Moved Time Machine drive - can't see backup.

I was having trouble with my Time Machine drive, which was connected by USB to my Airport Extreme.  I moved the drive to a USB connector on my MacBook Pro to improve the speed, and after formatting the drive, made a complete, new backup with Time Machine, which took about 8 hours.
Then I moved the drive back to the AirPort and told Time Machine to use it for backup.  Time Machine doesn't see the earlier backup (I can verify that it's there using the Finder) and is now doing another complete backup of my MBP.
What's wrong here?  How can I tell Time Machine to use the backup it made yesterday instead of starting over?
Walt

Actually, Tech Support told me that they support only Apple Time Capsules connected to the Air Port Extreme.  They most certainly do NOT support using Seagate drives such the ones I have been using successfully for over three years, on two MBPs.
I firmly believe (but Apple does not want to hear this) that my problem originated with the erratic WIFI connections since I upgraded to Lion, which has been discussed at length in the forums.  Time Machine reported backups failing when the WIFI connection could nto be restored after waking from sleep.
My wife's MBP, running Snow Leopard, is working just fine on the same hardware.
Walt
EDIT:  I tried "Inheriting" the backup that was made via the direct USB connection, but it still doesn't show up in the TM history.  The tmutil program is interesting - it does distinguish between the "machine_directory" - the backups.backupdb folder that was made by the direct USB backup, and the sparse_bundle file that was created by the AirPort backup.

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    Can Repair Permissions : No
    Can Be Verified : Yes
    Can Be Repaired : Yes
    Can Be Formatted : Yes
    Bootable : Yes
    Supports Journaling : Yes
    Journaled : Yes
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    Partition Number : 2
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