[A Novice]

That's the idea - Natural Selection makes the alleles that are beneficial in a specific context less rare, increasing the amount of the correct alleles that are brought forward:

https://www.beesource.com/threads/the-backside-of-selection-a-forgotten-cause-of-bee-mortality.377165/?post_id=2037514#post-2037514

And this appears to differ based on genetic composition. The pre-print that @little_john shared from Steve Riley (attached) begins to unpack some of this for us.

True. But natural selection does that very very very very very slowly for polygenic traits.
So to get consistently better bees when WE want them, it takes artificial selection. Intelligent intervention. Not a random process.

But an expensive process. Hard to make a profit at it.

 

[GregB]

In the vein of the original post, Dr. Martin has studied this question and determined that between 20 and 25% of UK beekeepers are TF (see attached).

I suspect if the question were studied here in the US it would yield similar results.

Disagree on this.
Like we are saying - the UK is really riding on their native pops (with naturally built-in developed resistance over the recent decades - because they were allowed to).

Heck, the non-stop churning pee soup in some of the US regions keeps depressing the same locally developing adaptive traits from getting fixed.

Actually we should already stop using the "US" - too big and meaningless.
We should start talk the regional languages.
Every single region is as big and bigger than the entire UK.
Only appropriate.

There was a reason we now have the regional subforums - to outline the differences.
See "Regions of the USA "

 

[GregB]

In the vein of the original post, Dr. Martin has studied this question and determined that between 20 and 25% of UK beekeepers are TF (see attached).

I suspect if the question were studied here in the US it would yield similar results.

Agree for Southeast US.

 

[GregB]

I suspect that the number of TF beekeepers in the US is low, because

Need to start speaking regional languages.
Speaking of the US is meaningless.

 

[crofter]

Re. post # 113; A case where the cure may be more inconvenient than the disease. Hard to get this medicine accepted.

The inordinate influence of the drone is difficult to overcome when the mating ratio is 10 to 1 or higher

As mentioned before, some mite resistance is being found by University of Guelph but they have a mating station on an island in lake Simcoe a hundred miles away where they truck the selected virgin queens to be bred. Selected semen may be brought in from Europe A far cry from the logistics Greg has to work with.

 

[A Novice]

Just like with the Russians - the Carnis better be from few select vendors (I don't know what these vendors are - I don't care to keep track).

Most so-called Carnies are Carni-named fake mutts.

In the past I had a case of the "carnis" from a person who swore and insisted she bought Carnis.
They were not even close to the true-spec Carnies.

It was a bunch of random, rainbow bees produced by openly-mated whatever queen.
Sold as Carnis.
Typical.

Most likely, any significant difference between these mutts sold under "C" and "I" labels you will not see.

TRUE in my experience.

The only bees I have ever gotten that looked like carniolans are supposed to look was a swarm that came with all gray bees and a dark dark queen. She was superseded almost immediately and the next generation were more mixed with yellow and black. I suspect someone nearby paid a lot to get "certified old-world carniolan bees" all dyed gray, but they swarmed... The queen wasn't marked, but the bees were far too uniform to have come from natural comb cells.

 

[A Novice]

Disagree on this.
Like we are saying - the UK is really riding on their native pops (with naturally built-in developed resistance over the recent decades - because they were allowed to).

Heck, the non-stop churning pee soup in some of the US regions keeps depressing the same locally developing adaptive traits from getting fixed.

Actually we should already stop using the "US" - too big and meaningless.
We should start talk the regional languages.
Every single region is as big and bigger than the entire UK.
Only appropriate.

There was a reason we now have the regional subforums - to outline the differences.
See "Regions of the USA "

But regarding this topic - the relative ease of shipping bees from Wisconsin to Florida to California and back to Wisconsin means that Florida, California, Wisconsin and just-about-everywhere-else-bees-can-be-shipped makes the distribution of bees, mites and viruses in the USA fairly homgenous, and this same ease of shipping makes the large scale commercial operations economically attractive.

Most small scale operators (not all) depend on those bees (mites and viruses) as a resource as they are readily available and economical. Sometimes as trapped swarms....

