Native-type bees will fare better in this - the most challenging - beekeeping season in 40/50/70 years (delete as applicable locally). Native bees produce better in bad years and worse in the best generally.
Not always so. Our native and near native are our worst by a country mile this year. The NZ carnica stock are performing very nicely. True in all the areas we are working in from Aberdeenshire down to Hereford etc. (If anyone on here was at our visit days at Tillington in May or Down Ampney only last weekend they may care to confirm this independently.)
Produced way more honey, swarm preparations much less, peaceful and easy to work.
Wish I could say the same about the A.m.m. and similar stock, but no. Low production, high swarming (actually quite unprecedented instability, even drawing cells on test frames when you subsequently could actually SEE the queen running). Slow mating, although that is now rapidly rectifying itself, but too late really for bumper colonies for the heather.
What native bees are best at is surviving. They can cope as a species with the local weather in all its colours, but that does not mean they are the best for keeping. I know its heresy on here, and I know that there are many unsuitable stocks in this country of types only good in very different climatic zones, but to say non local bees are a bad thing is quite untrue, and if the bee can cope with our weather, and is productive and even tempered, then its suitable in my book, irrespective of where it came from.
Not in dispute is the 'challenging season' bit. Way back in March I was being called depressive and a 'jonah' for not getting a wiggle on in the freak weather spell and declining even to break comb until nearer the normal time. There was a bill coming for that weather, and the extreme swarming has its origins back then. Its the kind of freak conditions that means 'locally adapted' is actually some of the least adapted to the pattern that came along. No bee evolves to fit a one in a hundred weather pattern.
