Nigel, with your expensive breeder queens, are you going to limit their egg-laying, say, by keeping them in small colonies, with the hope that they last longer?
May your bees read the same books as you do.
While I respect your alternative view on this I think you are very wrong to belittle nature and natural selection. We already have plenty of evidence that simple cross breeding while appearing simple and obvious comes with a whole lot of unexpected consequences, the beauty of natural selection is that its based on trial and error of a many thousands of generations, over this period of time all causes and effects will have been tried and tested and the end result -AMM in north Europe is a bee adapted perfectly to its environment. Personally i'm more interested in conservation of this bee rather than producing some new super honey producer for financial gain but that me.NigelP wrote: ↑08 Dec 2021, 17:25I think "Nature knows best" is a big big misnomer.
Without interference from man what lives is what survives, and rarely has the necessary characteristics man wants from them . If it was true we would still be farming Aurochs for beef and milk.
Jon Gettys Amm's are being selected and bred for traits that beekeepers find desirable. And as such are as unnatural as any other species/races /hybrids of bee that have been bred for desirable characteristics.
Banning bee imports would put a lot of professional beekeepers into liquidation, they simply cannot get the yields they require using "local bees". Murray McGregor (3000+) hives has his main queen rearing station in Piedmont in Italy so as to get reliable and early mating's for his selected queens (mainly of Carniolan origins IIRC)
Interestingly enough there is a movement to bring the Aurochs back.....
Yes Jon's Amm's are very runny on the frames and martyrs to chalk brood. And yes I know a lot about Jon and his breeding group and where they want to go but they are trying to do so by restricting the types of bees other beekeepers can keep in that area and this is far to dictatorial for my liking.thewoodgatherer wrote: ↑09 Dec 2021, 19:29
i have had from him over the past few years I certainly wouldn't call his bees beekeeper friendly easy to handle or nice, more like very runny on the frames and quick to sting but i can't help admiring their strengths.
Spot on, although worth asking which race is bringing in the negative qualities . Without isolated mating stations or using II then any mating in UK is doomed to this lottery. Restricting the lottery to "local" only still means a lottery. Most other European countries have specific isolated sites to control and improve the genetics of what gets mated. In fact for around 15 Euros you can send your queens to some of these sites to get mated there. Germany has a mobile II unit that tours the regions to II queens for beekeepers and control the good genetics. Denmark has specific island allocated for different races only, including Amm's. The UK is a small densely populated country where the only isolated mating station we have was used by the late Pete Little . BIBBA, for all their talk, have made no serious inroads into doing what they preach which has to be II in this country.Polymorph wrote: ↑24 Dec 2021, 12:45The live and let live approach unfortunately results in the mixed views of beekeepers simply thwarting each other. Whether it's AMM, local, italian, buckfast or carniolan - the on-going additions of positive and negative traits from these do not result in the splendid addition of only positive attributes but a lottery.