Hi All,

Somebody wrote me off list and had this to write;

> Actually, Erickson of the USDA did work on this more than ten years
> ago ("On The Size of Cells" February, 1990 - Bee Culture). I wrote to
> him and asked him why it was dropped. He said the idea had merit, but
> that breeding for resistance had more promise, and they would focus
> on that. Pretty simple explanation, really.

This is what I originaly wrote;
Could the comic at this URL explain why researchers have difficulty deciding
whether to research cell size applied for honey bees.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/occams_razor.html

My reply;
If it had merit it should have been looked at more closely. Breeding for
resistance just may be more affective if in combination with cell size. Of
course lets not forget that nutrition also plays a big part in the health of
the bee and how well they can organize to fight off some problems.  By the
way breeding is not all that simple, lots of beekeepers buy queens from
suppliers for many reason and some of those reasons may be that they do not
want to bother with queen rearing, amongst other reason of course. If
breeding queens were easy everybody would be doing it. If a
researcher said it has merit, then I say great, It should be given a good go
for the honey.

Keith Malone
Chugiak, Alaska USA
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http://takeoff.to/alaskahoney

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