>... shown varroa resistance does not get passed down as a learned behavior?"
This topic is presented in a recent paper, but to my knowledge, no one has tested it empirically:

Advances and perspectives in selecting resistance traits against the parasitic mite Varroa destructor in honey bees<https://gsejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12711-020-00591-1>

It is worth noting that heritability might be confounded by epigenetic processes. A genetically inherited trait is indistinguishable from a trait acquired via social learning, when workers have the ability to transmit acquired knowledge across generations: thus, behaviours may be expressed by related workers without a genetic causality.

That said, Dr. Chittka frequently refers to the social learning work that Dr. Page did with his high and low pollen lines:

Responsiveness to sucrose affects tactile and olfactory learning in preforaging honey bees of two genetic strains<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432800003594?via%3Dihub>

'Genotype did not have a direct effect on acquisition. In high- and low-strain bees, individuals with high gustatory response scores learned better than bees with low gustatory scores. This is true both for tactile and olfactory learning. The correlation between responsiveness to sucrose and acquisition scores is not different between the strains. But genotype did affect sucrose perception and thus indirectly affected learning performance.'

The Effects of Genotype, Foraging Role, and Sucrose Responsiveness on the Tactile Learning Performance of Honey Bees (Apis mellifera L.)<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1074742700939960>

'We analyzed sucrose responsiveness and associative tactile learning in two genetic strains of honey bees under laboratory conditions. These strains differ in their foraging behavior. Bees of the “high” strain preferentially collect pollen. “Low”-strain bees mainly forage for nectar. Responsiveness to different sucrose concentrations and tactile learning were examined using the proboscis extension reflex. Acquisition, extinction of conditioned responses, and responses to an alternative tactile stimulus were tested. High-strain bees are more responsive to sucrose than low-strain bees. Regardless of genotype, pollen foragers are more responsive to sucrose than nectar foragers. In bees of both strains we find the same relationship between responsiveness to sucrose and acquisition. Bees responding to low sucrose concentrations show more often the conditioned response during acquisition than those responding only to higher sucrose concentrations. Extinction of conditioned responses depends on the response probability during acquisition. Discrimination between the two tactile stimuli is affected by genotype but not by responsiveness to sucrose. High-strain bees discriminate better than low-strain bees. Our experiments thus establish links between division of labor, responsiveness to sucrose, and associative learning in honey bees.'

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html