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Date: | Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:04:49 -0400 |
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Dave Cushman writes; “The widespread use of transport for queens in US
means that
naturalisation does not get a chance to occur and stability to develop,
but stability requires selection to achieve it and little of this is
done at local level in US.”
Dave, I am having a hard time assimilating all this. Genetics was not my
best subject. If you are saying that “naturalization” occurs when all non-
natural movement of genetic material via transport of queens ceases, and
some form of stability is achieved when selection is allowed to take place
under presumably open mating conditions, it raises a couple of questions
for me. Firstly, what form of selection are we talking about; natural or
man made? If natural selection is allowed to take place then it seems to
me that we would have to let go of our attachments we might have for
certain characteristics like gentleness, swarming propensity, honey
production, etc. If man made selection is applied then what’s to say we
don’t run into the problem I think Peter was talking about where you select
for your favorite characteristic(s) while being unaware of what’s happening
with those characteristics which aren’t so obvious but are perhaps even
more important to the overall viability of the population? Secondly, what
makes you say that the kind of selection you are talking about does not
occur in the U.S., and in what countries is such practice common place?
Steve Noble
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