# Marla Spivak Black Box TF/ hybrid program



## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

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Interesting reverse soft bond were the breeder queens are treated if needed to protect the genetics(and a back up against bottlenecking) and the daughters are bonded to test the line as its the performance f-1 f-2s from a breeder that matters, no the breeders performance

Should be fun to watch as this progresses


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

Interesting video, MSL. Did Dr. Spivak ever identify the Belgian study that they were basing the program off of?

The one thing that she said that really stuck with me was describing how there needs to be a paradigm shift in our monitoring and treatment of mites.

Specifically she mentioned that we are typically monitoring mites to determine when they exceed a threshold and then we are treating the entire apiary.

Instead, she alluded to the idea that we should also be monitoring mites for progress- when we find a hive with less than 3 mites per 100 bees, we should ask ourselves why...

Interesting project- I hope you will post updates here when you hear about them.

Russ


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

> Did Dr. Spivak ever identify the Belgian study that they were basing the program off of?


About 4-5 seconds in the video she shows the top of this paper, some of the other slides match it as well.. of note its a concept paper/sales pitch (not a study) calling for a bunch of beekeepers to try it as an experiment and see what the results are,








Darwinian black box selection for resistance to settled invasive Varroa destructor parasites in honey bees - Biological Invasions


Established invasive species can pose a continuous threat to biodiversity and food security, thereby calling for sustainable mitigation. There is a consensus that the ubiquitous ecto-parasitic mite Varroa destructor, an invasive species from Asia, is the main biological threat to global...




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> Instead, she alluded to the idea that we should also be monitoring mites for progress- when we find a hive with less than 3 mites per 100 bees, we should ask ourselves why.


nothing new here.. the experts in the field have been saying this for a long time as randy oliver put it "A beekeeper friend asked me the other day, “Why haven’t those danged researchers found us the cure for varroa yet?” I replied, “They have—Marla Spivak’s been on her soapbox for years, telling us what it is " and that was 13 years ago ...lol IPM 2 Fighting Varroa 2: Choosing your Troops: Breeding Mite-Fighting Bees - Scientific Beekeeping

I always found this enlightening 


> selecting “blindly” for resistance, i.e., by using an approach that simply targets low mite infestations. This has already, however, been documented to be a viable breeding approach that has led to honey bees that now are used by both small-scale and commercial beekeepers with no or minimal acaricide input: Russian
> honey bees in the USA (Rinderer et al. 2010; de Guzman et al., 2007) and bees bred by John Kefuss in France (Büchler et al., 2010; Kefuss
> et al., 2004).


Robert G Danka, Thomas E Rinderer, Marla Spivak, and John Kefuss-2013 Comments on: “Varroa destructor: research avenues
towards sustainable control”

4 GIANTS in the field...
Danaka ..VSH
Rinderer "Russian" bees
Spivak Minnesota Hygienic
and Kefuss need no introduction..
these 4 got together and whispered in beekeepers ears, "Pist... here is what has worked repeatability"..... yet few listened

they point out that Kefuss and the USDA Russian were bred by the simple use of mite counts, a few years after this was written Danaka bred the USDA VSH Pol-line based on mite counts.


https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/60500500/PDFFiles/501-600/548-Danka--Selection%20of%20VSH-derived.pdf




> The selection we used (i.e., finding colonies with low end-of-season mite infestations) proved to be useful in lieu of the technically difficult measurements (i.e., measuring rates of hygienic removal of mite-infested brood or percentages of reproducing mites) needed to directly select for high expression of VSH. The technical methods are not well suited for use by commercial bee breeders. Our production of Pol-line honey bee stock using industry-appropriate methods may encourage adoption and further selection of mite-resistant bees


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

Thank you for your reply, MSL- good information as always.

As previously mentioned, I have sincerely taken to heart your admonition about the lessons that can be taken from the success of the Pol-line stock (and others) utilizing MPG and colony health as the primary selection criteria. While I am still not exactly certain how/when/whether to implement targeted artificial selection in my own situation, I am trying to diligently monitor these two factors as primary indicators of a particular stock's potential suitability for further propagation.

