AMM Mated Queen for sale - source and reason?

[dickbowyer]

A local West Sussex Equipment supplier is now advertising AMM Mated Queens for sale at nigh on twice the price of a local or NZ Queen. Any idea the source and why so expensive as within a couple of seasons, that hive will have been adulterated by Italians and Slovaks? Why would I want one, AMM Queen I mean not Italians and Slovaks?

 

[Hivemaker.]

Why would I want one,

I have no idea why you would want one,but some may want them for breeding purposes,some queens cost many hundreds of pounds.

 

[dickbowyer]

OK, let me rephrase the question, why would anybody want one apart from breeding purposes?

 

[Hivemaker.]

For breeding purposes, or if they live in an area where there are only AMM.

 

[mbc]

Why not ? Could it be that these West Sussex AMM are the product of a carefull, ongoing breeding programme which may result in bees we might all be proud to manage ?

 

[Midland Beek]

Why not ? Could it be that these West Sussex AMM are the product of a carefull, ongoing breeding programme which may result in bees we might all be proud to manage ?

Those are the AMM you get from Greece.

Are we talking VSH/LASI AMM?

And is this the thread for insomniacs?

 

[mbc]

Lol.

I suppose amm from Greece would have to be the result of a carefull breeding as they could only be produced by instrumental insemination AFAIK

 

[Into the lions den]

Just had a look at the site.

My thoughts? Cripes.

I doubt they are Greek btw, and would offer Cornish or Irish as a possibility. However, you can also get really well bred A.m.m. queens out of parts of France (there are some fine breeders of them there) direct by post for maybe one third of that rate, plentiful and early.

There are also a handful of breeders up in Scotland, one guy on the shores of the Firth of Clyde has A.m.m. with a fine reputation. At the price being asked they could be from any one of a number of smaller scale breeders then resold on.

They will in all likelihood be fine queens, but at that price are only viable as mother queens in a breeding programme.

If being sold on to smaller beekeepers as normal colony heading queens then I suspect there is a degree of taking advantage of the current revisionist fashion for having A.m.m. and claiming it as a virtue. As someone else pointed out, in a generation or two it will be subsumed into the pattern of local mongrels, although their owner may still make a claim about their specially sourced A.m.m. for years afterwards.

As mbc said, they are probably the product of a careful breeding effort somewhere, but unlikely to be West Sussex. The outfit in question, a fine company btw, is a trading concern that buy in and sell on, as well as being significant beekeepers in their own right.

 

[Black Comb]

A local West Sussex Equipment supplier is now advertising AMM Mated Queens for sale at nigh on twice the price of a local or NZ Queen. Any idea the source and why so expensive as within a couple of seasons, that hive will have been adulterated by Italians and Slovaks? Why would I want one, AMM Queen I mean not Italians and Slovaks?

Can you provide a part starred link? Googling beekeeping equipment suppliers west sussex brings up only ****** and their queens and bees section lists only swarm lure. Perhaps for those of us who cant't find it you might be kind enough to tell us the price .

 

[browncow]

Hi all, I am newish beekeeper and trying to get to know as much as I can about the hobby but this post has got me totally lost.
What do all these abreavations mean, AMM,VSH/LASI??
Thanks for the explanation in advance.

 

[Hivemaker.]

Can you provide a part starred link?

If you take a look in the forum directory under queen suppliers,( i want bees) they are listed at £75.

 

[SixFooter]

Hi all, I am newish beekeeper and trying to get to know as much as I can about the hobby but this post has got me totally lost.
What do all these abreavations mean, AMM,VSH/LASI??
Thanks for the explanation in advance.

Apis Mellifera Mellifera (British black bee). There are beekeepers who like to promote these bees as the original native bee that we had before we started importing bees and that we should all go back to using them.

I googled the other 2 and came up with:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_sensitive_hygiene
Varroa sensitive hygiene (VSH) is a behavioral trait of honey bees (Apis mellifera) in which bees detect and remove bee pupae that are infested by the parasitic ...
Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects .

www.sussex.ac.uk/lasi/
The Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) at the University of Sussex is the largest research group in the UK studying honey bees and other social ...

