Neonach

Disappointment ... and Recovery?

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A bit of an understatement, that. Devastated? Well, not that bad. Bad news certainly. I'm now certain that all the queens that were raised and have survived this year are infertile. That leaves me where I was back in the spring, on a knife edge. I badly need disease-free Amm nucs next spring, but as yet I'm at a loss to know where to get them. The lesson I've learnt from this year is that I cannot afford to take anything for granted, whether it be the supply of nucs/queens (that never materialized), or early queen cells that then seemed superfluous but now seem like an opportunity missed. The queens I raised were ready for mating when the weather was already starting to become predominantly unsuitable for the purpose. I've now got to make sure that what I have survives the winter (of that I'm confident) and that next spring I make the most of the early foraging opportunities and that I do everything I can to stimulate and support colony growth, with a view to new queens mating in late May or early June - when the weather here is the most promising (though this May gone was uncharacteristically appalling). First item on the action plan: make fondant for winter feed and fill up the Ashforths. Second item on the action plan: make renewed efforst to find a source of clean Amm's for next Spring.

I know weather conditions here are exceptionally difficult and outside the range of the vast majority of beekeepers, but the main difficulty is not that, but the fact that there are no other honey bees here, feral or kept. But the foraging resource is huge, albeit over a relatively short season, but with an abundance and variety of wild flowers and heather that would be the envy of elsewhere. The greatest challenge in this context comes from starting too small, which I did. I need more bees, simple as that.

It does make me wonder whether limiting myself to Amm is really sensible: if bee varieties interbreed freely and successfully given the chance (and that is nature's way of adapting and surviving), then why don't we exploit that intelligently, rather than rigidly resist it on pseudo-ethical grounds. What would be the best option for inter-breeding, with a view to both widening my choices for obtaining bees, and to develop the bees I have here to be more successful under the conditions?

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  1. Jon's Avatar
    I'm now certain that all the queens that were raised and have survived this year are infertile.
    Have they become drone layers or what do you mean by infertile?
    It's not really possible to rear queens with just a couple of colonies on an isolated island which has no other beekeepers because of the lack of drone producing colonies.
    If you want to get control of the timetable you have to graft larvae into a cell raising colony.

    There are many beekeepers keeping AMM or AMM type bees, especially in Scotland.
    Jimbo who posts regularly on the forum keeps AMM.

    Your problem may well be sourcing them from a varroa free area.

    I don't think bees which originate from further south are likely to survive under your extreme conditions.
    The further North and West you go in the UK, the more the conditions favour AMM.