Definite sign of a feline in there!
I hope this colony is queenright and survives over winter as I would love to take a few grafts from it and see how they turn out.
Kate has a paper out on Plos One.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%...l.pone.0105164
I suspect there's another paper in the pipeline ... this one has no mention of the genetic relatedness of feral and managed colonies, but a few large hints in the intro and discussion. There's an interesting difference between the prevalence of DWV in the colonies reported here and the recent study by Furst et al., ... 100% here, 34% (if my increasingly dodgy memories serves me correctly) in the Nature paper.
Kate shows similar levels of DWV in untreated managed colonies and feral colonies. We know what happens to the majority of the former in a bad winter ...
fatshark - your PM box is full.
Apologies … now empty
Also BQCV is ubiquitous in her study - is that to be expected?Originally Posted by fatshark
G.
Not sure, but the commercials around here are talking about it as becoming a problem. I can't remember the numbers quoted by FERA in unofficial results from the random apiary survey (for BQCV).
Murray McGregor says that his bees over time return to the dark strains.
Mobus found the founder of his "Maud" strain err.. in Maud.
Now whether you believe or not that the wing measurements are an indicator I found indications of AMM in Aberdeenshire, Morayshire and Perthshire. Given that the native wants to survive and the climate self selects I would gently suggest that there is hope yet. It's a case of looking.
PH
AMM genetics is the biggest part of the background bee population in the UK, something around 40-60%.
Someone at the Bibba conference presented data, can't remember who it was but I think it was either Kate or the person who stood in for Giles Budge.
I would expect the percentage to be much higher in parts of Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Andrew Abraham's bees on Colonsay seemed to have the least introgression from other subspecies.
Bear in mind those videos you have showing French AMM arriving in Scotland in the 1930s!
Sure they are. Bernard stated often about the "French invasion" but he was still convinced that native AMM was here.
PH
I don't doubt that for a second and I think in the UK and Ireland we also had a fair number of French and Dutch Amm colonies arrive in the first half of the 20th Century.
That's not a problem for me.
BTW, Kate is absolutely convinced that Wing morphometry is only of use in populations that have not been hybridised, and given that most UK bees are hybridised, it tends to get used in the wrong way here. The technique was developed by Ruttner and he never intended it to be used to try and pick out 'more Amm' or 'less Amm' bees from hybridised populations. She found no correlation between the % AMM according to the wings and the underlying microsatellite markers. She said at the Bibba conference that the way it is used by the vast majority here is totally erroneous. Went down like a lead balloon obviously.
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