Hi Peter

> All I am saying is if ferals are surviving
> on their own, don't look to the genetic
> makeup of the bees, because the fact is
> they are usually not really isolated and
> therefore not different from other bees
> in hives in the same general area.

Isolation can be subtle.  Bees in trees may prefer to colonise holes in trees and spaces in buildings rather than hives on the ground.  They may be partial to local mating rather than at distant drone congregation sites.  They might tend to supercede late in the season, or swarm and mate at a slightly different time of year.  Any behavioral isolation could be topped up by selection.

Varroa may not benefit from such complex behaviour, so how isolated are they from the mites on these commercial stocks?

I do my beekeeping in a land where Russians, VSH, and commercial queen breeders are not part of the system and don't look like becoming so soon.  Also, we hosted real native honeybees, at least until beekeeping became organised enough to import strains from all round the world.  I hadn't really paid a lot of attention until recently to the possibility that we still have native types, naturally selected for today's problems, persisting here and there despite being exposed to all that exotic genetic resource in our apiaries.  Not necessarily the answer to beekeeping in the UK, but it might be part of the way ahead and that intrigues me.

all the best

Gavin 

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