Or is the African bee wild card too dangerous to play with?
If one could assure that only mild-tempered AHB colonies were propagated, or that the mean ones were always kept distant from residential areas, I might agree about the varroa adaptation.
But, I've encountered AHB in its worst form (one case was an all out explosion of an AHB colony in Guatamala, another wwas a set of abandoned, turned feral, colonies in San Antonio, TX). I've video of them attacking - it's unreal. Also, Dr, Gerry Loper, before and for a long period after he retired from Tucson bee lab, kept a yard of AHB colonies. In addition to being mean, these bees produced huge amounts of alarm pheromone and lots of venom from all of the stings. Gerry now has a soft, almost whispery voice. He attributes it to exposure to the AHB chemicals.
One has to ask, if even one person dies because of an AHB colony, is that worth the possible advantage of varroa adaptation? That said, maybe it's not AHB per se that should be culled, but ANY overly aggressive bees?
As most of you know, I grew up on a dairy farm. Our Holsteins were uncommonly large. Our breeder bulls tipped the scales at 3200-3800 pounds. We were never hurt by any of them, but we didn't hang out inside the pen with them, and we kept tight control over them. We had one that we never turned our back on - he could change from all friendly, wanting his ears scratched, to a monster attacking at full run. He carried an 8 ft chain on his nose ring - so that when he tried a charge he'd step on the chain and do a summersalt. But he got smart, would swing his head and toss the chain over his neck before he charged. Then he learned to swing the chain in a arc between the 2x12 horizontal fence boards. He was very sneaky about that trick, and we had to put up signs warning any visitors to stay at least 10 ft from the fences. Great breeder, but nasty tempered, and really smart for a bovine. He was a known risk to us, and we fully understood the risk. But we kept him and anyone other than my dad or myself away from that pen. So he was a contained risk. But jumping into that pen with him would be like walking into an AHB yard and kicking hives.
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