I was chatting with my husband about evolution in honey bees in regards to varroa resistance, and asked if evolution is still defined as a shift in allele frequency in a population  https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/natural-selection/population-genetics/a/genetic-drift-founder-bottleneck#:~:text=So%2C%20evolution%20is%20any%20shift,for%20its%20environment%20or%20not.  - yep, still taught that way! He's a biology professor with an emphasis on animal behavior.

That's kind of the dream for us beekeepers, right? The frequency of varroa resistant alleles becomes very high compared to where it is now in the population.  It could be caused by a genetic bottleneck, if all the queen producers put their resources into disseminating a queen line which is varroa resistant, _and_ all of the folks who purchase queens contribute to the project by 1) releasing lots of drones, 2) not open mating for 5 or so years. After all, in a few years the varroa sensitive ferals will die off and be replaced by either their offspring (whose queens found our drones, ideally) or our swarms with our resistant queens....

And I tossed out the comment, casually, that the one thing we do know is that this behavior is not taught by older bees to younger bees. To which he replied, "Oh? Someone has done that experiment - taken only older bees  from a varroa resistant queen, and added them to a sensitive hive, and shown varroa resistance does not get passed down as a learned behavior?". I actually do not think that assumption has been tested, but if it has, someone here will know.

To which he again had the perfect reply, "According to Finagle's Law, the perversity of the universe would dictate that it has not been tested and that it is important." :$

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