Dave Cushman writes; “The widespread use of transport for queens in US 
means that 
naturalisation does not get a chance to occur and stability to develop, 
but stability requires selection to achieve it and little of this is 
done at local level in US.”

Dave, I am having a hard time assimilating all this.  Genetics was not my 
best subject.  If you are saying that “naturalization” occurs when all non-
natural movement of genetic material via transport of queens ceases, and 
some form of stability is achieved when selection is allowed to take place 
under presumably open mating conditions, it raises a couple of questions 
for me.  Firstly, what form of selection are we talking about; natural or 
man made?  If natural selection is allowed to take place then it seems to 
me that we would have to let go of our attachments we might have for 
certain characteristics like gentleness, swarming propensity, honey 
production, etc.  If man made selection is applied then what’s to say we 
don’t run into the problem I think Peter was talking about where you select 
for your favorite characteristic(s) while being unaware of what’s happening 
with those characteristics which aren’t so obvious but are perhaps even 
more important to the overall viability of the population?  Secondly, what 
makes you say that the kind of selection you are talking about does not 
occur in the U.S., and in what countries is such practice common place?  

Steve Noble

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