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Alastair

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Tristan is right. VSH is pretty much a waste of time because the trait is lost in the next generation or two.

What I would like to see happen in NZ is we import some varroa resistant bees from say, Puerto Rico. They could be quarantined on an island for 2 or 3 years to determine they are not carrying any pathogens we don't want.
 
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What I would like to see happen in NZ is we import some varroa resistant bees from say, Puerto Rico. They could be quarantined on an island for 2 or 3 years to determine they are not carrying any pathogens we don't want.
not going to happen. do you remember last time and that was just with seamen.

also i don't think we need to. more than likely we have the genes in our stock.
it just boils down to cost. we need a few big crowds with 1000+ hives each (more the better), who have a queen breeder and staff who can go varroa check hives.
its also a little bit better if they also put hives in high density aeras eg kiwifruit pollination. you want the hives to be exposed to mites from other hives.
thats a problem i suspect randy and others are facing and i assume they have a way around that. if all the hives around you are semi resistant to mites then you won't have any mites to test your hives with. the more resistant your hives get the worse that issue becomes. so you need a means of reliably exposing the hives to varroa.

this is something aussie should be jumping on and be full swing into.
 

Alastair

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Me anyway, I don't think anything undesirable was introduced with the carniolan semen, other than carniolan genetics. There is a theory that the semen introduced DWV. But before then I would very occasionally see a bee with deformed wings, I think the virus has always been with us, but just came into prominence when varroa arrived and helped it multiply.

About breeding varroa resistant bees from our own genetic base, it has been tried for many years, including by a program the government spent 12 million $$ on. Results have been zero.

Compared to America we have very limited genetics here, America, which was populated by Europeans hundreds of years before we were, brought in bees from all over the world, as for a long time there were no restrictions. As a result, out of the several million feral hives that existed when varroa arrived, there were some that had just the right re combination of genetics to resist varroa. As other hives died, these multiplied. So there are genuinely treatment free bees in America now. Also in Britain which also imported bees from every corner of the globe. Here in NZ, we have only had a few importations, and nowhere near the genetic pool of some other countries.
 


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