Jim, and all 
   A lot of questions come up for me in reading Seeley’s paper.
http://research.cals.cornell.edu/entity?home=6&id=31234
  First, if as he states, the host parasite balance  is/might be attained 
by successive generations of hosts passing their Varroa populations down 
from colony to newly swarmed colony (vertical as opposed to horizontal 
transmission), how long would this take?  What kind of program would one 
devise to replicate this in a managed operation?  Would it make more sense 
to try to get colonies to pass their mites on to successive generations of 
colonies in some way than to simply inoculate hives with already avirulent 
mites?  How would you prevent continuous re-infestation from virulent mites 
and if this is inevitable, how do the colonies in the Arnot forest cope 
with this?  
  I don’t know, something tells me there is more to this than meets the 
eye.  My understanding is that Seeley inoculated the two types of colonies 
with virulent varroa, and they both responded the same which I presume to 
mean they both died.  Did Seeley try to infest a managed colony with varroa 
from a stable forest hive to find out if that colony displayed the same 
ability to withstand the mites as the feral colonies?  This would tend to 
eliminate the possibility that something in the environment other than 
unrestrained swarming is at play here.  A lot of questions.

Steve Noble    

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