Welcome!

[gavin]

It could be a good idea to start a queen-raising section but I think that I'll leave it until next season now. One reason for starting a Scottish forum was that attitudes are quite different here. I was surprised at the number of people in these English fora who prefer to keep exotic strains and buy in queens regularly. Here it is probably fair to say that the majority view is that local is best, and that amongst the local types the original native type still exists and should be given help to persist. One of the bigger commercial beekeepers near me also likes to keep the genepool diverse as you put it - and so my bees get an interesting range of mates. Sometimes the crosses are vigorous and sometimes they make very angry bees indeed. A small group of us are planning an isolated mating site to try to keep selected, productive, gentle native types pure - with a bit of breeding you can recover really good bees from native stock.

all the best

Gavin

[beebreeder]

Thats probably the difference, when we had a Galtee queen and we talked AMM most of the beekeepers at our meetings did not have a clue what we were talking about and when the word BOUGHT queen with MONEY was mentioned a lot of them got the shakes. We also have very little area where isolated mating could be even half guaranteed, but a friend on exmoor knows of a place that if you put out apidea with virgins in they would never get mated as there are no other bees in the area and its low in a valley. The problem however would be keeping the strain pure enough without inbreeding problems as you have been talking of in another thread, has II ever been talked about or is that frowned upon north of the border?
kev
I do agree fully about native stock and selective breeding can give good tempered, prolific bees with disease resistance, ( I am in the same county as Ron Hoskins and know him and his work well)

[gavin]

I would say that II is seldom talked about - simply because it is rather too technical rather than any frowning! Maybe we can have a Ron Hoskins discussion in another thread?

[beebreeder]

Good idea Gavin, see what the concensus is on the subjuct, a guy willing to stay up to 2.00am in the morning inspecting mites both mature and nymphs has got dedication.
kev

[Alvearium]

Hullo Kev
Good to hear from the deep south and hope you find our forum interesting. Mostly we are trying to breed from our best local stocks and things are slowly getting off the ground here in Fife. The idea is to try to keep within our local strain while making sure we have a good gene pool. This way we hope to be able to fix desirable characteristics more easily. We have a real problem when there is an influx of Carniolans as the cross matings show a lot more aggressive tendencies. We had a good queen rearing course at the end of May and are pushing on with our plans for a late November course on 'Breeding Better Bees for Scotland'. Self sufficiency is the name of the game! I am getting very interested in the possibilities of bees with hygienic behaviour that are able to handle varroa. Do you have any news on that front?
Alvearium

[Jimbo]

Hi Kev,

I agree with Alvearium we are trying to breed from our local stocks and improve the strain of native bees. On the West Coast of Scotland we do not have the same problems as the people in Fife or Central belt of Scotland. We do not have large scale commerial bee farmers importing in other strains of bees. What we do have in our local stocks is a high percentage of native or near native Amm which we are trying to preserve. Once we can fix the strain and breed good quality native bees we might look at II but at the moment there is no need.
Jimbo

[Brian]

Well done Gavin. I wish I'd had access to such as this 20-25 years ago. The mistakes I've made - a lot of them painful too! To those just starting out on the road - ignore the cost of fancy stainless steel extractors with timers, thermostats and tea making add-ons. Get a hive and if, necessary, scrape your first frames of honey into a bog standard sieve sitting over a clean pot. Beekeeping is like every other hobby - it is only as expensive as you make it. Good luck all.
Brian

[beebreeder]

Hi Jimbo, Alvearium and Gavin
If we still had any semblance of AMM in our area it would be a miracle, but Ron Hoskins has got something going and its a great pity that all his pics and research was on the Moray Beekeepers site but that has changed servers and its all gone at the moment, but suffice to say that Ron has pots and pots of mites plus microscope photos of damaged varroa and all sorts of damage, his floor inserts are insect proof so nothing else causing it but then 18 months ago he started finding varroa nymths on the insert (they are white or virtually transparent) obviously being uncapped by grooming bees. His work is moving on from that in that he is trying to set up beekeepers in an ever increasing radius of his site with nucs and monitoring kit to check that grooming is still going on in the progeny, the idea being as the area gets bigger more and more drones will be around from grooming colonies, its a very long term project but as I stated earlier for a guy Rons age to be counting mites under a microscope at 2.00 am does show dedication to the cause.
kev

[Poly Hive]

Hello Gavin,

thought I should have a presence on my home turf as it were, although currently living in the south.

Some may remember me as "Spirtle" from the magazine.

PH

[gavin]

Welcome PH, and also Pete L, EmsE and all the other folk joining up since I last said something here. Also a special hello to anyone at yesterday's bee breeding event at Scotlandwell.

Now to try fighting my way through some snowdrifts ...

G.