 

[Gray Goose]

To do that, you need to reduce the number of variants of genes that affect the desired result - getting rid of the bad variants.

bad variants will self eliminate, as in succumb to mites, O Unless treated.

The only way this can work, I think, is first to make the resistant queens available at no cost. Second to make the use of other queens illegal. Third to start a public service / propaganda campaign explaining how good people use the good bees, and bad people don't.

dissagree, some have TF now and some with TF are selling 100's if not 1000's of queens, none have been free yet....

On average, those queens after mating will produce daughters that have half of the resistant genes that their mothers had.

you are presuming my bees are 0% resistive 100 with 0 is 50,, many are 25 -50% already.
AND these queen have 100% resistant drones and In an additive environment bring some alleles to the table.

But the distribution will be Gaussian. It is inescapable.

not sure I am onboard here either.
from google:
In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution.

if a hive has lots of mites and or is weak/it will produce less if any drones, if these drones are sick they will not win the race to get to the Queen first. IMO the sick bees will loose the race , And the sick hive will have way less drones. this is not random variables. Once the Resistance starts better hives will have more and sooner drones, the healther drone will win the race.

IMO you are talking worst case. IF this is to be random and Multivariate Distribution. You In theory are stating mite ridden hives produce the same number of drones, that are Just as fast as the healthy hives drones. I cannot be onboard with that. When I see mites in large numbers in a hive they can barely stay afloat with replacing worker bees. no drones are being produced. They need health and surplus to raise drones or swarm. I know my waggle dance is off when I'm sick so I may be humanizing this but it stands to reason with the "healthiest drones mating" the non resistant Alleles' will slowly lose ground. I can say none of my hives that fail to winter, produce drones to keep the "winter failure" in the allele pool.
rare they swarm either, for the queen side passing of the non wintering genetics.....
with some drone flooding and queen mother Harbo or UBO testing, the wind is at the backs of the resistance increase.

once buyers start asking "what was the Harbo score of the queen mother" when buying queens , speed will increase even more.

GG

 

[Litsinger]

So to get consistently better bees when WE want them, it takes artificial selection. Intelligent intervention. Not a random process.

I'm not sure it has to be an either/or proposition. Every survey conducted in the last decade suggests we have as many feral colonies now than we did before Varroa - and at least in North America this population is larger than the managed population.

This coupled with the examples we have of growing panmictic populations around the globe suggests to me that Natural Selection is neither random nor necessarily requires long ages to complete it's work.

We have previously analyzed work here on Beesource of rapid adaptation in many species including mice and lizards when confronted with novel threats. Given the honey bee's recombination rate it stands to reason they will fare better than most in rapidly adapting to new challenges - particularly one already familiar to hymenoptera.

 

[GregB]

But regarding this topic - the relative ease of shipping bees from Wisconsin to Florida to California and back to Wisconsin means that Florida, California, Wisconsin and just-about-everywhere-else-bees-can-be-shipped makes the distribution of bees, mites and viruses in the USA fairly homgenous, and this same ease of shipping makes the large scale commercial operations economically attractive.

Most small scale operators (not all) depend on those bees (mites and viruses) as a resource as they are readily available and economical. Sometimes as trapped swarms....

NOT so.

Economics!
Again - everything starts with the economics.
And dies with the economics.
This is how people operate.

So - the economically attractive regions are very much destroyed and hopeless.
Economics run them and ruin them.
The most economically profitable way is - running meat bees using industrial methods and on scale and on unseasonable calendar (to maximize profits).

However, the less economically attractive regions are full of hope and the data and the specific use-cases confirm the same.
Back to this document - it outlines very well the regional pockets where sustainable, localized, low-maintenance and TF are a real possibility.

Nomadic commercial honey bee pollinators vital to some U.S. crops | Economic Research Service

The successful cultivation of many U.S. specialty and orchards crops (including almonds, sunflowers, canola, grapes, and apples) is dependent upon commercial insect pollination. The European honey bee is largely preferred over other pollinators due to their relative ease of transport and...

www.ers.usda.gov

Or this document:

Thousands of commercial honey bee colonies are transported long distances to pollinate California almonds | Economic Research Service

The California-grown almonds in your trail mix or almond milk were likely made possible through the pollination services provided by honey bees. In the United States, all commercially grown almonds—a crop worth more than $5 billion in 2021—are grown in California. Almond blossoms largely require...

www.ers.usda.gov

Or this document:

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Education_and_Outreach/Reports,_Presentations_and_Conferences/reports/ERS-290-09-12-2022.pdf

 

[Litsinger]

... some mite resistance is being found by University of Guelph...

