Hi All

I am about to 'cherry pick' a statement out of Mikes post of 10/21/06 
11:45 PM and use it to illustrate another point.

 > These colonies that need feed at the end of the season are still
 > a valuable resource. They provide bees and brood for the next
 > seasons' splits. Their genes are removed from the pool, but the
 > colonies still have a place in my apiary.

I see this as excellent bee management practice and have done much the 
same myself under UK conditions, but the point I wish to make is about 
selection and culling for improvement of stocks.

We are always talking about 'selecting the best' and 'culling the worst' 
this does not mean that we 'destroy' the worst.

By selecting the best we are talking about deliberately raising queens 
and drones only from those colonies that we wish to keep or enhance the 
properties of.

The other side of the coin is that culling the worst is arranging not to 
breed from those stocks that we have marked down as unsuitable for our 
purposes, for instance, drone brood destruction as a varroa control 
method can be practised quite severely in colonies that are not intended 
to be bred from. There will always be a percentage of drones raised to 
maturity in these colonies that will become involved in matings, but 
this is actually helpful in maintaining diversity. In the late season 
you make up the nucs and use freshly raised and mated queens that have 
been produced by 'selected' colonies, all that gets destroyed in this 
process is the old queens that we were unhappy with the performance of. 
The bees and brood have been raised recently and thus the impact of any 
previous winter feeding is out of the equation.

I can also make a point about the artificiality of feeding sugar or 
honey...

Whether honey or sugar is used for winter feeding, the process is still 
a support measure, you cannot magically make a poor colony 'good' just 
by feeding it honey.

But there is a place for supportive feeding in the early stages of a 
breeding program that seeks to naturalize bees in an area where there 
was originally no natural background population. In the early stages of 
such a program we may have quite a mixture of colony types, some 
colonies exhibiting genes that we consider useful to our survival 
strategy, but not all genes are expressed in all colonies, in such cases 
we need to give supplementary feeding to ensure as many colonies survive 
as possible so that in subsequent generations the wanted genes may 
become more abundant in each colony.

If such supportive feeding is carried out, sucrose may be a much better 
option than honey as the incompletely naturalized bee stocks may be 
unable to cope (during winter) with honey that has been produced from 
the plants available in the un-colonised geographic region.


Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
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