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
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