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Sun, 29 Jul 2007 11:45:27 -0400 |
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Jim, and all
A lot of questions come up for me in reading Seeley’s paper.
http://research.cals.cornell.edu/entity?home=6&id=31234
First, if as he states, the host parasite balance is/might be attained
by successive generations of hosts passing their Varroa populations down
from colony to newly swarmed colony (vertical as opposed to horizontal
transmission), how long would this take? What kind of program would one
devise to replicate this in a managed operation? Would it make more sense
to try to get colonies to pass their mites on to successive generations of
colonies in some way than to simply inoculate hives with already avirulent
mites? How would you prevent continuous re-infestation from virulent mites
and if this is inevitable, how do the colonies in the Arnot forest cope
with this?
I don’t know, something tells me there is more to this than meets the
eye. My understanding is that Seeley inoculated the two types of colonies
with virulent varroa, and they both responded the same which I presume to
mean they both died. Did Seeley try to infest a managed colony with varroa
from a stable forest hive to find out if that colony displayed the same
ability to withstand the mites as the feral colonies? This would tend to
eliminate the possibility that something in the environment other than
unrestrained swarming is at play here. A lot of questions.
Steve Noble
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