This is just a very general comment regarding "leave them alone" beekeeping. This style of beekeeping is neither natural selection nor is it man made breeding and selection. Leave them alone is still using man made hives with colonies concentrated to a density not normally found in nature. Should there be a third category of human influenced selection? Or is all bee breeding today influenced by humans?
Yes, I think there should. 'Beekeeping respectful of the benefits of natural selection' might work for me, but it's a bit of a mouthful!
Isn't 'leave them alone' a bit of a straw man?
The key idea behind allowing bees to find their own route to resistance is that you stop preventing that by keeping unresistant bees alive, and feeding their unresistant genes into the next generation. And that you go on doing that, indefinitely.
With mammals you organise what is called a 'closed' breeding group. You, the (genetic) husbandryman select the parents that make each new generation, and banish all the rest. In that way you avoid nature's wastage. (And you have a system in which a single male can be worth millions)
But you have key controls beekeepers don't have. First, you can easily recognise the strengths you want to maintain and increase. Beekeepers seeking resistance really only have one way of doing that. That is to stop treating and see which survive and thrive. And/or locate bees that have those resistant traits, that is wild, feral, or survivor bees.
Second, the system of closed breeding, allowing you complete control of matings, is not available.
To a) locate, or facilitate a wild population, and let natural selection do it's magic, and b) draw on the results, and improve them, seems to be the obvious available route, given those things lacking to breeders of other lifeforms. It is demonstrated to work.
A Bond test may be part of your plan. But it is a process with an end in sight. Once you have located functional genes, and can can draw on them, you can rapidly spread them. And of course from then on you eliminate any weak individuals by requeening from the stronger, continuously.
I'm sure you know all this. I'm responding mainly to try to clarify things for others.
I agree fully with your statement about unnatural densities. But I don't think there is an optimum. Wild populations tend to build according to energy and nesting availability. That might mean a new disease will knock down more in any one location, but it would probably have knocked down the same proportion in any concentration.
