>
>
>THis is a very interesting point.  The one person I know who has done
>literally *hundreds* of feral removals (A.M. Buzas 1/800-47-STING) swears
>that he has never seen a feral colony with foulbrood.  At first thought
>this makes sense: Who's going to call and pay you to remove a dying or
>dead colony?  I.e., his data set is biased toward strong, unafflicted
>colonies, rather than weak/dead colonies.  But when I've pressed him on this
>point he emphasizes that he's never seen even *one*.  And it's true, I
>spent two summers working with him (we had NO business last summer!) and
>of the 30 or so I've removed with him, there was never any sign of ANY
>brood disease...  You'd think that you'd get one or two once in a
>while...  Unless the feral populations were (are) (there still are some
>out there) already somewhat resistant to brood diseases in general
>- which is as Andy says, what you'd expect from natural selection.
>
>Final point, since I'm not really sure where this leaves the question and
>hope that the group will continue to mull it over:  If you assume that the
>feral colonies really did/do have some resistance to brood diseases, what
>are some likely mechanisms?  The one difference that I noticed regularly
>was the heavier use of propolis.  (You could argue that they may not
>actually use more propolis - they just never get the inside cavities
>scraped down - but I'll testify that the feral colonies that I have
>installed in regular deeps do use quite a bit more propolis than those
>descended from packages or breeder queens.) I seem to recall a post a
>number of months ago from someone in Arizona who said they were using
>propolis as an AFB preventative...  I tried e-mailing them, but never got
>a response...  Also, some strains of bees are apparently more resistant to
>some brood diseases than others.  This has been known since at least 1915.
>(My 1915 edition of Philips' "Beekeeping" states that the Italian strain
>is "vastly superior"  to the German black bee with respect to resistance
>to EFB.)
>
>Dave T.
 
Not often but years ago, I did see several feral colonies with AFB.
Ed