As well as with their LVG program, which employed open-mating:

https://www.beesource.com/threads/university-of-guelph-low-varroa-growth-program.375448/?post_id=1997935#post-1997935

 

[GregB]

Let me comment on this snippet from AN above somewhere:

............On average, those queens after mating will produce daughters that have half of the resistant genes that their mothers had...................

From my kind of unrelated (is it really unrelated????) listening of the human genetic talks I picked the following:

• the over-used assumption of the 50/50 heritability is largely incorrect
• the correct answer is - heritability is random.

Because the heritability is random - the 50/50 shortcut is used based on the normal distribution assumption of the data.

But in fact, 60/40 or 70/30 heritability of a certain trait is rather common.
Even 90/10 can not be excluded as if impossible.

And so this 50/50 cliche is nothing but a over-used cliche and nothing more.
We don't really know and have little control over the heritability - especially because we are talking about pylogenic traits.

Working on the population levels kinda/sorta works.
E. G. - Randy O. is truly working with the population level numbers.
But playing with 10 hives has pretty much of little consequence.

Hence my attempts to push my pseudo-population over the 100 queen hump in-season.
Otherwise it is not even worth the hassle.

 

[Litsinger]

Disagree on this.

To the extent we trust the samples, looks like the BIP pegged TF practitioners at around 20 - 25% too:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7810333/

 

[Litsinger]

We don't really know and have little control over the heritability.

Are you making this statement in an artificial selection context or considering a larger panmictic context?

With our musings here on this theme of varroa resistance selection, it would be helpful to have some data presented that supports the varied assertions.

 

[GregB]

Are you making this statement in an artificial selection context or considering a larger panmictic context?

With our musings here on this theme of varroa resistance selection, it would be helpful to have some data presented that supports the varied assertions.

It is difficult to quote here some non-English audio contents.
So, I blurbed what I picked up from popular-science Youtube content.

No - I will not get into looking for some hard quotation here as time consuming.
I could point to a YT video but don't want overload people with translation work (still might).

Gotta cook my bean soup - more important here and now!

 

[GregB]

To the extent we trust the samples, looks like the BIP pegged TF practitioners at around 20 - 25% too:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7810333/

On average.

Like I said - totally agree for the Southeastern US.
Surely, there many pockets. No doubt.
Some places may as well be about 100% TF.

But overall, the averaging methods are of little use, misleading and even harmful.

Example:
The average temperature on Earth is approximately 59 degrees Fahrenheit(15 degrees Celsius).
This metric is pretty useless without knowing contextual details.

 

[A Novice]

bad variants will self eliminate, as in succumb to mites, O Unless treated.


dissagree, some have TF now and some with TF are selling 100's if not 1000's of queens, none have been free yet....


you are presuming my bees are 0% resistive 100 with 0 is 50,, many are 25 -50% already.
AND these queen have 100% resistant drones and In an additive environment bring some alleles to the table.


not sure I am onboard here either.
from google:
In probability theory and statistics, a Gaussian process is a stochastic process (a collection of random variables indexed by time or space), such that every finite collection of those random variables has a multivariate normal distribution.

if a hive has lots of mites and or is weak/it will produce less if any drones, if these drones are sick they will not win the race to get to the Queen first. IMO the sick bees will loose the race , And the sick hive will have way less drones. this is not random variables. Once the Resistance starts better hives will have more and sooner drones, the healther drone will win the race.

IMO you are talking worst case. IF this is to be random and Multivariate Distribution. You In theory are stating mite ridden hives produce the same number of drones, that are Just as fast as the healthy hives drones. I cannot be onboard with that. When I see mites in large numbers in a hive they can barely stay afloat with replacing worker bees. no drones are being produced. They need health and surplus to raise drones or swarm. I know my waggle dance is off when I'm sick so I may be humanizing this but it stands to reason with the "healthiest drones mating" the non resistant Alleles' will slowly lose ground. I can say none of my hives that fail to winter, produce drones to keep the "winter failure" in the allele pool.
rare they swarm either, for the queen side passing of the non wintering genetics.....
with some drone flooding and queen mother Harbo or UBO testing, the wind is at the backs of the resistance increase.

once buyers start asking "what was the Harbo score of the queen mother" when buying queens , speed will increase even more.

