From: "T & M Weatherhead" <queenbee@gil.com.au>
Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2002 07:33:21 +1000
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Brood diseases

Erik wrote

> deJong said this in South AFrica, but the paper I was remembering was
> published in Apidologie 1995 by Message and Goncalves. Both AFrican and
> European bees are Apis mellifera. Don't know any scientist that says
> general findings found on any AM don't apply to another type of AM, but
> that's maybe something to think about, not only concerning African or
> European or also concerning strains, also concerning varroa...

I would suggest that there is a difference. It was work on queen bees by, I
think, Goncalves et al that I was talking with David de Jong about and we
both agreed that you could not automatically transpose the results from the
African queen to the Italian queens.

> ANyhow the paper dealt with an Africanized queen and an Italian queen
> heading the two colonies compared, but both were mated AHB. Pieces of combs
> were inserted in both colonies which were naturally built by AHB and
> Italian bees respectively.

This do not automatically prove that the smaller cell size was the reason
why the varroa preferred Italian workers to the AHB workers. I would
suggest that it also supports the juvenile hormone (JH) theory where the JH
produced in the AHB is somehow not switching on the varroa trigger to
reproduce whereas the JH in the Italian was and cell size had nothing to do
with it. The other comment I would make is that if there were only two (2)
colonies used then the data does not seem relative in statistical terms.

Trevor Weatherhead
AUSTRALIA