A big mistake as the desirable drones should be in demand and generated by design.
agreed, and to the point I was making was when it comes to drones a f-2+ (local X import) overwinter queen and hive is better then a puppy mill import queen and package come spring, even if it takes some IPM to get it to survive.
The OG queen is tossing her genetics in drones.
While the colonys workers and thuse performance in a F-1 is impacted by the local drones she mated with, they are throwing drones with the genetics of OG QueenX and foren drones she mated with.
Its not till F-2 we see the out flow of "local" genetics back to the environment. Simply put drones don''t have fathers, but they have grandfathers, you need to get to the point were the grandfathers/great grand fathers are of the stock you want for the drones to be help full in inacting change...
Another way to look at it is drones don't have sons, but they have grandsons
when people can't keep hives alive long enuff to get to that point (3rd year for many ), the net effect is the area is flooded with foren drones from replacement stock sourced form far away. This wipes out adaptation as the poor genetics are not removed from the breeding pool when a hive dies, they are replaced with more of the same.
The way off the treadmill is local sustainability beekeeping. Keeping your bees alive, making up your own replacements, and having a few extra in the spring for those who were not so lucky/skilled.
If the majority of backyard beekeepers took care of there mites, and pulled/overwintered a nuc per full sized hive things would be very different and some work on the problem would be possibly, the price of bees would fall as craigs list would be flooded with local nucs come spring... and the shift from replacments being foren packages to local nucs would alow localy adapted and mite resistant gentnics to be developed and take hold....
but... theres more... the bigist issue is people NOT using resistant stocks... the TF message is you have to breed them your self, this is hurt full to the cause. The reason TF isn't working/spreading isn't that such bees can't/don't exist.... Its that there isn't a market for them. Some of that is the "do it your self" message, some of it is the let them die message... hives fail, mite bombs can take out the best stock... understanding the need to sometimes protect your stock going back to the drone issue... those queens and there f-1s would be distributing resistance genetics and should be protected... even if it takes treatments... as the area will be better off for it.
we need to encourage people to buy and then propagate local drivitives of them.
We need to demand resistant stock instead of settling for puppy mill package queens. Once we are sustainable we have choices, it becomes a buyers market, and we would not bee like many are now, buying anything they can, in a panic to place an order before the bees are sold out for the year... The pre orders have allready started in my area
inch:
its simple suply and demand.... if the puppy mills were left holding a bunch of unsold packages and all the Russian/VSH queens were sold out, it wouln't take but a year or 2 for the queen producers to start shifting what they were making...
we (the US) have done this once.... when Italian bees came in there was a huge demand (genital and more productive is a huge incentive) .... threw mass production and constant re queening the bee gentnics of a country was shifted...
before then a queen was a queen.... but all of a suden people could get $20 for an Italian queen (near $600 in todays $$$),it's no coincidence the classic queen rearing manuals came out in this era. The market demanded... the queen producers answered
We are back to a queen is a queen/I will take what ever I can get (hobbyist market)... In till that changes we get no were..
I am talking of little, local guys like me - 20(+/-) hives.
Better yet - a community of little, local guys.
Everyone should be thinking of your own "drone generation" IF you care to have some sort of a local bee at all..
yes... and no....
ego says your bees are better...the math, not so much. see my drone points. the reality is everyone should be looking in to drone suppression of sub par stock, the bottom 90%... alive dose not make breeding stock...
there are those who understand the facts about bees and those the don't....devil take the hindmost...if only one could keep them from spreading like a mite bomb..
WE created this problem, and the TF movement is far from with out blame
the fix is simple.... locals stop bringing in (or saveing swarms from) package bees...