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  1. #51
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Andrew on Colonsay will prioritise the supply of queens to those he thinks will multiply up from them. We had a conversation about this at the Bibba conference.
    He produces fairly limited numbers of queens and prefers to try and get maximum impact from them.

    England is pretty much a lost cause for Amm in the sense that the bee population is completely mixed. However, there is scope to form breeding groups which could work with Amm material brought in from parts of Scotland Ireland or Wales. Most of the queens I sold last summer went to GB.
    Last edited by Jon; 17-02-2015 at 12:04 PM.

  2. #52
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    Where I found good measurements in the 1990's: Aberdeenshire, Kincardinshire and Morayshire.

    Might be a good idea to mail all the associations as not everyone by far is involved with the SBA.

    PH

  3. #53
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Problem as Jim says is finding varroa free Amm stock to move to other varroa free areas.
    The last varroa free area I know of in Ireland in Glencolumbkille got its first mites last summer when some eejit moved a colony into the area.
    I did wing morphometry on a small sample of those and they looked good.

  4. #54

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    I have a good knowledge of Moray particularly and it's been a free for all in terms of bee strains for a good few years now. Especially since the ease of online queen ordering

  5. #55
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    All you need is 3 or 4 breeders with good stock and you can multiply up as many queens as needed for those interested in working with native stock.
    Andrew's stock has been repeatedly tested and was the least hybridised of any Amm stock examined from various European sources.
    If you get two unrelated queens and use the daughters of one to head up all the drone colonies at the mating site and use the other to take grafts from, you are up and running with just two queens.

  6. #56
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    To go down the line of varroa free is frankly rather short sighted.

    Why would anyone assume that varroa will conveniently stay away?

    PH

  7. #57
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    It wont stay away but when you get beginners buying in bees from the English mail order companies into varroa free areas you can see why people got annoyed.

  8. #58
    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    And Scottish bee sellers too.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Tomorrow evening in a pub in deepest Kinrosshire we're having a meet-up of a little group that met over a year ago to consider starting a regional breeding group. Year 2 is about to begin. We've made significant progress, involving people from different local associations, and the experience has encouraged me to follow Jon into a cottage industry bee raising business (using a different queen raising site from this group to be set up in the coming months). Stocks come from various parts of Scotland and include dark bees that trace back through the maternal line to a man who kept bees obtained from Bernard Mobus in Aberdeenshire. We have Colonsay bees too, as well as dark stocks from two other places on the mainland. As we have not (apart from one small example) used wing morphometry for selection we will use it cautiously (along with checking other visible traits carefully) to help select breeders for 2015.

    One of our fellow conspirators was a main organiser of the queen rearing course in Summer 2010 and the winter bee breeding workshop in late 2010. Both were very well attended, showing that there is indeed a broad interest in this in Scotland. Jimbo presented, and Margie (who would be another key individual in an Amm movement) sent a presentation (snow keeping her away). We filled Portmoak Hall which was some achievement so I think a Scottish NIHBS could get off to a flying start. Details of the workshop are still here: http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/

    I'd prefer to plan to hold a well-publicised meeting later in the year (if we're going to do this), given that the active bee season is almost upon us. I'll discuss this with our co-conspirators tomorrow and report back. Gerry, Jimbo and anyone interested, maybe we should discuss a little first? Worth a private forum area for this?

    Someone at Llangollen - maybe Kate - showed a graph that implied that colonies at the end of a big scatter plot did fit racial origins fairly well but the ones in the middle (hybridised ones) had no relationship between wing traits and racial origin. Once you have a queen that is hybridised herself at the chromosome level (rather than just carrying sperm from another type of bee) then that's it: her progeny will always be mixed.

  10. #60
    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Poly Hive View Post
    To go down the line of varroa free is frankly rather short sighted.

    Why would anyone assume that varroa will conveniently stay away?

    PH
    It conveniently stayed away from Mull, Colonsay, Orkney and until last summer Sutherland too for the almost 20 years it has been in Scotland. Ardnamuchan a year or two before. Nirvana for beekeeping and useful material for scientists studying viruses. OK, for two of these places someone, against local advice, brought in bees with Varroa but the bees and the Varroa died out before it spread. I spent a significant amount of time helping to keep these areas Varroa-free and I don't consider the effort short-sighted.

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