Scottish Honeybee Restocking Programme 2013-2014

[gavin]

Just for everyone's interest, here is what happened to the daughters of ESBA1, our colony from our five survivors than seemed the best fit to both close to pure Amm and gentle. The bees were all dark earlier in the spring, then the mother colony had a few Italian drifters. Now the daughter queens are showing a large amount of Italian blood in them, so we can now look forward to thoroughly mixed-up genetics and some hard to handle progeny.

We have five virgins more from this stock in Apideas that will not be let out until they've been driven far away tomorrow morning, and two others that might or might not have been mated yet but weren't laying on Sunday.



There are images elsewhere of the uncontaminated mother colony ... and here is Jon's plot of the wing data: http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...D-plots/page30

G.

[Bridget]

The commercial bees arrived this weekend on the heather - about 1/2 mile from us in a bee line. I checked my three hives this week for varroa and all were clear. We'll see how long that lasts. Luckily queen in apidea was mated before they arrived.

[The Drone Ranger]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_bee
quite a good description of the Italian bee
They are nice bees
But like they say in gardening a weed is just a flower(plant) in the wrong place
http://www.beeworks.com/morphometry/index.html
There is a small overlap in italian amm morphometry workers
The drones don't overlap in CI index

[mbc]

If this was happening in my backyard my response would be unprintable.

It is happening in my back yard too, same source as the Scottish imports, and there's not a thing I can do about it, barring re doubling my efforts and giving the natives a fighting chance by weight of numbers. Such is life.

[The Drone Ranger]

would it make any sense just to do wing morph on a drone taken from above a QX
that would select from your queens
I found that when I gave them fishing line with starter frames they made mostly drone cells and that was quite early in the season

[greengumbo]

I watched this last night on aye player. Pleasantly surprised at the balance shown. I would love for someone to give an accurate account of colony numbers and losses over the past say 20 years. Bill had a figure from 2002 - 2005. I mean that's 8 years ago now ! I still struggle to find accurate numbers for this and the NBU are hard to pin down as well. Those transponders on the bees were brilliant.

[gavin]

On the BKF Murray related NBU comments from a BFA meeting (too many acronyms!) that since 2005 (I think) there has been a 20pc increase.

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[Trog]

'aye player' - love it, great name!

[fatshark]

I watched this last night on aye player. Pleasantly surprised at the balance shown. I would love for someone to give an accurate account of colony numbers and losses over the past say 20 years. Bill had a figure from 2002 - 2005. I mean that's 8 years ago now ! I still struggle to find accurate numbers for this and the NBU are hard to pin down as well. Those transponders on the bees were brilliant.

BBKA have 12/13 figures for England ... an average of 33.8% (see http://www.bbka.org.uk/files/pressre...1371062171.pdf). This also has figures for all winters from 07/08. Why didn't they include Scotland? Northern England were higher, mid forties. Remember that this was a straightforward poll of members so - a bit like Amazon reviews - might reflect an average of responses from "Doris Disaster" who lost all her colonies and "Stevie Smug-Git" who lost none and wants the world to know what a good beekeeper he is.

With apologies to Doris and Steven. You know who you are. No offence intended ;-)

I too thought the programme was reasonably well balanced but was disappointed that it dwelt overly on the fancy machines - harmonic radar and electron microscopes - rather than significance of the results obtained from using them. I would have liked more detail on the stuff from Simon Potts, including practicalities and the impact on farming methods.

However, it's clear from the opening of the programme that the evidence supporting the statement that bees are in decline is so well accepted by everyone - beekeepers, scientists and the public - that it no longer needs to be presented. At all.

[gavin]

BBKA have 12/13 figures for England ... an average of 33.8% (see http://www.bbka.org.uk/files/pressre...1371062171.pdf). This also has figures for all winters from 07/08. Why didn't they include Scotland? Northern England were higher, mid forties. .....

Ah well, the question may have been rhetorical, but I'll bite. The BBKA is of course the English BKA, being a federation of English LAs plus one Welsh and one slightly odd NI association too. That name 'B' is misleading. OK, it accepts and has members across the UK but it is constituted to vote via delegates that come from the overwhelmingly English LAs. That's why the BBKA have no data (or very little) from Scotland. The B is a misnomer.

The mid 40s figures from the NI group surely reflect the quality of the beekeeping in the NI group that has affiliated itself with the BBKA, that's all. I don't know if the Ulster BA runs its own winter loss survey, but it should. Or the NI local associations. Here, in the heart of the bee farming armageddon that requires government support for massed imports, the local losses of full colonies were 20%. Include the little ones and the figure is similar to the BBKA one for (mostly) England.

Saw this on Facebook today. What a wonderful initiative. It is high time we had some action in Scotland to promote native bees in a similar way. Shouldn't we start by discovering what the SBA membership feel about the current position of the SBA hierarchy on native bees? The comments by the President in his letter in the magazine this month were not encouraging - disparaging comments on native bees, can't buy them off the shelf, no mention of the need to breed for the traits required.

http://nihbs.org/?page_id=896

Controlled use of this label purchased from the NIHBS (this image comes straight from the NIHBS website):