The release of ARS Russian honey bees

For most of this decade, the Honey Bee Breeding, Genetics, and Physiology Laboratory of the USDA, Agricultural Research Service has been studying honey bees from Primorsky Territory, on the Pacific coast of Russia. We are interested in honey bees in that area since settlers from European Russia started bringing Apis mellifera, the western honey bee, to the area in the mid 1800's (E. Crane, Bee World, 59:164-167, 1978), The area is within the natural range of Apis cerana, the eastern hive bee and its external mite parasite, Varroa jacobsoni Since this is one of the longest known associations of the western honey bee and V jacobsoni we speculated that natural selection operating on the honey bee populations in the area had one of the best chances to produce resistance to V jacobsoni.