Colonsay reserve approved!

[Jon]

Any figures on annual output ?

300 per year.
Next year there will be more of us trying to up the supply.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi Prakel
I see your point about co-operation and the lone beekeeper
In the spot where I live there are a fair few beekeepers but loads of beehives come to the rape and then disappear later when its over.
Honestly if somebody brought in a Carniolan Queen or two next to me it wouldn't have any effect there are hundreds arriving every year
One of the biggest commercial beekeepers said in a podcast that the local drone population was improved by his bees
That is probably true in my apiary because the bees I have will already be very Carniolan in character
If I was beekeeping next to Gavin I would try and not mess up his efforts of course
This year though a lot of Italian bees came in and I don't think anybody liked that idea too much

It's not a good climate for Italian bees to thrive in and the season is too short.
Fortunately any unfavourable traits of excess stores consumption and late brood rearing may quickly disappear again because hybrid bees are likely to adjust quickly to their environment

[prakel]

One of the biggest commercial beekeepers said in a podcast that the local drone population was improved by his bees

I believe that I've listened to it at some point in past. No doubt that good bees en masse can improve the local population, I think the issues that affect those of us working on a small scale start to occur when an unbalanced incursion occurs; just a few odd queens of maybe very different origins being moved into an area by one or more beekeepers.

[Blackcavebees]

I'll start with a disclaimer: I'm a convert to AMM and local queen rearing. AMM suits my local conditions and climate: My apiary is on a cliff looking over Mull and part of Aryshire coast.

EVERY beekeeper should be breeding to improve his stocks and not depending on swarmy bees to propogate a lottery gene pool. You get the traits you select for. Andrew has a closed area for breeding. While the rest of us are not so fortunate we can get together in queen rearing groups in a locale and flood the area with selected bred drones to stack the odds in our favour in DCAs and encourage AVM. I'll take 12/15 bred drone matings as a success story - ok in open mating I've still got a small percentage of stripey bees but stocks are improving.

Why is it that most beekeepers do not breed bees? And why do commercial operations not develop sustainable queen rearing on a large enough scale, even if it means developing over wintering systems for queens in mini maxi nucs or over production colonies? The simple answer seems to be INCENTIVE. Now the economics are such that it is more profitable to import 12-15,000 queens early in the season from warmer countries. So now the incentive is economic, but what if that incentive changed?

Two weeks ago I visited a Honey Farm in Tennessee. For years they brought in new queens from Georgia and Florida (and I think California). Because of the africanisation of honeybees in some states they have developed their own queen rearing and breeding programme, and currently breed 1000+ queens pa for their own operation. Was it more costly to begin with? Yes, but the incentive switched from cheapest cost to one of breeding for sub species purity out of necessity. OK, we don't have africanised colonies to deal with, but what will it take for large scale bee breeding to take place here? I hope it won't be disease, but we are sitting on a ticking bomb bringing in the quantities of queens that we do.

Meanwhile, I'm up to my oxters in mating nucs in the workshop, building away, getting ready for 2014 queen rearing season!

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi BlackCave
I agree with everything you say in your post
Best of luck on the AMM front
Clearly even a few non AMM hives in your area can have a strong effect on your breeding program
Oil seed rape is the single most powerful driver of imports I think because it appears so early and yields heavily
How could a commercial operation resist that driving imports
To some extent rape is only grown because of subsidy and has led to the potato/grain/rape three crop rotation
Perhaps we should positively encourage the existing queen sellers to offer AMM as well
I think the difficulty of any pure race breeding program might be like my chickens
I have a run with a maran, a cream legbar, and an appenzeler, hen running around with an Arucana cockerel
If I hatched any of those eggs I would have none of those breeds If I went on and crossed those I might find a few that looked like a maran but they wouldn't breed true and perhaps even a whole lifetime of breeding I would not get back to one of the original breeds.

