" has the potential to yield local adaptations in parts of the genome under selection....."
There is an old, old saying among people who are breeding critters.  The saying is you will get what you select for.  I am sure bees are no exception.  If you really selected bees for local adaptation you will get it.  The problem is can you really select for local adaptation?  If I am breeding pigeons or tropical fish or any number of other species I can carefully control the matings on both the male and female side.  With honey bees all I can really control is the female side.  Someone with several hundred or more hives can probably do a decent job of controlling the male side.  But someone like me with 20 hives has at best only modest control over the male side.  The BYBK community buys a lot of queens.  They raise a lot of queens by splitting hives that want to swarm trying to prevent swarming and thus select for more swarming.  They have some ferals entering the gene pool on the male side.  Some even go after swarms as a source of free bees so constantly bring in unknown genetics.  It is well documented drones can travel close to 20 miles from the hive they were raised in presumably hopping from hive to hive during the trip.

Seems to me if you want to control a breeding population well enough to really do effective selection you either need to have an awful lot of hives so you can drone flood or you need to be an an area with no ferals and a very low population of BYBK's.  Not many of us have that number of hives.  Not many of us live in a northern desert or on an island where we are really isolated.  And even if you do buy some queens that are locally adapted they are going to last about one or two generations at best before genetic dilution removes the advantage some breeder worked so hard to put in his stock.

All these same arguments imply strongly that even if someone did breed a varroa proof strain moving that trait across the country would likely prove real hard.

There is some future hope.  There is some new technology now coming on the market that may well revolutionize selective breeding.  Without getting bogged down in details this technology allows very rapid DNA sequencing of large hunks of DNA in one shot.  The current record as far as I know is single experiments which have sequenced chunks nearly a million bases long versus 1000 bases long at best (and usually more like 500 bases long) with the current technology.  You also do not need a fancy lab to run this method.  Good enough sequencing capability at a low enough price holds the hope that you could effectively look at things like SNPs or microstatellites and learn which drones to use for II to very rapidly improve a breeding population.  If the commercial queens were really so much better than home grown they might crowd out the poorer genetics given time.  But, that is likely 20 years or more in the future.  And the commercial queen breeder is going to have to be big enough to be able to afford adding a full time geneticist to his staff.  It works with corn and cows so I do not see why it could not work with bees.  After all, in both those examples the huge yield improvements made in the last 60 years have been dominantly genetic.

Dick

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