VSH queens

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Mummzie

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but I was saving these hives for this experiment plus these were varoa tolerant queens I was testing.
John, I have been doing bee breeding studies, and would value your assessment of the queens.
Were the VSH queens only in those 4 hives? Did you notice an increase of uncapping or brood removal as the varoa load increased?
Were they open mated Queens or Instrument Inseminated?
 
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The short answer is no. The longer answer is that I was very keen on breeding resistant queens in the early days from my own strain of bee's with over 50 years of selection behind them. I went to a course and learned A I . At this time I had a large area where I was the only beekeeper and I was planning to use these hives for testing and breeding up. Along came the manuka boom along with carniolan bees and to be honest I just lost enthusiasm because it all became just too hard. These days I struggle to maintain a decent strain of bee with quietness, high production, wasp resistance and disease resistance without worrying about varoa resistance as well.
When I started beekeeping there were some beautiful bees but on average New Zealand's bees were pretty nasty and unproductive.
There was slow but positive improvement for many years with varoa finally taking out the last of the feral hives and a lot of the let's be polite and call them natural beekeepers. For a few magical years we had stunning bees with well over 80% close to breeder quality and it was usual to go to an apiary and find every single hive as full as the one next to it.
Today's bees are definitely still better than they were 50 years ago but I don't think that anything close to what they were 10 years ago especially with regards to temperament, evenness and disease resistance.
 
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John, I have been doing bee breeding studies, and would value your assessment of the queens.
Were the VSH queens only in those 4 hives? Did you notice an increase of uncapping or brood removal as the varoa load increased?
Were they open mated Queens or Instrument Inseminated?
Mummzie, how do you determine tick resistance? Are you counting, infecting colonies?
 

Mummzie

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My studies were part of learning to breed queens- so very much at introductory level when it came to Varroa resistance.
I would be surprised if there was any colony in NZ that had no varroa and there is much to understand about all the genetics that add towards the trait expressing.
 

yesbut

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I would be surprised if there was any colony in NZ that had no varroa and there is much to understand about all the genetics that add towards the trait expressing.
I know of a colony that has really good DWV sensitive hygiene judging by the pile of immature bees out the front ! I don't think it's gonna make it.
 
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varoa may be present in the hive. The main goal is to prevent varoa from reproducing. I am sure that there are bees with such genetics in NZ, because almost all bees have this trait. This feature needs to be identified.
 
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Mummzie

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I know of a colony that has really good DWV sensitive hygiene judging by the pile of immature bees out the front ! I don't think it's gonna make it.
any speculation on why the (assumed) treatment has failed in this case?-
 

yesbut

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It's a multi - storey nuc, which probably has something to do with it. The full size neighbour is fine. Both had OA in vast quantity.
 


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