>It is very short step from idealist to ideologue.

The authors of the report are ideologues? Marina D Meixner(1*), Ralph Büchler, etc.

This doesn't really deserve a comment, but I would politely ask: did you really think I was referring to that paper in my reply? Was I that unclear? I was responding to Roger's statement:

> I do not understand how it is possible to make a dogmatic statement that “Locally adapted bees are best” when it cannot even be defined.

It seems very clear to me that given unsupported assumptions, one can only proceed further into the realm of unfounded speculation. That's all I meant. I have immense respect for the work and the researchers. They state:

Although knowledge about honey bee geographic and genetic diversity has increased tremendously in recent decades , the adaptation of honey bees to their local environment has not been well studied. Until now, no systematic comparisons of different strains of bees under standardised conditions in a range of environments have taken place.  And what do we mean by "performance" anyway, and how do we measure it?

Although in general no significant differences in disease incidence between local and non-local colonies were observed, a case study in one site in Greece indicated that the level of pathogens in colonies of non-local origin was generally higher, which may be the result of poor adaptation to the local environment. 

Uzunov et al. describe the behavioural differences among the colonies. They found that overall variability among locations was higher than the variability among genotypes. 

* * *

My take is that we are just beginning to systematically study local adaptation, that it is not clear what it really means, how it would be measured, and also, that variation between individual colonies is much wider than variation between particular strains, which could swamp any subtle differences. Finally, if the differences are subtle, they may have little or no real importance.

PLB

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