A Year of Bee Decisions

[Tremyfro]

I seem to reading about a lot of superceedures this summer. Having been experiencing this myself...I was reading more about it. Last year I heard about it happening in the late summer and early autumn but it seems earlier this year...or perhaps that is just that it seems like it.
Would this be caused by poor mating season in the spring?
And would superceedure queens be less desirable if they come from poorly mated queens? Would it affect the future of the bees in any way?

 

[For want of a better word]

I suppose all of the above ....would give many an excuse to import more hybrid bees to mess up what the bees are attempting to do... adapt to the LOCAL environment!!


Yeghes da

 

[Hebeegeebee]

My first batch of grafts mated well this year and are all going strong. The second batch all mated in good time with decent weather but most have been superceded or are failing. I've also had a couple of 2014 queens being superceded recently as well.

A lot of varroa damage this year - maybe it's them wot done it.

A supercedure queencell is usually fed well and provided the genetics are good, I would not have any worry about using it although some purists would say that the egg would be under-nourished within a poor queen.

 

[Tremyfro]

I suppose all of the above ....would give many an excuse to import more hybrid bees to mess up what the bees are attempting to do... adapt to the LOCAL environment!!


Yeghes da

So what do you mean by local? Local...within 10 miles....local ...in the same county....local in the same country? The Queens I bred myself....well the ones the bees bred them selves...got mated, despite the bad weather and are laying well. The queens I bought from another county..so not that far away....seem to have struggled. Now superceeding.
Or do you mean foreign bees or bees from foreign extraction like Italians or Carniolans?

 

[Tremyfro]

My 2 original queens.. A green and red queen...are still laying well....so far no signs of superceedure....I will cry if they do!

 

[Vramin]

I suppose all of the above ....would give many an excuse to import more hybrid bees to mess up what the bees are attempting to do... adapt to the LOCAL environment!!


Yeghes da

The bees are not attempting to adapt to anything. They simply reproduce.

Natural selection, if given a chance, will give rise to locally adapted bees, but only if you don't interfere and keep the weak colonies alive.

Bees have evolved such that the queen mates with a dozen or more drones which gives rise to maximum genetic variation. Selective breeding achieves precisely the opposite!

 

[Obee1]

I suppose all of the above ....would give many an excuse to import more hybrid bees to mess up what the bees are attempting to do... adapt to the LOCAL environment!!


Yeghes da

Oh do you think we should all keep local bees. Like my meangreenqueen that terrorised the neighbourhood and her daughter after her. Meangreen was bred about 3 miles from here. Give me on of petes buckfasts anyday. No sign of supercedure from my bucky hive - touch wood or I will cry too!

 

[Tremyfro]

I can't touch wood!!! All my hives are poly or plastic...yikes!

 

[Swarm]

Oh do you think we should all keep local bees. Like my meangreenqueen that terrorised the neighbourhood and her daughter after her. Meangreen was bred about 3 miles from here. Give me on of petes buckfasts anyday. No sign of supercedure from my bucky hive - touch wood or I will cry too!

But what happens with F1 and then F2?
What was behind that local queen? What was her breeding?
People can and do manage fine with local mongrels and you could probably argue that the gene pool gets messed up when pure breds are brought into these areas. It just keeps perpetuating the unknown quantities.

 

[Thymallus]

But what happens with F1 and then F2?
What was behind that local queen? What was her breeding?
People can and do manage fine with local mongrels and you could probably argue that the gene pool gets messed up when pure breds are brought into these areas. It just keeps perpetuating the unknown quantities.

In my area the F1, F2s and even some F3's (although getting pretty native by now) have been fine, except for one feisty F2 which was actually no worse than my general local bees.
I know local mongrels are fine in some areas, not in mine. For example I had 5 hives of mongrels in the same apiary as some Buckfast F1's this season. The collective 5 managed 14lbs of spring honey in total between the lot of them. My F1's averaged close to 100lbs per hive over the same period and it was a crap spring when the locally adapted bees should have outshone their imported softy cousins,....at least according to dogma.
Needless to say I don't keep local mongrels for serious honey production any more. They may adapt, as everyone keeps telling us, but I think the adaption is simply to survive if left to their own devices (which they aren't, cos we look after them in cosy hives), but they are useless for honey production in my area.

