Maud bees

[Rosie]

It's supposed to be an adaptation to a cold climate. The closer to the equator a bee is then the lighter it becomes. Dark bees are meant to be better able to absorb the sun's rays and hence can fly in cooler conditions. This means they are more successful than light ones and the advantage that confers means they will survive and breed more. The Aussie bees that Andrew was talking about were in the mountainous West of Tasmania where the climate is better suited to black than yellow. I understand though that the Amm queens in Tasmania are quite light.

[prakel]

Andrew Abrahams, Bee Improvement #38.

It is also worth considering that the Black Bee is also the "survivor" in Australia's dry, arid bush. I talked with both Don Keith and Laurie Dewar in Queensland about my interest in Black Bees. Both these long experienced bee farmers and queen breeders expressed their own doubts about the Black Bees' commercial worth, but said that if stocks of pure Italians were abandoned in the Australian bush, they would, after about ten years (5-6 generations) have reverted to blacks.

[Pete L]

It's supposed to be an adaptation to a cold climate. The closer to the equator a bee is then the lighter it becomes.

More to do with climate i would say, as there are black bees living more or less bang on the equator.

[Rosie]

Thanks Prakel. That would appear to blow the cold climate theory out of the water. I know that Andrew spent a lot of time with Tasmanian beekeepers and has delivered presentations on the subject but I did not know, or had forgotten, that he had been told that mainland Aussie feral bees tended to go dark. It could be, of course, that something other than climate was favouring the Amm in the bush so the Italians were just being overwhelmed with Amm genetics rather than changing colour themselves. I wonder how they knew that the bees they found turning black were the same ones they had lost 10 years earlier.

[Duncan]

Don't forget that AMC is also widely used in Australia. Maybe there are more carnica feral colonies due to their high swarming and that is where the dark genes are coming from.

[Poly Hive]

He had 8 he said.

PH

[prakel]

he said.

Who said? 8 what?

[lindsay s]

I hope this clears up my last post and gives you a better idea about the arrival of Maud bees in Orkney.
Hugh Clyde was my mentor and I spoke to his wife yesterday to make sure I had my facts right. Hugh was from Peebles and was taught beekeeping from an early age by his father. He moved to Orkney in 1963 to start his own pharmacy business and he soon started beekeeping up here. He kept Italian bees for a short time but didn’t like their temperament or suitability for Orkney’s climate. He soon became an advocate for the native black bee and kept meticulous notes on the performance of each hive. Hugh made contact with most of Orkney’s beekeepers and he encouraged many new people to start this hobby me included. He often used to say if there was money in beekeeping he would have never become a pharmacist.
Bernard Mobus used to stay with Hugh when he was in Orkney and they held demonstrations at the Voresheed apiary. It was through this contact that he was introduced to Bernard’s strain of bees. Queens were often sent up from the S.A.C. apiary at Craibstone near Aberdeen and it was not long before Hugh started breeding his own line of bees at Voresheed. For many years most of the bees in the Kirkwall area were either kept at or had come from Voresheed and any other imports were sourced dark bees (mine included) so there was very little cross mating. Hugh would send bees south to friends and say they were from the Maud strain. I’ve got a copy of a report on his bees from May 2000 and it starts off with “The Kirkwall samples are impressive, both are excellent examples of pure apis mellifera mellifera honeybees”.
Hugh died in January 2004 and an obituary was printed in the April 2004 Scottish Beekeeper. His family asked me to sort out his apiary and distribute his bees to Orkney’s beekeepers, there were 16 colonies kept in various types of hives. His son Torquil who is known to some members of this forum kept a few; I took one and the rest went to different parts of Orkney. I could have gotten more but I didn’t have spare hives at the time. With hindsight I wish I’d taken up the offer. As I said in my last post his strain is now no longer pure but the majority of colonies here are dark and a lot have a high percentage of AMM traits. One of mine was about 94% AMM in 2011.

[drumgerry]

Fascinating stuff Lindsay. Perhaps you're aware that the one of the first orders of business of the new SNHBS is to embark on a survey of Scotland's AMM gene pool. Sounds like you have some valuable material in Orkney.

[Jon]

Torquil did a presentation about Orkney bees and beekeeping at the Bibba conference in Tipperary in 2010.