Bee breeding/improvement groups

[Jon]

Slightly at a tangent but here are some photos one of the group members posted from last Wednesday evening. (Thanks Conall)
If you have a mailing list you can forward links like this to all the other group members which is very useful.

http://flic.kr/p/cjdcJN

http://flic.kr/p/cjcZNW

http://flic.kr/p/cjcDsE

http://flic.kr/p/cjc1wQ

[The Drone Ranger]

Great thread, I stalled trying to get a group going this year and my own personal queen rearing also went off on a bit of a tangent but im still keen to get something going.

I think many of us are passively rearing queens through swarm control, or lack thereof. This year I've been a little bit more organised around it but still making the most of the bees urge to swarm.

I want to be more organised and with more people. There's nearly 150 apiaries within 10 miles of me so aiming for a "pure" bee type is probably fruitless, but I do feel that with just a few other people working together we could make a big difference to our bees so I'll also he keeping a close eye on this thread to pick up some hints and tips.

Nellie I have read of breeding programs in Denmark where the pure bred bees on an isolated Island are encouraged to produce drones.
Off Island beekeepers produce mini nucs with a virgin queen. The Nuc is inspected for drones there have to be none.
The Nuc is transported to the Island and the queen allowed to mate with the AMM drones
The beekeeper gets his nuc back and raises his queens from that source.
Year 2 same procedure after a few years he has AMM strain.

The difficulty arises in making sure you don't have swarms supercedure etc.
You also are restricted to mating your queens the same way every year

[The Drone Ranger]

Great thread, I stalled trying to get a group going this year and my own personal queen rearing also went off on a bit of a tangent but im still keen to get something going.

I think many of us are passively rearing queens through swarm control, or lack thereof. This year I've been a little bit more organised around it but still making the most of the bees urge to swarm.

I want to be more organised and with more people. There's nearly 150 apiaries within 10 miles of me so aiming for a "pure" bee type is probably fruitless, but I do feel that with just a few other people working together we could make a big difference to our bees so I'll also he keeping a close eye on this thread to pick up some hints and tips.

Nellie I have read of breeding programs in Denmark where the pure bred bees on an isolated Island are encouraged to produce drones.
Off Island beekeepers produce mini nucs with a virgin queen. The Nuc is inspected for drones there have to be none.
The Nuc is transported to the Island and the queen allowed to mate with the AMM drones
The beekeeper gets his nuc back and raises his queens from that source.
Year 2 same procedure after a few years he has AMM strain.

The difficulty arises in making sure you don't have swarms supercedure etc.
You also are restricted to mating your queens the same way every year

[Jon]

DR
The Germans have the same system re. Carnica on some island in the Baltic.
There was a video about it on the old DWE site.
Mating nucs with bees and a virgin queen were sent by rail and ferry and returned with a mated queen.
Any mating nuc which arrived with a drone in it was rejected and sent back.

[The Drone Ranger]

DR
The Germans have the same system re. Carnica on some island in the Baltic.
There was a video about it on the old DWE site.
Mating nucs with bees and a virgin queen were sent by rail and ferry and returned with a mated queen.
Any mating nuc which arrived with a drone in it was rejected and sent back.

Hi Jon
That system could work here even if the isolated apiary was in a remote and unfavourable location where the bees needed feeding in the early part of the season.

[Neils]

I think we're lacking a suitable isolated island that a £10 contribution might buy that being said I think we can create a "bubble" of good drones with a few people interested, it might take a couple of seasons to reap the benefits but I think we can strive for good natured bees and work from there.

[The Drone Ranger]

I think we're lacking a suitable isolated island that a £10 contribution might buy that being said I think we can create a "bubble" of good drones with a few people interested, it might take a couple of seasons to reap the benefits but I think we can strive for good natured bees and work from there.

It's easy enough to pick the well behaved and replace the grumpy ones and for a lot of us that's good enough.
You might be able to find an isolated mating spot without an island providing it's fairly uninhabited and too poor to support commercial beekeeping but you would be feeding them more often.
Farms that don't grow crops and are at some altitude but without heather ?
Forestry Commission pine forest.
I'm sure there are better suggestions

Bet there are hundreds of hives in Weston Big Wood for the lime trees ?

[The Drone Ranger]

http://bbgroup.forum-phpbb.co.uk/t34...mating-station

Buckfast back on the map ?

[Neils]

The south west is a bit weird, much of the agriculture is livestock based and there's a massive concentration of beekeepers. Avon has over 500 members, Dorset, Somerset and Gloucestershire are at least as big both geographically and in terms of members. It's not insurmountable, but finding a quiet spot where you might get a degree of isolation is going to be hard. There is also a massive amount of importation going on. A guy close to me who bought italian based stock a couple of years ago is now brining in both carnolian and buckfast queens. I don't think he's unusual around these parts but I think that's going to cause problems and not just for him.

We also have a lot of "let alone" beekeepers trusting that their choice of Warre or Top Bar Hive makes their bees immune to the problems that everyone else has to deal with and oblivious to the fact that it's the rest of us getting phone calls to come pick their bees out of trees because we're visible as beekeepers so it must be our bees hanging off that tree.

There are times when I feel that if everyone else but me was banned from keeping bees it would be a far more pleasurable experience.

[The Drone Ranger]

Hi Nellie

Yes the big beekeeping operations do sometimes switch bee breed and that's not good for the rest of us.
After years of importing Carolinian Queens one of the biggest in Scotland just decided to bring in Italians this year.
Course that's just second hand you would have to consult Gavin or somebody in the SBA who is friendly with them to get the low down.

The point is though, if you had say 6 hives and been selecting your queens against a backdrop of Carolinian Drones, all that work could be stood on its head in a single season.
It's not just a temperament thing I think that most crosses can be ok, its more that the whole management of your bees can change. Swarming time , colony size, winter feeding, all the stuff that's particular to your own bees in your location

Sound like your in a location thats great for bees but not so easy for beekeepers