Brother Adam himself stated: "One thing seems certain: in cross-breding the
honeybee we are rarely in a position to foretell specific results with any
measure of certainty."  He goes on to list the unexpected problems from
crosses, esp. F-1's, with regard to defensiveness, etc.  Brother Adam was
quite a salesman and promoter, preaching the mantra that hybrid strains
were best, so we must take some of his writings with a grain of salt.  Yes,
one can occasionally get lucky with the F-2 generation on from a hybrid
cross, but such hybrid lines may be difficult to maintain.  Larry Connor
managed to maintain the 4-way hybrid Starlines for some years, but it was
difficult.


> >Projections, promises and prognostications ... show me the results.


Some examples would be Apis mellifera ligustica, carnica, caucasica,
mellifera, to name a few.  Also Baton Rouge's VSH and POL lines.

Results would be "In conclusion, our experiment demonstrated that “the best
bee” showing excellent performance and superior disease tolerance
across all environments does not exist. Instead, the local bees were not
only the most long-lived, but in many cases also received
better scores for gentleness and honey yield."  Looking for “the Best Bee”. An
experiment about interactions between origin and environment of honey
bee strains
in Europe,"  ABJ June 2015.

Also: "The conclusions from this comprehensive field experiment all tend to
confirm the higher vitality of the local bees compared to the nonlocal
ones, indicating that a more sustainable beekeeping is possible by using
and breeding bees from the local populations, although the interactions are
complex. This may seem logical and obvious to many bee scientists, but has
not been proven on such a wide scale before. This conclusion may also come
as surprise to some beekeepers who believe that queens purchased from
sources outside their own region are in some way “better” than the bees
they already have in their own hives. We hope that our results may provide
them with additional information and entice the community to regard
benefits other than the mere amount of honey produced in a season as
important."  Meixner, Marina D, et al (2014) Honey bee genotypes and the
environment. Journal of Apicultural Research, 53 (2). pp. 183-187.

An example of a successful hybrid cross is the Africanized bee--a cross
between several races of Apis mellifera, which hit a winning formula
consisting of mix of alleles from each parental type.  This is also a good
example of what happens in those rare cases in which the hybrid outperforms
the parents--it's called the Lizzy Borden syndrome, in which the hybrid
rapidly displaces either parental type, as occurred in South America.

But even the Africans are outcompeted by European bloodlines above the 30th
Parallel--each race of bees is best adapted only to certain environments.

The take home message is that since we've imported perhaps every known
strain of honey bee to the U.S., that all options for hybridization have
already been offered to the hard winnowing by natural selection.  If any of
those crosses exhibited incredible fitness, they would already have
displaced all but the most carefully managed bee stocks.

The following is from the most recent COLOSS newsletter:

Call to Join Darwin's Black Bee Box This spring, Bees@wur will start a new
natural selection trial for Varroa resistance at two locations in the
Netherlands and Germany. At both locations, 25-30 colonies will be
prepared. The experiment is based on earlier natural selection trials in
the Netherlands, which resulted in resistant populations after 4 years
because of several selected biological traits. They expect that similar
results can be obtained in every population of local bees, and also that
different locations and start populations might evoke different mechanisms
of resistance. Therefore, experiment organizers would like to broaden the
trial to many more locations, dispersed over Europe. For more information
and to express interest in cooperation, please contact Tjeerd Blacquière (
[log in to unmask]) or the Coloss Survivors Task Force (www.coloss.org
)



-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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