>
> Personally, I think the idea of genetically modifying honey bees to suit
> our needs is simply the wrong way to proceed.
>

In your opinion, what is the right way to proceed?

I'm not an advocate of GM honey bees either, but an argument can be made
that conventional breeding techniques for the honey bee have not been
overall successful, at least when comparing honey bee breeding to other
livestock breeding. We're still reaping the benefits of breeding techniques
of cows from 100 years ago (larger, more milk production). But do we have a
better honey bee today than we did 100 years ago?

Even conventionally defined successful breeding lines appear to loose
effectiveness over time. You can't find pure Italian queens in the US,
despite decades of attempts to maintain the line. Midnite and Starline
queen lines were abandoned. Ten years ago Minnesota Hygienic and SMR (later
VSH) lines were all the rage, and where are they now? I remember reading in
the Hive and the Honey Bee about a breeding attempt to make a higher pollen
collecting bee, which was successfully produced in a relatively short
number of generations, but was equally lost in even fewer successive
generations without continuous breeding techniques. Conventional breeding
hasn't produced a widely accepted varroa resistant line either. It appears
conventional breeding techniques only produce short term, human defined
benefits, if at all.

So what is the future of bee breeding?

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