Hi All I find it quite amuusing reading all the replies about the whole NZ bee/Hawaii bee debate. It sounds almost remarkably of bee racism. In south africa we have two types of bee. The transvaal honeybee (AHB) and the CApe Honey bee (A.m.capensis). Transvaal beekeepers will lament the uselessness of the cape bee. Likewise, cape beekeepers get badly stuung whenever they toch tvl bees. Nevertheless people moved the two bees around, and wiped out much of the transvaal honey industry. The cape bees are adopted as queens by the tvl bees and eventually waste the hive. Lesson: if you are dealing with an indigenos situation, don't introduce an exotic into an area where you have an indigenous animal capable of doing everything you need. Next lesson: Apis melifera ligustica and iberica introduced into asia, successfully wiped out lots of Apis cerana, and gave us the worldwide varroa problem, because people took an introdced species, which now had an exotic disease and popped it into Germany and I think Ney York State. Bam. Good move. As with any biological system, there are a delicate set of balances. We humans alter the balance. We can deal with the results in two ways: We can legislate against things coming and exploiting our imbalances-eg introducing american strains of EFB that may not be easily dealt with by NZ bees. Or, we can say, throw in everything and see what the balance is. We could even help by genetically engineering the bees a bit. So we have NZ that is going the protectionist route, maintaining the stats quo, and the US which uused to import tons of bees from everywhere, thus ensuring maximum genetic variability in the resident exotic bees. This strikes me as being the best idea for a big variable country. Likewise, I think that NZ being a small isolated, conservative island is right in it's stand as well. Hawaii on the other hand has the wrong bees anyhow. There is a reason that A.m.iberica is more like an african bee than a.m.carnica. It is slowly being africanised by gene flow. There is also a reason why every bee introdction in africa has laft almmost no genetic bee contamination. Sometimes, a superior organism evolves. With time, that will conquer all. The range of A.m.scutellata at present extends from somewhere in the middle of south africa almost all the way to sdan (if I remember right.) Not other bee has such a large natural range. It also extends exotically from somehwere in argentina to california, with a few colonies having been reported as far as Tennessee! (how many knew that? Moved there by a migratory beekeeper) So people can sit back and tinker trying to create an everything resistant eropean bee that will eventually be wiped out when some wise quite beekeeper making lots of money of tame AHB, through better pollination services, works out how to get Scutellata to regulate brood laying with temperature and is resistant naturally to most of these things. This in turn could easily be wiped out by someone experimenting with A.m.capensis which could wipe out all bee in the US? Just a few thoughts. Keep well Garth Just a thought. --- Garth Cambray Kamdini Apiaries 15 Park Road Apis melifera capensis Grahamstown 800ml annual precipitation 6139 Eastern Cape South Africa Phone 27-0461-311663 3rd year Biochemistry/Microbiology Rhodes University In general, generalisations are bad. Interests: Flii's and Bees.