>The USDA already spent millions importing bees from Russia, and from the
former Yugoslavia before that. The Russians are probably the best bet at
this point

I wondered why Russian semen was not brought back with the first trip made
by Shiminuki but bringing in the queens brought in the complete genetics to
work with and proved the best move. The reason being that once you move away
from the Russian as imported  and move into hybrids the varroa tolerance
seems to drop.(my own experience).

I brought back 26 II pure Russian breeder queens from Dann Purvis to
evaluate years ago. I found the hives headed by the pure Russian could
handle varroa & tracheal mites with out problems but once I open mated and
was dealing with a Russian hybrid the scenario changed and the bees became
less varroa tolerant.
When a Russian hybrid queen was grafted from and her daughters open mated
then those bees became less varroa tolerant. So my question is:

What happens when there are no pure Russian/Russian to use to get back to
the start again?

My objection to the Russian has been with their other traits which would be
fine for a hobby beekeeper. The Russian import was as Martha Stuart would
say: "A good thing" I guess if the original lines are lost then another
Russian import could be done.

Dann Purvis asked for the Baton Rouge Bee lab to send the reject program
queens to Dann so he could keep those lines pure and still around through
II. His offer was rejected and those queens got the hive tool. Both Dann and
I felt some queens worth saving got the hive tool as mite counts alone do
not tell the whole story.

bob


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