a couple of Paul Hosticka snips followed by > my comments

If one is scientifically looking for a line of bees that are resistant to varroa mites then they can not interfere with the bees efforts to control the mites. 

> you are imho walking a fine line between natural selection and beekeeper selection. 

The semantic and social arguments are not what I'm talking about. I do not understand the beeks that are clearly going to considerable effort to control their mite populations yet refuse to call such efforts treatments. Beeks that do nothing and think that mite resistance will spontaneously emerge are in my mind delusional. A scientist trying to find a mite reducing trait can't interfere with the bees efforts and thus must not treat for mites. All I'm asking for is accurate and descriptive definitions that we can agree on so we know what each other is saying. Choose your poison, but keep your eye on the ball. Nuff said.

>we have no hard and fast definition of the word non-treatment. Personally I do not sell my hives using the term although I do spend a lot of time explaining to customers what i do and do not do.

>some years back in trying to talk some sense into some well meaning (I think?) and well known bee keeping 'gurus' I told them that unless they literally had thousands of hives to loose their potential to rear a treatment free bee was about zero. Heck they seem to have trouble just keeping bees alive much less the daunting task of rearing a bee resistant to varroa.  Do some goals need to be accomplished before more difficult task are even attempted?  Even I (and I run about 200 hives) do not have enough to create a dent in this problem. At that time I suspect the genetic solution was much like the problem 70 years ago with afb whereby only a very small percentage showed resistance and going from near 0% to some number that was economically viable takes a long time and a lot of hives have to die in the process. I see that Randy Oliver (in a prior post) gives a good 'starting' number (2% I think?).  I suspect it is a long hard slog from 2% to some meaningful number?

Gene in Central Texas where the weather is just as weird as the natives....   

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