Catherine Thompson's research
Did anyone here attend the lecture by Catherine Thompson at the BIBBA AGM? There's a tantalizingly brief mention in Chris Slade's bee blog but as he always makes a big deal of the fact that he can't read his own notes it might be nice to hear a report from someone else.
Last edited by prakel; 07-04-2014 at 09:30 AM.
I was there. I made a few notes would would have liked copies of her graphs to study at home.
Kate's talk was mainly about ferals which she had collected with a net at the nest entrances. She showed a map of the locations where they had been collected from and, sadly, none were in Wales where ferals seem to abound. The nest entrances faced all directions but SE was the most common.
She tested them for genetic markers and disease load. Her conclusions were briefly that feral genetics reflected the background population of managed populations and did not show any tendency towards the AMM end of the scale. Managed colonies of native breeders showed much more AMM genetics than either ferals or the background populations.
Ferals and untreated managed colonies both showed more DWV than treated colonies and 50% of the ferals she studied died out during the project. She concluded that the view that all ferals are recent swarms which will eventually die out due to varroa is probably true.
The DNA tests were done with 12 bees from each colony and the standard she used for comparison was from samples taken from Colonsay.
Hi Rosie,
Any ferals from Scotland? or any results from the Scottish managed hive samples that had a lot of pure Amm in them
Jimbo, the map she showed of the feral sites did not show the Scottish border and, although I tried to work out where it was the slide was removed before I could manage it. However, if Scottish bees were included in the ferals they will all have been close to the English border. I can't remember if she even showed where the purest managed ones were and suspect that information was not included in the stuff she was able to reveal.
Sorry I can't be more help.
Estimating the Density of Honeybee Colonies across Their Natural Range to Fill the Gap in Pollinator Decline CensusesOriginally Posted by Rosie
RODOLFO JAFFE et al. 2010
Her findings are reflected in this study which found no difference between ferals and the background population either.In Europe honeybees sampled in nature reserves had genetic diversity and colony densities similar to those sampled in agricultural landscapes, which suggests that the former are not wild but may have come from managed hives.
Last edited by Jon; 08-04-2014 at 03:26 PM.
Although disappointing Jon I don't think any of us are surprised by this. It demonstrates how important it is for us to go all out to preserve the stocks that were saved before varroa struck. Wild sources of Amm have all but dried up - at least in England and I suspect elsewhere too. I wish Kate had taken samples from the "Celtic fringes" though because they might have had a better chance of being genuine as they would have been operating closer to the extremes of the honey bee's natural range where Amm traits are more important for survival.
Steve
I never see ferals in my area, just recently escaped swarms in chimneys or roof spaces.
They don't last long.
I sent Kate samples from two of my apiaries. I must e-mail her to see if she can let me know anything about them.
from what I can gather wing morphometry is dead in the water unless you are talking about a population where beekeepers have never selected based on wings.
Remember the little coop map with the 100% AMM claim based on wings?
I had a really interesting conversation last week with a guy from the far western extreme of Donegal.
They have 70 colonies of dark bees in the area and varroa has not arrived yet.
I was unaware that Ireland had any varroa free areas left.
The mites arrives in Sligo/Leitrim in 1998.
No outside colonies have come into the area in living memory and the guy I spoke to is the only beekeeper under 65
There are still feral colonies in the trees.
I spoke to one of the other NIHBS reps about this and we are going to go down and take grafts in a couple of months or ideally get a mated queen to bring back home to graft from.
He said the bees have never been surveyed either.
Last edited by Jon; 08-04-2014 at 03:38 PM.
I don't think wing morphometry is as dead as you think but I take your poiint that it's easy to rely on it too much. Around here we use it after all other criteria have been satisfied and it's used to confirm that the queen had not had a bad mating. I hope we can continue to use it like that for a number of generations. Even Kate stated it works at the pure end of the scale but is not good at detecting how mongrelised a mongrel colony actual is. That Coop thing was corporate hype and was never taken seriously by any of the queen rearers that I know. We were all waiting for the DNA results but we've given up now. I am not just disappointed that we are still waiting for the results but the standard used was Colonsay. I had hoped it would have been indisputable stocks such as museum samples. Because we can't see any reports we can't tell how a Colonsay standard compares with all the previous work done by Pedersen etc. Also how do local natural ecotypes differ from Colonsay? Stocks that Kate thinks are not pure might just be another amm variation so at this stage I feel just as much in the dark as I ever did.
Now this is the type of conversation that gets us amm geeks in a froth
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