> When Dr. Shiminuki selected queens in Russia one the reasons was bees which would tolerate a high varroa load without PMS showing up.

? Shimanuki in Russia? That's news to me. 

This is what I thought happened:

A preliminary fact-finding trip was
made in autumn 1994 by two of us from
USDA-ARS (Rinderer and Delatte),
joined by Dr. Kuznetsov in Primorsky.
The trip was partially supported by the
office of International Cooperation and
Development of the USDA Foreign
Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS, lCD). 

Because a chief goal of the trip was
to assess possible resistance to varroa, a
wide variety of colonies was sampled
for mites by burning fluvalinate smoke
strips in the hive and measuring the
resulting "mite fall" within the ensuing
half hour. The bees were not immune to
varroa; mites were present in all
colonies tested. Almost all the queens were
chosen from colonies showing low varroa
populations based on mite fall following
treatment with fluvalinate smoke strips.

With the Tilia flow
soon to begin, we saw one potential
negative trait of the bees - a very
strong swarming tendency. Almost all
colonies we saw had swarm cells, with
as many as 84 cells seen in a colony.
Most of the colonies were far less populous
than we would have expected for
the degree of swarm preparation we
saw.

A USDA-ARS Project to
Evaluate Resistance to
Varroa jacobsoni by Honey
Bees of Far-Eastern Russia
by ROBERT G. DANKA, THOMAS E. RINDERER,
VICTOR N. KUZNETSOV and GARY T. DELATTE

Reprinted from Volume 135, No. 11,
November, 1995 American Bee Journal

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