I also appreciate you posting the 'Black Box' article- I somehow missed this one entirely. While I can appreciate much of what they espouse, there were a few things that they mention that I found presumptuous and/or curious:

1. The inevitability of Natural Selection establishing a stable Host/Parasite relationship- while I sincerely hope and expect that EHB's and Varroa will develop a stable relationship on a large-scale in relatively short order, I can also appreciate (as you have pointed out) that it could also lead to continued large-scale decline for a long time (in human lifescale) without continued beekeeper intervention.

_'Even though it is inevitable that natural selection would result in A. mellifera adapting to V. destructor if managed colonies were left untreated, this option was not considered in apiculture as the foreseen loss of colonies raised understandable concern over the sustainability of crop pollination and hence food security.'_

2. Selecting for survival, vitality and low mite population growth and then releasing the pressure- While I am just as guilty of this at times, it does seem counterintuitive to select for specific traits and then to step-in preemptively to forestall what pressure would have otherwise brought to bear.

_'All examples used selection on outcome (survival, vitality (which means well developing colonies), or on (slow) mite population growth).'

'After splitting the successfully developing colonies into four nucleus colonies (see Procedure below), in the first year these colonies must be treated against V. destructor once, when the young queens have started laying eggs and prior to brood capping, by spraying with oxalic acid.'

'In our scheme, we avoid an extra selection pressure due to the lack of food by feeding the young colonies with sugar dough. In periods of poor forage, established colonies should also be fed.'_

Otherwise, I do think that the general ethos of the breeding assumptions comports with what I think many of us suspect- 'black box' breeding methods may afford the advantage of preserving multi-factorial and/or yet-unknown resistance/tolerance mechanisms that might be inadvertently bred out by selective breeding to specific discrete traits.

_'Natural selection is therefore ‘inclusive’ as it maintains genetic diversity by keeping all surviving phenotypes in the black box, including possibly rare alleles beneficial for resistance to parasites and pathogens.'_


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

> _After splitting the successfully developing colonies into four nucleus colonies (see Procedure below), in the first year these colonies must be treated against V. destructor once, when the young queens have started laying eggs and prior to brood capping, by spraying with oxalic acid.'_


This isn't about releasing the pressure, its about ensuring the presser is the same for all queens.


If you have a queen with good traits that is started with 2 frames of heavily infested brood you can get a false negative. If you have a poor queen that's started with clean brood it can show a false positive. 
To compare one queen to another you have to start them with about the same mite load, about the same time, and keep them in the same location. outher wize exterior factors can skew the results. 
the easiest way to start them with close to the same mite load is to do a broodless OA


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## Litsinger (Jun 14, 2018)

msl said:


> This isn't about releasing the pressure, its about ensuring the presser is the same for all queens.


Thank you for clarifying, MSL. This makes sense.

Thanks again for posting the presentation and the source document.


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## msl (Sep 6, 2016)

I was a bit surprised you had missed it, its come up here a bit mixed in with seeleys darwiin stuff.
No surprise to anyone I took a dim view of it based on the past data
But (much like the comb project)
With Spivak entering the game it was worth it to say "hey watch this incase what we "know" changes"

in that light I think its important to expand the quote from the 2013 paper in post#3 underlining is mine to make the point 


> selecting “blindly” for resistance, i.e., by using an approach that simply targets low mite infestations. This has
> already, however, been documented to be a viable breeding approach that has led to honey bees that now are used by both small-scale and
> commercial beekeepers with no or minimal acaricide input: Russian honey bees in the USA (Rinderer et al. 2010; de Guzman et al., 2007)
> and bees bred by John Kefuss in France (Büchler et al., 2010; Kefuss et al., 2004).* Resistance in other untreated bees selected for survival
> may be functional but has not been documented with rigorous testing *


Spivak is about to to shine the light of science and test and document if this approach is functional.. my gut (past experiences+data from others) says its a dead end... but if she shifts the data available I am more then willing to shift my views, witch is why I felt this was one for people to watch.


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## GregB (Dec 26, 2017)

msl said:


> This isn't about releasing the pressure, its about ensuring the presser is the same for all queens.


A good idea.
Need to keep in mind.
A good use case - if a promising young queen is dropped into a mite dump, she will be doomed.
I have done several of this myself with a predictable outcome - all died.
In retrospect, mite levels in ALL such colonies need to be brought to the survivable level *initially *if the queens are to be properly tested.


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