RE ESHPA Meeting

I happened to be lucky to attend the meeting and hear Dr. Seeley's talk.
Actually, I have been interested in his work with Feral Hives in the Arnot
Forest since I first heard about it. I didn't think then that the bees were
isolated enough to develop characteristics any different from the run of the
mill bees in the area. There are a large number of bee hives surrounding the
forest which belong to commercial beekeepers.

Dr. Seeley went to a lot of trouble to capture swarms from these bees. These
swarms seemed to do well in the single story bait hives that he caught them
in and he left them high in the trees where the swarms were caught. These
bait hives had normal comb drawn on normal foundation, so the swarms did NOT
build their own combs. Most of them survived winter and did not develop high
levels of mites.

He thought the reason must be due to heritable mite resistance so he set up
an experiment where he raised queens from the ferals and tested them
alongside some commercial stock. However, the ferals did NOT show mite
resistance in his experiment. There must be some other factor at work that
allows the wild hives to make it, where commercial hives can't.

My own view is that the reason they survive has to do with either the fact
that they are isolated from other bees instead of being kept in apiaries
like we have, -- or it's due to the annual swarming that feral hives do,
which may purge the colony of mites. Obviously we can't put our hives high
in trees separated by a quarter of a mile. But I wonder if dividing the
hives annually might replicate the effect of swarming, and prevent the rapid
build-up of mites.

Peter Borst
Danby NY

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