Peter Edwards writes:  “I am no expert, so I seek an answer from those 
who are.”   

     I am certainly no expert on viruses either.  In fact, although I do a 
lot of things I don’t consider myself an expert at any of them.  But for 
what it’s worth here is my thinking as it was when I wrote that last post 
in this thread.  
     With respect to breeding, I was thinking that there are already too 
many things to target in a given breeding program to add targeting 
resistance to a specific virus to the list, especially considering how 
slippery the little buggers are, and considering how many of them there 
are.  Folks on this list like Peter Borst, who have way better access to 
the literature than I do, have mentioned studies which have shown several 
viruses commonly present at the same time in the same bee.  Some of these 
are obviously more virulent than others but any one of them could mutate 
into something deadly at just about any time.  As you are breeding for 
resistance to one of them up pops another.  
     The same thing could be said for trying to develop a vaccine for any 
specific virus.  The process has got to be pretty expensive, and they can’t 
even get it right for the flu epidemics that visit us humans every year.  A 
virus has such an uncanny ability to persist and change.  A lot of people 
who got flu vaccinations this year got sick anyway.  
     But for bees my thinking is do we really want to go down that road 
anyway?  Do we really want to become dependent on vaccines to keep our bees 
alive?  I kind of don’t think so, and here’s why. As I mentioned it could 
be too expensive for beekeeping purposes, but also bees have been around 
for how long now?  And viruses have been around for how long?  They seem to 
work things out in their own way.  It may not be convenient for beekeepers, 
to put it mildly, but the natural strength of bees to resist viruses has 
grown from their periodic exposure to waves of viruses of different degrees 
of virulence throughout the millennia.  And so in a very real way the 
breeding program is more or less built in.  In fact it has worked so well 
maybe we should just stay out of the way on this one.   The ability to 
resist is dependent on healthy bees of course, and also on a robust genetic 
diversity, and I fear that narrowly focused breeding programs may tend to 
shrink that diversity somewhat.  How much, I don’t know.  It has been 
talked about a lot on this list, but I don’t get a sense that anybody 
really has a good handle on how big the problem is if there is a problem.
     But like I said in my previous post, studying things is good.  You 
never know where the next big scientific breakthrough is going to come 
from.  It could be that someday someone will discover a way to make viruses 
a moot issue for humans and bees.  This will only come from knowing viruses 
to the nth deegree.  If they could somehow be eliminated altogether as a 
threat then we wouldn’t have to be concerned about maintaining natural 
resistance to them at all.  We are not there yet though.  As always these 
are just my thoughts on the matter and I welcome anyone else’s constructive 
analysis (criticism) of what I have said.

Steve Noble

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