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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
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Tue, 17 Oct 2023 16:27:19 +0000
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"When the Avignon bees were tested outside their native environment in a Europe-wide experiment [197], neither their Varroa infestation rate after one year without treatment nor their survival outperformed that of colonies descending from non-selected genotypes tested at the same locations."
The important part is what does this imply will happen when the average bee keeper tries to duplicate this program.  I have read the approaches for many (maybe 100?) people trying to run a selective breeding experiment for mite resistance.  These authors actually did some things right.  Most people make far more breeding program mistakes than these authors so it is reasonable to expect on average the results will be worse than reported in this paper.  That seems consistent with reports on actual results.  In fact the normal breeding project could, in my opinion, be given bullet proof mite resistant queens and would in a very few generations manage to throw away the majority of the mite resistance due to the common errors in such breeding programs.
That is not to say we could not breed a mite resistant stock that was pretty much bullet proof with respect to mites.  That obviously can be done.  Maybe not as easy as breeding for docile, but still very doable while also still retaining the desired qualities such as honey production which these authors lost or never had.  The problem is maintaining those good traits in the hands of people who do not know how to set up a breeding program.  It is unlikely to happen.

Dick

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