Hello All,
I received this email from a lurker and thought I should answer on BEE-L in
case others are wondering.

Lurker asked an excellent question.
>For those of us who don't find acronyms easy to remember could you tell me
what SMR & PMIB "mean"?

SMR & PMIB represent parts of research being done at the Baton
Rouge Bee Lab by Harbo & Harris.

I was fortunate enough last January to get to talk to Dr. Harbo for about 45
minutes in Jacksonville about SMR & PMIB.

I tried to keep on topic but Dr. Harbo asked about capensis and the
conversation drifted in a different direction for about the last 15 minutes.

When Harbo & Harris started trying to breed a bee which would tolerate
varroa from survivors efforts failed. They then began to look closer at the
brood varroa infestation.

They began to examine sections of brood for varroa reproduction and found in
certain hives varroa did not reproduce in brood. They named the trait SMR
(suppressed mite reproduction). Reason still a mystery.

My partner and I bought SMR breeder queens, raised daughters and introduced
the trait in our lines. Sadly the daughter queens were  bred to a point they
were not the best of queens (which Harbo said they might be). In fact Dr.
Harbo contacted through Glenn Apiaries all the beekeepers which had bought
the instrumentally inseminated SMR breeder queens to say the queens   (and
daughters) were showing brood pattern problems.
We saw the problems Dr. harbo talked about  with all but the breeder queen
from the red line.

If you raise your own queens and want the SMR trait in your hives you can
raise daughter queens from a Glenn Apiaries  SMR breeder queen and open mate
to your bees, buy SMR production queens from a queen producer or use a SMR
drone source.

Looking further Harbo & Harris began to rate hives (when looking for bees
which will tolerate varroa) by PMIB (percentage of mites in brood).
The results of the Harbo & Harris research on PMIB & varroa have not yet
been published (to my knowledge).
Dr. Harbo has explained  the method for finding SMR & PMIB he uses to me but
I have yet to try and find both SMR & PMIB  in the bees we are looking at
for varroa tolerance.
Both SMR & PMIB are explained in greater detail at the Baton Rouge Bee Lab
web site.
Sincerely,
Bob Harrison

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