 

[Cussword]

My (limited) understanding is that local bees are usually best adapted to survive and thrive in the local area. Isn't that what evolution is about.
I'm probably wrong, (I'm sure many people that know more than I will ever know will disagree) but, if a creature has thrived in an area, wouldn't it be better to support that creature, rather than keep buying one that will be fine for only a period of time?

 

[Thymallus]

My (limited) understanding is that local bees are usually best adapted to survive

Until they conquer varroa this is unlikely. Witness the decline in feral bee colonies in the UK since the arrival of varroa.
To date the only well documented bees that have evolved a natural tolerance to varroa are the Russian ones, who have had the longest exposure to them,

 

[Swarm]

Thymallus, your F3's are mongrels.

 

[Thymallus]

Thymallus, your F3's are mongrels.

That's what I meant when I said "although getting pretty native by now". Perhaps native was the wrong word to use, pretty mongrelized would have been better. By the F3 they have reverted to being non fecund and back to annual swarming. Even the F2's are only approx 25% Buckfast, although difficult to estimate accurately as there are lots of Buckfast drones around my apiaries. Yet most F2's still retain a lot of the good Buckfast characteristics, such as colour, fecundity, gentleness (most) and honey gathering. Seems it takes a few generations to drain the Buckfast genome out.

 

[Hawklord]

That's what I meant when I said "although getting pretty native by now". Perhaps native was the wrong word to use, pretty mongrelized would have been better. By the F3 they have reverted to being non fecund and back to annual swarming. Even the F2's are only approx 25% Buckfast, although difficult to estimate accurately as there are lots of Buckfast drones around my apiaries. Yet most F2's still retain a lot of the good Buckfast characteristics, such as colour, fecundity, gentleness (most) and honey gathering. Seems it takes a few generations to drain the Buckfast genome out.

Lots of Buckfast keepers around me. Where abouts are you Thymallus?

 

[For want of a better word]

Until they conquer varroa this is unlikely. Witness the decline in feral bee colonies in the UK since the arrival of varroa.
To date the only well documented bees that have evolved a natural tolerance to varroa are the Russian ones, who have had the longest exposure to them,

Everyone knows that there are no feral bees in the British isles... Acarine wiped them all out in the early 20th Cy.


However there are feral colony sites, populated by all the escapee swarms from beekeeping mismanagement.

Some beekeepers select bees for high honey production alone and destroy anything that is ... as they know it it easy to buy in especially bred and selected strains of foreign hybrids.............
then drone on about their failed attempts to match the F1 and F2 and F3 with the specials once they bees superceed.

I am not exactly surprised they then fail so miserably.

Tis the little TROLL inside methinks!!

Yeghes da

 

[For want of a better word]

Lots of Buckfast keepers around me. Where abouts are you Thymallus?

QED

Yeghes da

 

[Thymallus]

as they know it it easy to buy in especially bred and selected strains of foreign hybrids.............
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You appear to be confusing line breeding with hybridization again i.e selected F1's. Unless you think island mated pure Carniolans, Italians, Buckfast etc are all hybrids. Their F1's, even with random mating, can sometimes exceed their original parents....

 

[Thymallus]

Lots of Buckfast keepers around me. Where abouts are you Thymallus?

I have one apiary just outside Helmsley and my home apiary is at the bottom of the escarpment beneath the White Horse.

 

[Hawklord]

A couple of weeks ago my colony's were aggressive and I was considering buying queens. Today they were much improve, so probably badly behaved due to weather etc. Next year I will have to make a decision whether to buy Buckfast and follow everybody else or carry on as I am rearing my own queens. If I end up buying queens I'll probably stop beekeeping all together as I get more of a buzz creating a new queen/colony than taking a honey crop.