>To help natural selection favour Varroa-resistant bees, you will need to monitor closely the mite levels in all your colonies and kill those whose mite populations are skyrocketing long before these colonies can collapse.


Leaving alternate methods of queen breeding and treatments aside, and considering Tom's comments literally, is there any science to support that killing a single or multiple colonies helps shift the direction of natural selection toward varroa resistance?  It could be that the first slim advance toward resistance is colonies that can tolerate high mite populations and "survive" as in "survival of the fittest".  In killing colonies that may have survived, one may toss out some useful bottleneck genetics in the bees or the varroa.  Although admittedly unanswerable, what if some ambitious scientist measured and killed all the out of threshold colonies in the Arnot Forest, would they have survived until today as a reported example of varroa resistant or tolerant bees? 

Again if one assumes a literal interpretation while believing the implied benefit, the whole idea of killing, as selection, leads to questions about implementation. Do I kill my colonies when the counts exceed some threshold that signals destruction or wait until some other, currently unspecified, threshold develops? I'm sure beekeepers would have different ideas about when to literally pull the trigger. The opposite is also true in that there may be a host of other variables that are keeping some colonies under the threshold that have nothing to do with bee genetics. Saving those colonies may accomplish nothing to help natural selection.  I sense that If I'm in charge of the killing fields, I'm equally likely to be wrong as right.   

I think Tom has some answers to these questions and has said that Darwinian beekeeping is not practical in every location and has accepted criticism that it may not actually be workable in most areas due to migratory bee services and other issues of bee congestion. I enjoy hearing Tom talk about this but I'm always left with the nagging thought that he's proposing a method with very limited feasibility and no parameters around implementation except for his assertion that it may not work in your area. Add that to the notion of killing whole colonies and it becomes borderline for those of us that embrace an element of animal husbandry in our beekeeping practice. 

I've also thought that if Darwinian beekeeping works in an area, it would be isolated enough that a simple queen breeding program may also work. 


Bill Hesbach
Cheshire CT

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