GG

To some extent.

Not entirely following what Wikipedia says but the inescapability of the Gaussian distribution is relatively easy to demonstrate.

It has been maybe 30 years since I actually performed a convolution integral, but the concept is simple.

I can provide a detailed explanation if you like, but it is a tedious task.

But any thing you measure that is the result of many independent factors will approximate a Gaussian distribution (often called a normal distribution in English speaking lands).
It is an inescapable thing.

So the offspring will be variable.

An exception to this is the inherent resistance of africanized or "russian" type bees, which come from populations not having the non resistant variations. That sort of resistance can be quite uniform.

I suspect that much of the resistance of locally derived resistant bees has nothing to do with selection of the bees and everything to do with selection of the mites and viruses. Such resistance is valuable in the local environment but not in a larger context.

But more to the point from my perspective, I seriously doubt that the most robustly resistant bees currently available would have enough resistance to make any practical difference in my location.

I may be wrong about that.

So I am talking about bees that don't exist.

Before they can be proliferated they need to actually exist.

There is of course another approach. Just keep bees however you can in your location according to your objectives.

Whether you treat or not your bees are under selection pressure. Selection is taking place.

Eventually the bees will develop some level of population level resistance.

My plan is to become treatment free by not trying.

It is possible that I will succeed sooner because of the people trying to breed for higher resistance. I don't have a strong opinion on that.

 

[A Novice]

I'm not sure it has to be an either/or proposition. Every survey conducted in the last decade suggests we have as many feral colonies now than we did before Varroa - and at least in North America this population is larger than the managed population.

This coupled with the examples we have of growing panmictic populations around the globe suggests to me that Natural Selection is neither random nor necessarily requires long ages to complete it's work.

We have previously analyzed work here on Beesource of rapid adaptation in many species including mice and lizards when confronted with novel threats. Given the honey bee's recombination rate it stands to reason they will fare better than most in rapidly adapting to new challenges - particularly one already familiar to hymenoptera.

Which is why 30 years after varroa appeared I didn't need to worry about it when I started back into beekeeping.

OK. That was sarcasm. Not sure how else to make the point.

 

[A Novice]

Let me comment on this snippet from AN above somewhere:

............On average, those queens after mating will produce daughters that have half of the resistant genes that their mothers had...................

From my kind of unrelated (is it really unrelated????) listening of the human genetic talks I picked the following:

• the over-used assumption of the 50/50 heritability is largely incorrect
• the correct answer is - heritability is random.

Because the heritability is random - the 50/50 shortcut is used based on the normal distribution assumption of the data.

But in fact, 60/40 or 70/30 heritability of a certain trait is rather common.
Even 90/10 can not be excluded as if impossible.

And so this 50/50 cliche is nothing but a over-used cliche and nothing more.
We don't really know and have little control over the heritability - especially because we are talking about pylogenic traits.

Working on the population levels kinda/sorta works.
E. G. - Randy O. is truly working with the population level numbers.
But playing with 10 hives has pretty much of little consequence.

Hence my attempts to push my pseudo-population over the 100 queen hump in-season.
Otherwise it is not even worth the hassle.

Expecting the mean is a bad practice.
9 out of 10 times you meet a bear in the woods it will run away. But take no solace in the fact this is only the 3rd bear you have met. Bears don't in numerical order. come in numerical order.

However on average this is true. With large amounts of variability. However

If the queen has inherited the resistance gene from both parents then every daughter will have at least one copy of that gene, as will every son. So depending somewhat on gene expression characteristics the result can be better than 50%.

 

[Litsinger]

On average.

The statement was proffered that TF beekeeping was 'rare'.

So on average, there are likely at any given time between 20 and 25% of hobbyist and sideline beekeepers having a go at TF beekeeping.

Certainly a minority position but not exactly rare.