Thursday, January 22nd, 2026 at 6:30PM – 8:30PM (EST)
This is a free event with donations optional. All proceeds go toward beekeeper education, future speaker events, and further development and outreach efforts of the SBGMI.
Join us for a free webinar discussing how selecting and breeding for mite resistance is only as strong as the measurements used to identify “better” colonies. In this presentation, Dr. Harris will examine why resistance signals can be difficult to reproduce across yards, seasons, and operators and how unmanaged variation (environment, management, drift/immigration pressure, colony condition, and sampling noise) can masquerade as genetics. Drawing on his experience breeding for Varroa resistance and his current focus on Varroa control dynamics, he will outline common failure points in selection programs: inconsistent protocols, inadequate replication, over-reliance on single-timepoint assessments, and thresholds that do not account for uncertainty.
This webinar will discuss practical strategies to improve decision-quality: standardizing field methods, using repeated measures, building simple but defensible comparison designs (within-yard controls and cross-yard validation), and interpreting colony performance through the lens of both biological and measurement variability.
Jeff Harris is a beekeeping extension specialist at Mississippi State University (Starkville, MS), with more than 50 years of hands-on beekeeping experience dating back to when he began keeping bees at age eight. He has worked in a commercial beekeeping operation in Montgomery, Alabama, supporting queen production, package-bee sales, and honey production. After earning his PhD from Louisiana State University, he spent over 15 years as a researcher with USDA-ARS in Baton Rouge, where his work included breeding honey bees for resistance to Varroa mites. More recently, his research has emphasized acaricide resistance in Varroa and the development of safer miticides, alongside a primary appointment in extension.