Georgia! thats a bit far off
Crieff looks more promising
If I could just pin down that green eyed gene what a great USP
The propolis would be handy for the health food shops as well
Georgia! thats a bit far off
Crieff looks more promising
If I could just pin down that green eyed gene what a great USP
The propolis would be handy for the health food shops as well
Don't worry DR ... that's all possible with transgenics ... here's a fruitfully, but you could do the same thing with bees and a bit of effort
fly_fluor.jpg
Kind of on topic because they probably used a virus to splice some genes from school crossing lady into the fly
I could do with something like that for monitoring queens leaving mininucs
I love the fact that all the Amm fanboys ignore the fact that the black bee was reintroduced to the UK.
Where were yours imported from. ?
I'm not sure if 'fear' is the right word, but I'd prefer to see more caution about importing stuff ... particularly when we either don't test at all, or don't know what to test for. Over the last year or two there have been reports of new strains of DWV, some virulent, others apparently avirulent. There's a lot of paralysis viruses being reported in some stocks. None of these things are tested for in any of the packages, nucs, queens etc. that are imported.
It's clear from human disease - AIDS, Ebola, SARS - that global transport has played the primary role in widespread transmission. From identification it took just a few months for SARS to spread to 5 continents. Thankfully, it was a pretty poorly infectious virus, only causing ~8000 cases of which 10% died. Natural barriers to disease transmission ... isolation, oceans, absence of suitable vectors etc. are all bypassed by rapid global transport.
A particularly good example is measles in Fiji. In the days of sailing boats, carrying relatively small numbers from India to Fiji, the trip took so long that patients incubating the disease either died or recovered during the journey, and those they infected likewise, until all the people of the ship had either succumbed or were no longer incubating the virus. Once they introduced steamships - carrying many more people, much faster - they had a a measles epidemic on Fiji that killed ~50,000 people (in 1875 ish ...), one third of the population.
With current checks, a new (or enhanced virulence) bee pathogen that evolved on the other side of the world (or at least the other side of Europe) would be here within weeks or months, possibly before those at or near the source were even aware it was present. Those arguing for unrestricted movement of any livestock around the world, or justifying it's OK because it's what we've always done, need to appreciate the potential consequences.
So, I fear the diseases we don't know about ... they'll be here before you know it.
How about unrestricted movement around Scotland? Any of your mysterious unknown viruses are just as likely to develope in the UK first. So of course no sales at all should be allowed. Drones should have to be culled or clipped to stop them hive hopping around the country ( god forbid into England) no moving to the heather or osr. Isolation zones around apiaries.
Who knows what's out there.
Fear of the unknown, I love it.
What's to say that it won't be Beekeepers that are the carriers of your unknown killers. Beekeepers globally should be confined to their apiary, passports withdrawn and certainly an absolute ban on Beekeepers coming into contact with other Beekeepers.
After all that's no less possible than your imaginary viruses.
Do you sleep in a germ tent ? I doubt you sleep at all with so much to worry about.
Mine are a mixture of what was originally here and whatever genes successfully made it into the gene pool, as far as I know.
In my opinion the tone of your posting is unpleasant trolling, and being a fan of rare breeds is a far superior position to being a nasty and pointlessly disparaging sort of person.
Last edited by mbc; 08-02-2016 at 09:13 AM.
Well, to be fair I'm getting a lot of pointless answers from those against imports, like yours and the one from fatshark , both spouting your ignorance based fear as reason for an import ban. but I noticed you didn't see fit to critique DR for his blatant sarcasms, so I'll assume insulting the importers is fine just not the other way round. Do you simply accuse anyone who disagrees with you of trolling ?
Perhaps next time you're faced with a question like" what viruses is it you're scared of being imported".
If you don't have an answer, try not giving one.
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