 

[Ely]

How many generations of queens that the hive raises to replace lost/dead do people generally accept before buying in a new? Is it just a case of buying new when you are not happy with their behavioural traits?

 

[tonybloke]

there is a list of beekeeping abbreviations in the 'sticky thread' section
http://www.beekeepingforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=272

 

[BBG]

A local West Sussex Equipment supplier is now advertising AMM Mated Queens for sale at nigh on twice the price of a local or NZ Queen. Any idea the source and why so expensive as within a couple of seasons, that hive will have been adulterated by Italians and Slovaks? Why would I want one, AMM Queen I mean not Italians and Slovaks?

Are they the little black heathens that stand around looking hostile with a

"Put a foot wrong and make our day, punk" - attitude and come at you as soon as you take your veil off.

If they are, I know a place in mid-Devon where they're free!

Looking forward to getting a swarm there again this year. Last year's swarm worked like Trojans, building new comb, getting laying and producing a super of and honey despite us damaging a supersedure and setting them back with that.


Seems a bit odd, you asking "why would I want one". Perhaps someone's spent a lot of money and time developing these?\\SixFooter:

The link you gave to Sussex Uni threw up this on their front page:

"Our research by studying diseases and foraging aims to help the decline in Britain and maintain healthy bee hives. Etc.......... "

With government help, they should achieve that easily. :-{

 

[For want of a better word]

You could also search BiPCO

Bee improvement programmes are running all over the UK and probably the rest of the world

Specific types of Apis melifera... linguista, carnica.... melifera etc have existed for millions of years, and due to climate change and disease some have not faired so well or even gone extinct.

AMM bees in the UK were pushed into pockets of surviving colonies after the devastation of IoW disease and the beekeeperers preferring to import bees less likely to succumb, thus introducing a mix of imported and perhaps foreign genes that would never ever in all time conjoined into a new conglomerate gene pool mongrel bee.... BA at Buckfast did this very thing... now called the Buckfast bee...... ( But due to many years of further beekeepering and bee improvement at Buckfast the original no longer is extant IMHO)

Beekeeperes who have discovered the AMM, and despairing at the constant introduction of bees bred overseas that are patently not suitable for our northerly maritime climate have latched onto the idea that perhaps the local bee that have survived and adapted for millions of years may be able to be bred and selected for ideal traits of fecundity, temper, foraging, honey production and overwintering etc etc that we all want and need in a bee.

For me BiPCO groups vision and using the Cornish AMM does it for me........

Why buy an AMM queen... unless you are living in a bee improvement area no real reason at all... and if you were ( living in a bee improvement area) in all probability you would pay far less for a queen and get involved in the program.!!!
No snobbery or elitism involved whatsoever.

 

[Bob Bee]

Just had a look at the site.

My thoughts? Cripes.

I doubt they are Greek btw, and would offer Cornish or Irish as a possibility. However, you can also get really well bred A.m.m. queens out of parts of France (there are some fine breeders of them there) direct by post for maybe one third of that rate, plentiful and early.

There are also a handful of breeders up in Scotland, one guy on the shores of the Firth of Clyde has A.m.m. with a fine reputation. At the price being asked they could be from any one of a number of smaller scale breeders then resold on.

They will in all likelihood be fine queens, but at that price are only viable as mother queens in a breeding programme.

If being sold on to smaller beekeepers as normal colony heading queens then I suspect there is a degree of taking advantage of the current revisionist fashion for having A.m.m. and claiming it as a virtue. As someone else pointed out, in a generation or two it will be subsumed into the pattern of local mongrels, although their owner may still make a claim about their specially sourced A.m.m. for years afterwards.

As mbc said, they are probably the product of a careful breeding effort somewhere, but unlikely to be West Sussex. The outfit in question, a fine company btw, is a trading concern that buy in and sell on, as well as being significant beekeepers in their own right.

(Revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event. Though the word revisionism is sometimes used in a negative way, constant revision of history is part of the normal scholarly process of writing history.)


