Hello Jeff &All,

Thanks for the post!

I remember the bee lab asking 
for survivor queens from the
Bond method.
I think I sent a few.

I went back and looked at my notes from ABF conventions 
20 years ago.

Maybe it was Shims job to explain the program.

My notes mention Tom but was a couple years after Shim
when I sat in a presentation by Tom.

The idea of A Russian import was not popular as the Yugo
import was basically a failure

I remember a private  discussion with Dr. Harbo after one of his first SMR 
presentations and Dr. Harbo explained the queens we sent
was not the solution but he was doing as you said to try and find 
why certain hives had Smr.

My partner and I ordered ii Smr breeder queens from
Tom Glenn. We started a couple hundred hives from those 
Queens. Low mite loads but the
 f3 were not prolific
and spotty brood patterns

too inbred was the problem we thought at the time.

Produced no honey and both SMR breeder queens became dron3 layers by winter.

Big waste of time and money.

The best ii breeder queen we ever received from Tom Glenn 
was a Marla Spivak Minnesota hygienic breeder queen.

we ordered two and one arrived dead in cage so we filed a claim on the dead queen and went with  the alive queen.

I believe we raised over a thousand daughters from her
before she disappeared  We hauled her to Texas two years in a row.

Made a hygienic believer of us at Bell Hill Honey.


I wrote a BC article years ago on several years of testing Russian
bees.

At one time I had over 20 Instrumentally inseminated
pure Russian queens.

I reported honestly in the article the results of my testing.

The best feature of the Russian bee was being able to tolerate
a high varroa load without  PMS.

I had poor luck with hybrid russian bees and trying 
to keep my russian bees in yards with my italians.

Thanks again for your post Jeff!

Thanks for your years of research!

Sincerely,
Robert "Bob" Harris on
MidWes t bee keeper
Started in beekeeping over 50 years ago as a project
for FFA in DeLand ,Florida

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