Sunday January 14th, 2001

Greetings from the AFB Convention in San Diego.  The meeting is now in its
3rd official day -- the 4th, if we count the early-bird trip to Buddy
Ashurst's American Honey operation in El Centro last Thursday.

The convention is well-attended and quite a few BEE-L people are here.  The
schedule is full and often sessions running simultaneously have equal
appeal.  It's impossible to take in everything.  List members may be
interested to hear that Aaron put on an excellent show of bee-related web
sites and, of course, featured BEE-L in his one hour laptop-based talk.

Although it is hard to pick out only one or two things among the many
excellent talks, I'll mention the ones that struck me, and that come to mind
as I write this:

* John Harbo's talk about Suppressing Mite Reproduction (SMR) bees. He has
found bees on which varroa females simply do not reproduce successfully, and
has simple methods of measuring this characteristic.  He reports that the
characteristic is not uncommon in normal North American and European bees,
but is normally not expressed strongly in any particular colony due to the
mix of families within each hive.  He has bred a line of bees which exhibit
it strongly and has it ready for distribution to breeders.

* Gloria de Grandi-(something)'s talk about the transmission on the paternal
and maternal lines of characteristics in mixes AHB/EHB situations and
population changes, along with previously unsuspected behaviours in AHB
populations, such as routine development of intercastes, coexistence of
queens and laying workers, development of viable queens from worker eggs,
invasion of other hives by queenless groups of AHB workers and intercastes,
etc.

* George Hansen's talk about using bar-coding and data bases in bee
management.

* Jerry Bromenshenk's talk about learning in bees and mating queens in
tents.

Of course there are many, many others who gave great talks on marketing,
political and scientific topics and who are making huge contributions to the
industry.  It is a thrill to rub shoulders with so many others of common
interest and know that people are working on solutions and sharing what they
know.    ...And it is impressive to think that at this same time there are
just as many beekeepers, scientists and extension people having a similar
meeting  of the AHPA in Texas.

I'm sure we'll be writing more in the near future.

allen