>a perfect bee in the wrong hands or in the wrong location is likely still a dead bee overtime.
Exactly right and thanks for stirring the pot. There is not now nor ever will be a perfect bee nor should it be a goal of a realistic breeding program. The skills necessary to be successful vary with region and objective. Dedicated knowledgeable beekeepers adapt and make progress. That involves experience, study, and experimentation.
The overwhelming and almost universal problem is varroa. It has been with us here in North America for better than 30 years. In evolutionary time that is a blink of the eye but represents the great majority of almost all of our careers. A lot of different approaches have been tried from pharmaceutical, to management, to breeding. We have not really cracked the nut yet. Most will agree that sans varroa all other beekeeping problems are manageable with current knowledge. So we are not really looking for a perfect bee (they are pretty near perfect already) but a solution to the varroa problem.
Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA
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