Dave Cushman wrote:
> Hi Scot & all

>>I assert that feral EHB populations of 3rd or higher
>>generation ALWAYS (and I put my reputation
>>on that statement) display small cell characteristics and are
>>indistinguishable from AHB when using size for qualification
>
>
> Be careful when making statements like that... I can show you colonies of a
> substrain of AMM that will not adopt cells smaller than 5.6 mm even after
> several generations of attempted regression...

Dave has an excellent paper on just that at

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/denwood.html

A long time ago a post had a link to a chart of cell sizes of different
races of bees in their native habitat and cell sizes were all over the
place.

Also, within the same race, it seems that the hotter it is the smaller
bee does better and the cooler, the larger bee does better.

It is interesting that the few papers I have read about AHB v EHB when
they were tested under the same conditions, the AHB had lower Varroa
loads because they  removed twice as many "infected" pupa. Cell size did
not matter. It was all hygienic behavior.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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