Hi Tom and Everyone, Tom wrote: "Bob, I truly envy American beekeepers the choices you have available. Reading the ABJ each month for me, is like having my face pressed against the window of a tuck shop without being able to go inside. Sadly, the Irish Government prohibits the importation of bees. But I am ever hopeful that someday this will change, as change it surely must. Bob, you are absolutely right in what you say, but meantime I must soldier on with FGMO without the benefits of American beekeeping technology." While you may not be able to import stock from the USA certainly you can use the published methods of selecting for varroa resistance within your own stocks to select an Irish bee that is resistant to varroa mites. There are at least two methods that are published that you can follow. Dr John Harbo's method to produce the SMR line and the method published in a couple of papers by Erickson et all and also used by Tzabo et all in Canada and reported in the American Bee Journal. One observation though is that using FGMO as I understand it precludes using the method of Erickson which is the simplest for a beekeeper to do since you are keeping the varroa population low through repeated treatments. For selecting colonies that are more resistant to the mites you need to let the mites have some time to build up populations in the test colonies so those with the lowest mite populations can be found by some method of testing the mite population. As Bob also already pointed out getting your Agriculture folks to import selected stocks themselves is more likely to occur then for them to allow beekeepers to import stocks ( just a matter of much lower risk of importing something unwanted if the import is done in a carefully controlled way). I would encourage Irish beekeepers to get one or several selection programs going to select for varroa resistance amoung your own honeybee stocks. FWIW blane ****************************************** Blane White MN Dept of Agriculture [log in to unmask]