Nick Wallingford wrote:
>
> > Getting back to importing bees and Nick Wallingford's letter.  I agree
> > with what Nick says but how do you know if they are resistant if they have
> > not been exposed to the disease?  I suspect that bees do not have any
> > immune system and therefore any immunity or resistance must be genetic. I
> > would conclude therefore that any restriction on breeding would not be the
> > way forward.
>
> What I was trying to get across was that some bee behaviours can be
> bred for (and tested for) in the absence of the pest/disease you are
> attempting to combat.  The easiest example that comes to mind is for
> AFB resistance.  The hygenic behaviours of (1) uncapping and (2)
> removing dead larvae are the things that we want our bees to be
> doing.  But you don't have to infect the colony with AFB as part of
> the breeding programme!  Instead, you can breed for AFB
> 'resistance' by selecting for these behaviours, and testing for them
> rather than how they directly deal with AFB.
>
> I'm not sure how many other such 'indirect' selection/testing methods
> are useful in breeding bees, but I think they give an indication that
> you don't *have* to have a particular pest/disease present in order
> to provide bees that have 'resistance'.
>
>   (\      Nick Wallingford
>  {|||8-   home [log in to unmask]
>   (/      work [log in to unmask]
> NZ Beekeeping http://www.wave.co.nz/pages/nickw/nzbkpg.htmDear Nick,
Once again you are absolutely correct.  I must be getting thick in my old age!  I suppose that you have to
eventually expose the bees to the disease to prove the point.  The last time I wrote I was talking about
immunity and I notice  that no-one has contradicted my statement that bees have no immune system.  I have
since been thinking this over and if you think of the colony as one living being rather that thousands of
individual bees then the worker bees themselves become the immune system.  All you have to do is activate
them!  That might not be as impossible as it seems.  Do you have Braula mites in New Zealand?  If so if you
could get your bees to kill the braula mites then they would probably kill the varroa mites as well.  Probably
all this has been thought about before!
Does Ed Hillary still work with his bees?
 
Harry