What I could do though is breed from the ones I had in a closed system, as you described and I could end up with something which was a stable hybrid
That is what the Cream Legbar in fact is similar to the Buckfast bee
So if you follow that plan you can recreate something like AMM but it really is a different bee (I think Gavin is attempting this)
Because of where I am though closed mating is not possible so the 20 or so hives I am running at the moment are a drop in a genetic ocean
In the 1920s L E Snelgove pointed out that in two seasons a whole apiary could be completely converted to any pure race providing the mating area was closed to other drones
Crucially though that relies on pure bred queens with no hybridisation being available (luckily you only need a few in each of the years)
You lucky devil being on Mull

[Jon]

There must be a Mull in Co Antrim then!

In the 1920s L E Snelgove pointed out that in two seasons a whole apiary could be completely converted to any pure race providing the mating area was closed to other drones

It's not complicated.
Get a pure race queen and requeen all colonies with her daughters in year one.
These produce pure race drones.
Year two get an unrelated queen which is your breeder queen you take grafts from.

[Adam]

It is easy to say that BIBBA should do this, that or the other, but as with most associations there are no paid staff! The members (and especially the committee members) are scattered all over the country so it would be very difficult to organise some sort of central breeding station to distribute breeder queens. It would probably make for a great deal of work from people who will not profit from it - in stark contrast to the profits being made by the importers. Until the amateurs work together as a force it is unlikely that any great progress will be made. BIBBA's first 50 years has been a disaster; the question is whether amateur beekeepers are willing to change that. Many will sit holding their hands out expecting to be offered stock - but how many are willing to pay seriously good money for it - and then work to distribute locally?

I guess that it is not 'ask what BIBBA can do for you...'.

There is also a problem in that those who have the good stock are not necessarily willing to share it.

Unless there is serious funding then I'm not sure what BIBBA can really do.

I do like the idea of using the Isle of Wight as a large breeding station.

[Jon]

Bibba has had serious funding from the co-op. Tens of thousands.
A lot of it went on the UK morphometry survey which 'proved' that the native bee was alive and well.
You will note there is a big black bee sitting over Roger Patterson's apiary in West Sussex.
The NI black bee must be from a couple of samples I sent in.
I would also hazard a guess that the North Wales black bee belongs to Steve Rose and the Rosneath bee must be Jimbo's!

The follow up, if it has taken place, is what interests me.

The first round of testing which involved examining physical attributes such as abdominal colour, the length of body hair and the pattern of veins in the wings of bees in 117 hives across 40 locations will now be followed up with genetic analysis involving DNA testing.

It is long overdue that we have a serious comparison between morphometric characteristics and microsatellite DNA in order to see how useful (or not) morphometry is to native bee breeders.

If I had access to that kind of funding I would use it to establish breeding groups, a website to centralise sales, and an organizational structure which allowed for the production and distribution of breeding material.

[Blackcavebees]

You lucky devil being on Mull

Not ON Mull, looking over the narrow sea at the Mull. County Antrim coast. If I can't see Scotland it's raining, if I can then rain is on the way!

With Jon as our inspiration and with his help we've formed a local queen rearing group and have identified a possible site between Larne and Ballymena we are going to try next year. No beekeepers within 7 miles except one who keeps AMM, and those have been requeened with Galtee daughters from our queen rearing with Jon in Belfast this year. Hopefully it works out well. You have to make the effort or everything will stay the same.

[Jimbo]

Hi Jon,

I sent lots of samples to Cathrine Thompson for the DNA analysis from samples I got from various areas of Scotland that showed good wing morphometry and have heard nothing since.
I currently have about 90 samples of wings from Ewan Campbell's Acarine study from various locations in Scotland to try and map Amm locations. There are Amm turning up everywhere in Scotland and in some locations I would not have expected. There is also a few pure carnica samples also turning up as well as the usual hybrids. I did not want to publicise the fact there are other Amm strongholds in Scotland until Andrew got his protection for Colonsay. The aim is to try and map the Amm areas more precise than just sticking an image of a big black bee on a map