Greetings ,
         I hope everyone read carefully what James C. Bach <[log in to unmask]>
wrote. He covered a lot of ground, but covered it well.

         He wrote:
>5.  According to work done by Dr. Sheppard when he was at USDA (now at
>Washington State University) the genetics of commercial and feral colonies
>in the south were not statistically different, nor the commercial and feral
>colonies in California.  But there was a slight difference between
>California bees and southern bees.
>6.  This leads me to suspect that there is only a slight (if any) difference
>between the bees from Matthew's purchased queens and the feral colonies he
>collected.

         In this age of DNA testing, it's important to understand the
meaning of "statistically different" to which I would add: "significantly
different." Are they different in a significant way? When considering
"feral" hives and the potential for genetic improvement one must realize
that these bees are recent escapes. In order to bring about real change,
one must have 1) isolation, 2) selective pressure, and 3) time. The
pressure is there, obviously. But the isolation and time are not. Another
important factor is the size of the pool. If the pool is very small, one
gets inbreeding, which in bees is fatal (the eggs don't hatch).

         Consider the Italian Bee. It was isolated on the Italian peninsula
for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years by the sea, and the mountains to
the north. And it is not as different from the other European bees as it is
from the African types, which may have been separated from it for millions
of years by the deserts. Nature use the techniques of variation and
replication. But replication is by far the stronger of the two; it takes a
long time to produce a significant change and then, if it becomes
permanent, it is replicated very closely.

>15.  Dr. Marla Spivak has shown that mite tolerance is a recessive gene
>which means that the trait must be constantly managed in bee lines to
>maintain it.  The trait disappears naturally in several generations.

         Breeding bees is our only hope for genetic improvement because one
can control the isolation, the selective pressure, and speed up the time.
However, one must always be on guard against inbreeding as well as linkage.
Some traits are linked, some not, and this can be good or bad. Dr. Roger
Morse told me that certain hybrid bee programs were highly successful in
producing bees that raised a lot of brood, but that they didn't necessarily
produce more honey (though it was claimed that they did). Furthermore, how
would you feel about varroa resistance if it was linked, say, to extreme
aggression?

         The concept of genetically related disease resistance was promoted
by Brother Adam. It is instructive to note that he observed resistance to
tracheal mites in a population that 1) survived devastating losses and 2)
consisted of a cross between the old black bee and the Italians. Producing
such crosses became his life's work because of the importance that he gave
to them. With the dispersal of honey bees all over the world, it is very
difficult to find pure strains with which to do such crosses, hence the
move to closed breeding programs like Cobey and Spivak use.




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Peter Borst
Apiary Technician
Dyce Honeybee Lab
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853
[log in to unmask]
607 275 0266
http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/plb6/
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