" Unreliable methods and
doubt as to the final aims are useless ; conclusive results are obtained
only by steady perseverance and the scientific pursuit of a well defined aim."

I am of the classic school that believes most things are genetic.  There are lots of examples where classic breeding has wrought great improvements in stock even when selection was only on the female line.  Egg production in chickens and milk production in cattle come to mind.  Multiple births in sheep is another.  These things were accomplished by breeders that knew little to no genetics.  What they did know was propagation from the most productive females and culling offspring from poor producers in time lead to dramatic improvements.

Bees are hard because queens mate with multiple drones.  So, part of the problem reduces to how well a breeder can control the drones his queens mate with.  With zero control it is one step forwards and most of one step backwards with each mating.  Today with varroa killing most feral colonies that seems to me to be less of a problem than it was before varroa.  Today your drones are mainly competing with drones from other domestic colonies which may, or may not be a factor you can influence.  If you are significantly bigger in colony count than all the domestic hives within a couple of miles that is a good start.  If those others routinely requeen with purchased queens it is a negative towards any breeding program.  If requeening is largely supersedure or splits your drones will infuse your genetics in those neighbors.

Most traits of interest are polygenetic.  This makes progress slow and harder to select.  But, egg or milk production or multiple births in sheep are also polygenetic and those people accomplished great progress.  Progress is also rapidly becoming a matter of science rather than simply classic breeding in many animals.  But science involves things like doing single nucleotide polymorphism mapping or microsatellite mapping so you can look for correlations between performance and genetics.  Those techniques are expensive and beyond what most breeders can afford today.  As the price drops, and it is dropping fast, serious queen breeders should be able to bring more solid science to the process and with more solid science progress should be a lot faster.

Still, there are more than enough examples in addition to Brother Adam on significant progress in things like temper and productivity in only a few years of selection that I hold out hope that the next 25 years should show some real benefits.  The varroa proof bee is pretty unlikely in 25 years.  That is going to be a tough one to get while maintaining other desired traits.  Short of some real luck I suspect that one is well beyond 25 years.

Dick


" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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