Hi Carol and all listers

First let me apologize for the mistake of posting a “No subject” message. I noticed the fact too late to correct it.
And second, I’ll try to make my answer as short as possible, but it will still be long, or it won’t cover even the essentials.
June 15, 2001 Carol wrote
>What we thought was that it was like domesticating any creature...take the most agreeable/gentle AHB and breed  from them, then manage for the rest of the problems. It sounds like you are  working hard to manage for good characteristics, <
Up to this point, all well all good, you thought right, it is the way most people are trying to do. But they are starting from a base consisting in exactly what George Imirie tells us NOT to use, that is, swarms of unknown origin, from the woods, inbred, and of unknown ancestry. So we don’t know if (and in which percentage) they will be transmitting their characteristics to their progeny, if at all. How long will it take to breed something consistent from that? What do the beekeepers do in the meantime?
>but I wonder if you have a way to know if you are managing AHB or EHB?????<
I certainly DO know that I am managing EHB (by the way, I used AHB only because it is common usage, I usually refer to these bees as UOB (Unknown Origin Bees) irregardless of the actual race of their ancestry, since I cannot prove it). And I DO know my bees for what they are, because my queens are daughters of imported queens produced by queenbreeders of long standing (second generation, breeding in the same area for 55 years) and tradition. These queens are mated to the drones present (including some UOB drones) in the area, but since there is a determined effort of the queenbreeder in the production of drones of EHB, you can get up to 90% of  EHB drone presence in the fecundation (I use only carniolans because it is easier to determine the purity of the queen’s fecundation by the color of the adult bees). Needless to say that I don’t raise new queens from these queens, I buy ALL my queens.
>Please let me know. I am  in Texas and AHB is here...but now that the feral bees have bounced back  from Varroa, we wonder if the swarm we catch carry AHB plus varroa  resistance. We requeen or destroy very aggressive swarms but keep and  sometime get large honey production from "grouchy" bees that test as EHB.<
>Could they be very diluted AHB? What do you think?<
I agree with a recent posting to the list, saying that if they are aggressive, they need to be worked... Which is not exactly what Mr. Imirie would say, he would be even stricter....

And here, what I said above connects with another posting, by Barry in June 12, 2001
>How is it that there are supposedly these random boundaries that no AHB's have crossed? Example: No AHB's to deal with right around Navasota, TX, yet they can be found much further North, even in mountainous areas with colder climates?<
This is easy to explain. Wherever you notice that AHB stop their advance, you can look for, and you will find a queenbreeder in the region. Not any breeder, but a breeder that produces drones (in quantity) to mate with his queens. It works like this: one of AMScutellata’s worst characteristics is the fact that it is a migratory bee. When a migrating swarm (sometimes with a virgin queen) reaches a region with a high density of EHB drones (only queenbreeders do this) the AHB queens mated to these drones will produce a colony that tends to stay in the same place, and not migrate. Look for other places where the AHBs stopped, you will find a queenbreeder in the vicinity.
And this is what Bob Harrison said in June 12, 2001
>Tens of thousands of queens were raised and open mated between I10 and I20 and east of Navasota. I have worked with,transported and polinated with some of these queens and they are some of the easiest bees to work with I have seen in years. To set the reord straight about the Weavers. The migratory beekeepers in Texas probabbly raised more queens in Texas than the Weavers did. Any one of those could have brought back a queen open mated with AHB. The area in Texas most commercial migratory beekeepers use SHOULD have been africanized five years ago. Why the slow to a crawl of AHB? Are we as I believe Barry is saying we are seeing only a bee with a very small dna of A.mellifers scutellata? <
These tens of thousands of mated queens could never depend only on the drones in feral colonies, so the queenbreeders had to have tens or hundreds of thousands of drones of known origin flying around. These drones are interfering, diluting the AHB genetics in the vicinity. BTW there were no queenbreeders of importance in Brazil at the time of AHB introduction, and even today, no queenbreeder in Brazil produces more than 6000 queens in the year if that.
I don’t pretend to have been scientifically precise, nor to have exhausted the issue, I am only stating some facts observed by me and other beekeepers here in Brazil, and extrapolating them to the reality of Texas. Lots of ground is there to be covered yet.
If you (and you all in the list) have any other doubt, or feel that I missed some point, I am certainly not the owner of Truth, please shoot away.

Deodato Wirz Vieira

(raising bees, not flying rattlesnakes)


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