Native Irish Honey bee Society

[Jon]

We had another committee meeting yesterday.

There is a facebook page with a few photos

[madasafish]

Good luck to the Irish and yes they seem very organised.

In Scotland though there is a major problem namely Perthshire mainly. There is a concentration of Bee Farmers there and they will continue to import I suspect for valid financial reasons.

Being blessed with numerous islands a breeding program should be more than feasible.

BIBBA. A complete waste of space.

PH

Aftr my first year beekeeping, I thought that native bees were the way to go. I found BIBBA a waste of time.. Why bother trying to reintroduce AMM if you have no queens available.

Way to go is flood England with free - or cheap AMM queens in my view... (Ain't going to happen)

[Jon]

I don't agree that Bibba is a waste of time but there is definitely a demand for AMM queens which is not being met.
Bibba tries to promote the establishment of queen rearing groups and that is the best way to get queens in volume.
If you graft from a couple of different queens every year you should be able to produce some decent stock.
But if your surrounding population is mainly Buckfast or Carnica or some sort of a mixture there is no point in working with AMM unless you intend to requeen on a regular basis to avoid hybrids.

You could try and rope in a few of your neighbouring beekeepers and get a group going.

[drumgerry]

Don't quite know why I haven't caught up with this thread yet but here goes.

I think it's pretty easy to attack BIBBA as not having done enough. The answer is simple - if you want native queens get together with a few like minds, pool your resources and rear them yourselves - Jon manages to do it in Belfast so why not elsewhere?

I'd imagine in most of Scotland we have native-ish queens as a general rule. Certainly here in Moray and from my knowledge of Aberdeenshire most of the queens I've seen are dark. Whether they're AMM-based dark queens could be easily found out although I suspect most are.

Some of you may know that we're about to hold an inaugural meeting here in Speyside for a new association - Spey Beekeepers Association. It's my fervent hope that, in our constitution, we take a stance against imports and make the rearing and improvement of native queens our central founding principle. To my mind it's the only sensible and sustainable way forward for beekeepers who operate in our marginal Highland climate. It's going to be a struggle I suspect especially when just down the road Moray Beekeepers have £40K+ to play with and have decided to provide their beginners course participants in 2013 with a nuc headed by a Buckfast cross queen from Ged Marshall. Quite the opportunity missed if you ask me to make a real difference.

But all we can do is the best for our own members (assuming we get any at the meeting on 30th January!). I don't see why other associations in Scotland can't do the same. Queen rearing isn't rocket science!

[Jon]

Murray McGregor always says that Buckfast do not do well in Scotland and he has tried them in the past, so maybe your local problem will sort itself out sooner than you think.
Heaven help the beginners 2 years down the line when they have Buckfast origin stock hybridised with black drones. Might need to spend a good chunk of that 40k on body armour.

[drumgerry]

I'm not going to bank on it Jon. Just have to do our best with what we do. I have a dream (just call me MLK!) that one day we'll have a network of queen breeders/groups/associations all working towards the same end - which is an improved native bee - and that we can trade genetic material for everybody's benefit. Pretty much what your new Irish organisation is trying to achieve. But at least you lot are heading down the road. We haven't even opened the route map!

[Peter]

Hi Everyone

As a BIBBA committee member I feel that I ought to respond - but note that this is not an 'official' BIBBA response.

I have been a BIBBA member for many years and was also a little disenchanted; it seemed odd to join an association that simply told you to go and breed from the best of what you could find locally. Problem was that here in the Midlands there was not a great deal of good material available, so I was looking to BIBBA to help me find something better to help augment the gene pool. At that point I found that BIBBA tended to fall into two camps - one that was totally against 'importing' from other areas, believing that silk purses could be made from sow's ears, and the other who felt that we would never live long enough to make significant progress unless we could find some decent genetic material. At that point I joined the committee so that I could see what was going on, and also contribute what I could.

For so many years, BIBBA seems to have been paralysed by endless wrangling over these issues. Progress has been made in setting up local breeding groups and they are seen as key players in making further progress. Locally, we have a number of interested members who are working hard to multiply up what we have been able to obtain through various contacts and we working hard to flood areas with good drones. All good stuff, but we still need better genetic material to enlarge the local A.m.m. gene pool.

Perhaps few people realise that BIBBA has undergone some radical changes on the past couple of years with some fairly major changes on the committee. Project Discovery is at last making progress in identifying the location of good stock and we are working with top players at the NBU and Universities, and with a major sponsor.

All this should improve the availability of quality A.m.m. stock in the near future. This is likely to be made available to our Breeding Groups who will then have the task of multiplying it up and making it available to others. Clearly, the first task will be for chosen groups to ensure that they flood their own area to ensure good mating and I guess that some may use instrumental insemination to aid their work.

These are exciting times for BIBBA - a major breakthrough after so many years of non-achievement. So, for all the doubters out there I would say, just stop running BIBBA down, give us a chance to get this right, and if you can help then please join in - you might find it more rewarding than just moaning.

[drumgerry]

I couldn't agree more Peter. I sometimes think people expect to have the work done for them and enjoy having a moan at the easiest target in this area - BIBBA. The reality is that we, as beekeepers, have to do the work ourselves.

It sounds like BIBBA are doing a lot behind the scenes. You just have to blow your own trumpet a bit more. I think that communication with the wider beekeeping world is one area that I would suggest BIBBA could improve. To that end is there any prospect of the website being modernised? If so please incorporate a regularly updated news section. Static websites went out with the ark!

[Jon]

A lot of the people having a dig at Bibba are using imported queens - and it seems to me that having a pop at Bibba for not having native queens on tap is a convoluted way of shifting the blame for the possible consequences of their own actions.

If beekeepers get together to form local breeding groups it is straightforward to produce a lot of queens.
You need one or maybe two queens to graft from and a site with drone colonies where you have a reasonable chance of getting good matings.

You don't need dozens of queens to start off.
In year one you graft from a pure race queen and requeen as many colonies as possible with her daughters.
Don't worry about what they mate with as you are only interested in their drones.
The drones these daughters produce will be pure race. (assuming the mother was pure race!)
In year 2 graft from a different queen and let her daughters mate with the drones from the year one queen's daughters.
Requeen everything again and repeat in year 3 with an unrelated queen.
You need one or two queens per year and you don't get inbreeding problems.

PS. Bibba membership was due for renewal on Jan 1st. Just remembered and stuck a cheque in the post.

[Beefever]

At last! BIBBA have been spurred into action by their funders, eh?
I think the Irish idea of leading by example rather than pushing small groups to do it for themselves has proved more workable. I feel the Irish have left BIBBA behind long ago, hence the need for their own society and good look to ‘em. Maybe this will spur BIBBA into pro-action and I won’t have to feel apologetic for being an AMM fancier.