I would still like to see some peer reviewed papers that support your view that breeding against propolis adversely impacts bee health/productivity.
I doubt if there have been any studies made of that. The reason will be because its it plain as the nose on your face that it will happen. Nobody will fund that research because its just damn obvious.
It would be like asking for cash to fund research to conclusively determine if dropping a ten pound hammer on a human foot from a height of three meters causes pain. Despite the fact that a scientific study of the effect of tree meter falls of ten pound hammers has never been made its absolutely scientifically unnecessary.
This sort of idea is also fundamental to all breeding. Breeding toward health involves maintaining those genes that supply health. If you breed against them you must expect health in the offspring to suffer. No halfway competent breeder would do that.
Your assertion that removing a benefit equates to causing harm is not correct. It just means that they do not have the benefit. For example, my children have lots of toys, arguably far more than they need. I can take away some of those without them having a 'disbenefit'.
Very well we need to firm up what we mean by 'benefit'. I think when it comes to health benefits their removal at least opens the door to worse health. Take an extreme example: radiation and chemo therapy, together with the removal of lymph nodes disables the human body's immune system. Without extraordinary care severe illness through infection will result.
The removal of a trivial 'benefit' like a child's toy (in circumstances such as you describe) has a commensurate trivial disbenefit.
Also, for your examples:
If the clothes get wet, they make you colder than if you weren't wearing them so removal of them in a cold environment potentially becomes beneficial.
In that case the wearing of clothes was not a benefit.
You can pick holes like this, but all it means is the statements need tightening up. In that example it was obvious to most I'm sure that I meant clothes that were dry and thus warming.
In your examples, you again are not considering the complexity of concurrently responding to multiple different constraints.
That is why I took care to say 'all else being equal'. In scientific experimental method and terminology this is the critical idea of holding all factors other than the one under study steady. A more technical term is ceteris paribus.
" The experimental method involves the manipulation of
variables to establish cause and effect relationships. The key features are controlled methods and the random allocation of participants into
controlled and experimental groups. An experiment is an investigation in which a
hypothesis is scientifically tested. In an experiment, an independent variable (the cause) is manipulated and the dependent variable (the effect) is measured; any extraneous variables are controlled. "
The coin has two sides and this is not a binary situation. For most behaviours to be beneficial, they should not be done to excess as that invariably leads to a loss in competitiveness somewhere else. It is just as conceivable that too much propolis could be a negative.
I agree. But breeding determinedly against propolis in circumstances once it is known to be highly beneficial is a dumb idea.
If you found the hives were overflowing with propolis you would consider moderating or reversing your approach.
This is where natural selection does the work for you. When/where there is a net benefit to generous amounts of propolis it rises in a population. When the reverse is true, it retreats.
