africa, BTW, is a special case.  The environment is especially 
hospitable to honey bees, and the predominant type there is of a type that 
has been of questionable utility to North American style beekeeping.

>> Think Santa Cruz.  That little experiment should have smartened people 
>> up, but somehow it did not and we still hear this kind of talk repeated 
>> even by smart people who should be able to envision exactly what would 
>> have happened if we had not intervened.

> Thanks for excluding me from that group!  Santa Cruz Island is the 
> exception, likely due to a small, inbred population.  Ditto for my 
> operation, in which I lost all but 6 colonies out of 250 when varroa first 
> hit me.  I for one don't need to envision--I lived it!

If Santa Cruz is an exception and so is your outfit, and if, and I repeat 
if, the Louisiana situation is an exception, what is the probability of 
success in any given such challenge, and how predictable is it in advance? 
How much are people willing to gamble?  Seems honey bees have gone extinct 
in the Americas before.

> Allen, it helps to understand the "domino effect" when varroa first 
> decimates a population.  The first wave will eliminate most colonies until 
> the host is widely dispersed, at which point the death of colonies no 
> longer favors the parasite.  Only then can resistant stock rebound.

Don't underestimate what I do understand, and I stand by my original post 
which was very carefully worded, but, as is so often the case, misunderstood 
or partially understood.

> Now let me be clear that I have no illusion that we could have let nature 
> fight it out in our yards, since we would mostly have gone out of 
> business.  (Although I've spoken to quite a few beeks who have indeed gone 
> cold turkey, and after a few tough years, have their numbers back up).

There was a long spell that is well documented where 100% losses were the 
norm in such attempts.  Additionally, not all regions are sufficiently 
hospitable to honey bees for adaptation and survival to be probable.

> But the data from all over the world support Dr Mike Allsopp's contention 
> that we inadvertently prolong the development of natural host/parasite 
> relationships by our continual promotion of stocks requiring chemical 
> intervention to survive.

If mere survival and development of the host/parasite tolerance is the only 
goal, then, *perhaps* this is true.   It is speculation, however IMO, and we 
have no clear idea what the costs would have been and how useful the 
resulting strains would be or what  regions could accommodate such a toss of 
the dice.

IMO, focusing on the probability of survival somewhere, some time, of 
something is a very narrow and simplistic view which disregards the context, 
and the range of probable eventual outcomes.

If we were talking simply the wild creatures in a very hospitable 
environment here as they predominantly are in South Africa, we would not 
care.

However we are talking at the same time of specialized varieties and 
applications and a large investment to date in maintaining genetic diversity 
and desirable traits.   We do not wish to have all the various niches 
dominated by only the most surviving bee.  We know that in much of America, 
that is the AHB, and most consider it unsuitable.

>> Of course they then immediately get criticized for not using locally 
>> adapted stock

> It helps if folk don't take extreme positions.  There is no need to 
> continually reinvent the wheel.  Bringing in genetics (or epigenetics) for 
> mite resistance can initially accelerate the development of a 
> locally-adapted stock.

This is a very complex topic and there are several camps with opposing 
interests.

I'll leave that for another post sometime.
 

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