It's ok Beesnaturally it's aimed at those interested in Amm/native bees. Wild colonies are something I remember finding as a young boy, were these escapees from an apiary? Who knows, we found them living in trees or other cavities, they were wild bees to us.
I think quite a few beekeepers would agree that bees are essentially still wild I don't know any who look upon their charges as domesticated. If they are wild creatures, they are wild IMO, to me feral means domesticated now living in the wild.
Free spirits is probably a better description, IMO. They do what they want and the best we can do is work with it.
Thank you Swarm. I think our interest overlap a lot.
However while your focus is Amm/native bees, mine is the conditions whereby health is maintained. That is, in many ways, the same conversation as one concerning 'survivor' bees, the, (probably) US coinage for bee populations that not only have not been wiped out by varroa, but who have, through natural selection for the fittest strains, attained a deep measure of tolerance and/or resistance, and are thus healthy.
These populations might be mongrel, they might mostly Amm/native, they might be pretty much entirely Amm/native. What matters to me is that they are given space to thrive - for a wild, naturally-selecting population is the greatest - indeed the essential - guarantor of future of bees.
So I'm interested in the ways beekeepers affect those existing, or emerging, or just potential populations. For example: my bees seem to me to fail too often to supersede in good time. I have too many colonies that would clearly benefit from a new queen, but hang on an aging one - too often with fatal results. I suspect this to be a trait born of the widespread practice of beekeepers to simply replace failing queens. This prevents the character of attention to aging queens from remaining at a healthy level.
That is of course, just a theory. But its one firmly rooted in an understanding of the way populations respond to their environment. If essential choices are being made for them, they tend to lose the ability to make them.
This is where a wild/feral populations performs essential work. Those individuals that don't perform essential tasks well tend to lose out in the reproductive strakes to those who do: and so health is restored.
This is, if you like, the deep, foundational layer that we should be aware of when we make choices for bees. A healthy wild population helps us and future beekeepers. Not to mention the local ecology, of which they are key players. Fewer bees = fewer seeds = a diminishing soil seed bank. That's not a direction we should be going in.
