Urgently looking for source of pure Amm for remote disease free island

[Neonach]

Please respond if you can supply July/August 2011 a minimum of two nucs of Amm from stocks certified free of disease, to help scale-up potentially very significant Amm population in disease-free part of Hebrides. More required in 2012 and probably also in following years. If you can't, but you know who can, please help get me in contact. Thanks!

[Jon]

Andrew Abrahams on Colonsay has AMM queens.

[Neonach]

Andrew Abrahams on Colonsay has AMM queens.

That's where what I have already came from. I have had two nucs on order for more than a year but he's so busy with orders for queens and nucs that I don't know whether I'm going to get them. Next year could prove too late. In any event I really need to try and find other sources in order to ensure a measure of genetic diversity. I'm prepared to risk ending up with two orders fulfilled.

[The Drone Ranger]

http://www.bees.me.uk/Bees/Buy_queens.html

Don't know anything about this chap but it might be worth making a few enquiries

[Trog]

How about the Isle of Man? AMM bees and no varroa. We may be able to help you out eventually from Mull but along with AMMs there are other bees here. You may well get your order from Colonsay. Ours turned up in the end (last week)!

[The Drone Ranger]

Oh Yeh I forgot about the disease free bit

Oh and the not moving bees around bit

Best just get the semen then I hear it stores quite well

Presuming the AI kit won't be a problem

[Jon]

DR
I think they guy in Sussex got his queens from Andrew on Colonsay as well.
He sells his queens for about 80 quid or something like that.

Trog.
The Isle of man bees are a pretty mixed bunch apparently. Roger Patterson, Doris Fischler and some of the bibba crowd were over there doing morphometry on the bees a couple of years ago. Some of the bees were very bad tempered.

[gavin]

That's where what I have already came from. I have had two nucs on order for more than a year but he's so busy with orders for queens and nucs that I don't know whether I'm going to get them. Next year could prove too late. In any event I really need to try and find other sources in order to ensure a measure of genetic diversity. I'm prepared to risk ending up with two orders fulfilled.

Jonathan, can I suggest that a good way to retain the genetic diversity that you have in the ones you already have is to raise as many queens as you can from your initial ones. Each mated queen will come with a range of sperm in her spermatheca, and if you raise many queens from each original one you will retain that diversity. On the other hand if you take two colonies to two daughter colonies over a few generations your population will be in trouble quickly. There is a thread called 'Yet another puzzle' which will give you some background.

It sounds like you want to build up to a medium-sized self-sustaining population. That is the way I would do it, definitely bring in more (very) carefully selected stock as even Andrew's genetic base may be less than ideal, but also go from a small number of queens to a larger number in one generation, before inbreeding takes effect.

If Amm is your thing then Manx and other larger island stocks are not necessarily pure.