Hi all

I'm losing track of who said what but I think Blane first said:-

> > Lets get on to the real work as Barry points out of selecting bees that
are
> > resistant to varroa so we all get on with beekeeping instead of varroa
> > population management.

I think that part of beekeeping, for the rest of it's existance, will be
maintaining a balance between the honey bee and the varroa mite. Varroa will
never be eradicated but we should find an equilibrium whereby varroa and the
bees coexist without damaging each other and without chemical intervention.

It is also the mite's best long term survival strategy.

Barry is concerned that breeders may "engineer" a breed of bee to tolerate
varroa
 I sympathise with his views... It is not a recipe where we take a bit of
that and add some of this, then sprinkle something else in. (that
"synthesis" may indeed work but it is only an extension of chemical
treatment and would be short term).

The (to my simple mind) way to achieve a long term solution, is to get the
bees to do it for themselves, with the breeders providing the starting point
strains so that the "right" or "useful" genes are fed into the melting pot.
The melting pot needs to be big to get sufficient diffusion of genes for
selection to take place.

There is a school of thought that says withdraw all treatments, allow the
bees to die that cannot survive and re-build from the survivors. The Lusbys
are working this way and they are now pulling out of the downward spiral and
reversing the trend.

They use a particular strain of bee that seems unique to their geographic
region. I have looked at the bee population of the UK, which is dramatically
hybridised, and I think there would be so few survivors, if we adopted that
strategy, that it would take about a century to re-build UK beekeeping back
to it's current level. That is why I say that breeders have got to produce
many strains that all "look promising" so that the selection process can go
on in parallel with a drug assisted honey industry that relies less on drugs
year by year as more of the selected strains become "operational" from the
"melting pot".

Some might criticise this by saying "if you withdraw all treatments" you
will end up with the largest melting pot that is possible. However for a
"melting pot" to work all the survivor strains need to be in breeding
contact. In the UK you would have minor groupings in different and disparate
locations and micro climates, that would never be close enough to to do the
intimate mixing that would be required.

> > The number of feral
> > colonies in Europe and in North America far exceeds the number of kept
> > colonies even now after varroa.

This is incorrect for my area of the UK, I have not seen a feral colony for
about 5 years and I have been deliberately looking.

Regards From:- Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping and Bee Breeding, http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman
IBList Archives, http://website.lineone.net/~d.cushman