From: Erik Osterlund <honeybee@elgon.se>
Date: Tue Dec 19, 2000 10:46am
Subject: Re: girls on small cells, regressing bees

Hi Dave and all

I respect you Dave

and admit I don't use all of Dee's advice fully myself, due to certain bad
experiences. But I'm fascinated over the possibility her ideas would work
also here where I live. It might. Someone has to try. At her place it do
work for her and Ed. They are the proof for it. No doubt. And they have
paid for coming there, loosing 90% of their stock over a number of years.
If you have just a few hives it might be much more difficult to follow all
the way down the road, but step by step, we might reach there. Let's try.

Erik

>> Further, Inbreeding does not occur in Nature as routine without something
>> forcing it to happen.At very most a queen might be inseminated if she is
>> real special, but normally a good breeder can work around it if he really
>> cares about what he is doing. Never tell beekeepers to inbreed and then
>> think they can become good biological beekeepers without problems in their
>> bees. Either you want to do it without crutches naturally to gain strong
>> outbred lines or you don't.Inbreeding in animals results in dead lines and
>> end of evolution for species and we seem to have enough of that started
>> within the bee industry now.
>
>If we adopt a pure "survival of the fittest" policy from the start then we
>lose the most susceptible strains of bee very quickly...It could be that
>there are other traits in those susceptible strains that we should be
>nurturing but have not yet recognised. Your ideals are a wonderful aim...but
>let us fully analyse what
>we have available before we cut off some strains for ever.