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Subject:
From:
Peter Borst <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 5 Feb 2007 18:34:09 -0500
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Joe Waggle writes:
> It certainly is interesting that the major focus of bee breeding nowadays is breeding back in the survival traits that for many years were ignored in breeding operations.

The search for disease resistance goes back many years. In the
American Bee Journal from January 1937, there's a story about efforts
to develop bees resistant to American Foulbrood. The work was being
done at the Iowa Ag. Experiment Station by O. W. Park, Frank Pellet.

In March of that year, Charles Mraz outlined his efforts to develop
resistant strains. He writes: "Prevent inbreeding and increase
cross-breeding, not necessarily between different races, but between
different hardy strains of the same race. Nature abhors inbreeding
..."

Pellet comments on Mraz's article, saying: "we found resistant stock
in all three of the races commonly kept and we also found
susceptibility in all three races. Once resistant stock becomes
generally distributed we are likely to hear much less about disease."

It is true that the availability of antibiotics put "resistant bees"
on the back burner. It was revived again with the onset of varroa, and
its rapid development of immunity to chemicals. A lot of us "old
timers" look back at the 1970s as the Golden Age of beekeeping.

At least as early as 1994, mite resistance is mentioned in Bee-L: "Dr.
Marla Spivak has shown that mite tolerance is a recessive gene which
means that the trait must be constantly managed in bee lines to
maintain it."

Since 1997, Dr. Tom Rinderer and the USDA Baton Rouge Bee Lab have
been importing, propagating, and developing a number of lines of
Russian honeybees in order to breed bees resistant to varroa.

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