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Thread: Native Irish Honey bee Society

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Default Native Irish Honey bee Society

    The inaugural meeting was held earlier this afternoon with about 80 beekeepers from all over Ireland in attendance.
    Quite a few of those who made it over to the Stirling Centenary conference were there.

    The main aim is to promote the conservation study and improvement of AMM throughout the island of Ireland.

    Irish native honey bee society inaugural meeting.jpg

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    Senior Member HJBee's Avatar
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    Default Native Irish Honey bee Society

    That's good it was so well attended Jon.

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    Default Native Irish Honey bee Society

    Heartening to know the interest is there. Hope the initial enthusiasm continues.

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Still in its early stages.
    Some broad aims and objectives were agreed and a few regional reps for each of the 4 provinces of Ireland were appointed.
    There were a couple of commercial beekeepers present who use AMM as their stock and there was quite of bit of comment about the need to control imports of bees from non native races which wreak havoc with their bee breeding.

    Micheál Mac Giolla Coda mentioned that there are over 100 beekeepers involved in the Galtee bee breeding programme and he would like to extend that type of cooperation more widely in Ireland and establish more AMM areas throughout the island.

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    Excellent ! I wish there was similar cooperation and vision this side of the Irish sea.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Totally agree. The Scots should really get together to try something similar. We don't have a strong centre to try this, although for the Varroa-free west clearly Andrew is it. We could really do with a coordinated effort on the mainland to see what is possible. Or is it too late for much of Scotland and we are doomed to stay with unstable mixes and continual imports?

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    Quote Originally Posted by gavin View Post
    Totally agree. The Scots should really get together to try something similar. We don't have a strong centre to try this, although for the Varroa-free west clearly Andrew is it. We could really do with a coordinated effort on the mainland to see what is possible. Or is it too late for much of Scotland and we are doomed to stay with unstable mixes and continual imports?
    Do you think this will be exacerbated by the lack of queens mating this terrible wet summer (on the east coast anyway !)and people buying in mated queens ?

    I know I had to after two unsuccessful drone layers. I wasn't aware of the implications back then and was pretty desperate. My original queen was a lovely black queen from a local source but after the bought (from a mixed scottish source!) the winter bees are all yellow. I intend to re-queen asap but at the time needed a stop gap to overwinter the colony with sufficient numbers.

    The germans have some amazing bee breeding management. Really top notch.

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    Senior Member prakel's Avatar
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    It's nice to see such cooperation between beekeepers. Anything that encourages people to take a personal interest in the breeding of their own bees has got to be of benefit. Of course, only time will tell how many of the membership will actually want to be 'hands on' to push the project forward compared to the percentage that will just like being associated with the idea.

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    Administrator gavin's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by greengumbo View Post
    Do you think this will be exacerbated by the lack of queens mating this terrible wet summer (on the east coast anyway !)and people buying in mated queens ?
    Definitely, and further influenced by importing packages to make up for too many empty boxes after what is likely to be a bad winter for honeybee survival.

    A sanctuary on Colonsay is great, but only a tiny fraction of the effort we should be making to preserve and improve local types. Repeat importing is just unsustainable - but I do understand why people do it, and I've had all sorts in my apiary in the past (and they are mongrelish now).

    We should be aspiring to go some way to matching the German effort to improve stocks of honeybee, but in these conservation-minded times doing so with something close to the native bee has to be the way to go. Especially when major bee farmers report that their bees revert to something like a native type over a few years.

    But we have very little of that going on - and the word seems to be (sorry if I'm wrong) that even the Moray initiative, sold to funders on the basis of conserving local stocks, is going to be importing Buckfast bees.

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    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Of course, only time will tell how many of the membership will actually want to be 'hands on'
    Any group tends to have a mixture of the givers and the takers but this lot is self selecting so I would expect the interest level to be pretty high. Those of us who attended from the north had a 12 hour round trip including the meeting in the middle. There are a lot of competent well organised beekeepers in ROI, much more so than in the North.
    As an example, the Galtee group has had an Instrumental Insemination programme for several years now.

    This is the II shed here.

    roger-patterson-&#6.jpg

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