What is the thinking behind the cubital index morphology ?

[Jon]

The thing is if you keep a race which no-one else keeps in your area you will have to requeen almost every year as it will be impossible to rear pure race queens from open mating.
For beginners whose bees swarm and requeen themselves naturally this is a recipe for disaster as a gentle colony could end up very aggressive when it gets its new queen.
I think the Galtee group is a very good example for others to follow as a group of beekeepers is working towards a common goal of bee improvement in their local area.
You have to counter the propaganda as there are loads of Buckfast beekeepers who trot out the stale old propaganda about black bees being vicious. Mine aren't. Any pure race bees from a decent breeding programme should be fine to work with. It is the random crosses and the hybrids which cause all the problems.

[The Drone Ranger]

Well it was a long wet Summer last year followed by a hard winter
High winter losses

If the theories are correct then the bee population should have veered back toward AMM
It would be a shame if the imports were to push the balance back before anyone has a chance to measure the changes

[Jon]

Well it was a long wet Summer last year followed by a hard winter
High winter losses

If the theories are correct then the bee population should have veered back toward AMM

The native bee people make that claim over and over but I'm not so sure about it.
Locally, the losses were bad irrespective of bee race.
I know people with yellow mongrels who lost the lot but I also know native bee people who had bad losses as well.
The main factor this year was colony size. Nucs and colonies understrength in the autumn had no chance.

[gavin]

Same in Scotland as far as I can make out. The losses are more down to husbandry than anything. If you had Varroa properly under control, and had some autumn or late summer brood raising (location or feeding), and fed for the winter, and had top-up feed as required directly over the cluster, then the losses were moderate in full-sized colonies. The small ones suffered badly. Get any of that wrong and your colonies were toast, whether Amm-ish or Carnie-ish.

There is one thing I'd really like to know. Dark worker bees clearly fly in poorer weather than the S European types. Was their queen mating (and drone flying) also better last summer when mating windows were very scarce?

[Jon]

I think my queens mated fine. They were laying decent pattern with no gaps and there was no sign of excess drone brood.
I would blame my own losses on other factors rather than poor queen mating. It is an easy cop out to say poor mated queen, had no chance.
varroa was not a big factor in my losses either. I blame sustained poor nutrition due to bad weather and early shutdown of brood rearing in the autumn. My colonies that I lost just ran out of bees. I saved a couple of queens from colonies which were down to apidea size and these are now roaring away and laying well having been caged and introduced to a couple of frames of bees and brood. That would suggest as well that poor mating was not the problem - just lack of bees. When you have poorly mated queens they try and supersede in August and September and that did not happen.

[The Drone Ranger]

You might be right Jon
The bad weather windows might have led to mating nearer the apiary though.
The unusual thing I found was nearly all the colonies made it through but a couple became drone layers and another couple just didn't make any headway
They are still around just small
That's 5 out of 15 =1 dead(drone layer), 2 drone laying in Spring , 2 just no vigour
They are all queen issues one way or another

[Jon]

Drone Laying queens are extremely rare in my experience. I do get the odd one but mostly I just see it with queens which go stale after too long in the apidea and they start to lay drone after about 30 days.