Wednesday wordphile: survivor stock

Recently, during a discussion with a professor of entomology who is also a beekeeper, I used the term “survivor stock.” He looked at me as if I’d just left my ship hovering above a corn field, slid down the chute, and landed on three feet.

It reminded me of why I write Wednesday Wordphile in the first place: because a word or term that is obvious to one person may be completely foreign to another. Nothing jeopardizes communication faster.

Okay, so survivor stock can be any organism that survives a stressful event and lives to tell about it. The “event” can be anything that a scientist wants to study. With honey bees, the event may be winter. Or it may be a predator, pathogen, parasite, or poison. The survivors of the event are then used to breed more bees in the hope that the genetics that allowed survival will be passed on to the next generation.

Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. Some other random or unknown cause may have allowed certain individuals to survive, and this external (or exogenous) variable may have nothing to do with the bees’ genetics. But you don’t know that in the beginning, so you experiment. You raise bees from the survivors and see if those bees can survive similar conditions.

Today the term is most often associated with Varroa mites. The survivor stock is comprised of bees that successfully overwintered in the presence of Varroa mites with no chemical treatments. If the offspring of these bees is also able to survive in the presence of mites, breeders will be on their way to producing a Varroa-resistant strain.