At those prices I doubt anybody would want them, however, many people, including me, are pleased top buy AMM queens to replace the horrible hybrids that develop as a result of the current interpretation of history and perpetual re-importation of foreign hybrids.

Tin Hat ! ?

 

[gavin]

I'll join you under the tin hat, Bob. Murray has said elsewhere (maybe here too, I don't read everything) that his bees revert to Amm look-alikes after a few generations. They will not be pure, but there are clearly widespread reserves of Amm-type bees out there, and perhaps something that gives them the edge in the UK when stocks are mixed. There is a degree of resilience in the native-type bees in the UK, although at the same time in their purer form they are threatened as never before by more imports and imports reaching areas that haven't had them in the past.

The corollary of that is, of course, that the footprint of an imported stock can persist in an area for long time: think carefully before bringing something in to an area that you don't understand well. That would also apply to bringing in an Amm queen for propagation to an area where Amm has gone and some incompatible type - Buckfast for example - dominates, as well as the reverse.

It strikes me as something of a paradox that so many people have come into beekeeping to 'save the bee' in recent years, yet that has been helping drive more and more displacement and mixing of the purer types of the native honeybee.

Revisionism? No, conservation. Conservation and sustainability. Sustainability in that there is no point fighting or replacing the genetics of bees in areas where Amm persists (and that is in small pockets and some big areas across the UK) unless you are able to dominate the area by force of numbers of colonies. Work collectively locally to improve bee stocks. Do it with Amm if it is still to be found locally. Or do the same with another strain if it dominates locally and suits the area. Pie in the sky in many places, I know, so the current chaos caused by importing will continue.

Gavin

 

[Into the lions den]

lol.....no need for tin hats.

Revisionism..........well yes there has been a lot of that. The old timers who actually worked with these bees way back in the pre IOW years did not actually greatly like them. In my youth I met a handful (all very old by then) who remembered the old black bee and did not have a lot of good to say about it. They much preferred the stock that came along afterwards. (With the important proviso that the ONLY old timers I ever met that knew the old bee were in Aberdeenshire, and their strain may have been a local version)
After the writings of Cooper and others the old bee started to be held in a regard higher than was actually the case whilst it remained extant in parts of its range. Thus the assessment of it has been revised in a period once it was, in large part, gone from the scene and those whose pleasure it was to work with it in pre hybridisation days are gone and forgotten, together with their less than glowing opinions.

Whilst I do not dispute for a second that the old bee lives on in pockets, it is NOT the old bee of 100 years back. It is a modified bee, and crystallised back out from the various bees brought in to replace the lost stock, which mated with the last surviving colonies of the ecotypes suited to the area, but sadly largely devoid of resistance/tolerance to IOW disease (even the cause of that is subject to discordant revisionism). So the pockets of blacks are genetically almost entirely such, physically indistinguishable from the old stock, but without the imported genes for resistance being incorporated they would still be totally susceptible to the causative mechanism for IOW. (Try putting any stock that has never met acarine in Scotland. they go down in a couple of seasons, so the cause remains virulent.)

As Gavin well knows the majority of my bees are of predominantly A.m.m. style, albeit the result of the stock reverting constantly back to the local ecotype rather than a breeding effort on my part to achieve that result. I find the dark bees less certain in temperament and more likely to swarm, plus they do not achieve the colony size I seek easily. The vigour goes off them in a couple of generations.

I do not see any conflict between revisionism..........a reassessment of historical view on the bee.........and conservation..........a drive to maintain the pockets that still exist. With the old timers opinion not having been subject to revision I doubt many would be seeking to do conservation.

I do have a copy of Coopers book, and whilst it is an interesting read, it is also at times an example of opinion trumping fact, and he was such a heavy hitter that many of his opinions became accepted as facts, and remain so today. Still does not make it all true.

 

[Black Comb]

Well the Galtee breeding group, whose stated aim is to conserve and improve amm seems to have been successful in producing reasonably docile amm.
(I've no personal experience but have spoken to beeks who have had them in the past - sadly they no longer export - and also heard Michael Coda speak about them).