Hello Dave & All,
Interesting hypothesis but I only agree to the fact that the easy way to
introduce traits into your bee population is through your drone population.

Dave quotes:
 Selection pressure from uncontrolled mite populations will
determine to a large extent which drones pass on their genes. Ways to
implement this type of selection programme, however, need to be addressed
and tested under field conditions"

The above leaves too many things to chance just like breeding from suvivors
does. There are too many reasons why a certain hive might have a high mite
load to select correctly.

Our U.S. researchers tried to breed a bee from survivors for fifteen years
without success.

Only when they began to closely observe the brood nest and varroa
reproduction (S.M.S. & P- MIB) were concrete advances made.

I can not comment on the article without reading the article but from what
you have written the method seems a giant step backward in my opinion but
what do I know?

Dave said:
.  If mite numbers are not over-suppressed by beekeepers natural
selection of resistance to the mites will develop relatively rapidly.

Same old BS we have been hearing from the start of the varroa issue. Plain
old raising bees from survivor queens and drones from the hives with the
lowest varroa loads has been proven (at least in my mind) as a loss cause!
One needs to know what the reason is for sure for the low varroa load to
include the queen/ drones in the breeding program.

Hope we can "agree to disagree".

The key to stopping varroa dead in its tracts revolves around varroa
reproduction in my opinion and many of the world's  researchers.

Enjoy your posts Dave and your excellent web site!

Bob

"In an infinite universe, every point can be regarded as the center, because
every point has an infinite number of stars on each side of it."  Stephen
Hawking

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