Biology and ecology of 'the black bee'

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borderbeeman

House Bee
Joined
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Location
Coldstream, Scottish Borders
Hive Type
14x12
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10
There is a wonderful beekeeper in Belgium, called Hubert Guerriat, who has been running a private breeding-station for the native black bee (A.m.m.) - for more than 25 years.

His site is here:

http://www.mellifica.be/en/livre/

His important article THE BIOLOGY OF THE BLACK BEE is attached
below as a WORD file:


Some of his site is in English - some in French. However, the gist is that he breeds thousands of queens a year and distributes them to beekeepers all over his region of Belgium and France.

hubertguerriat.jpg


He runs practical training courses for anyone who wants to keep the Black Bee. He also provides queen cells - free of charge - to any beekeeper within a 20 mile radius - to try and preserve the native bee.

He has written a superb article about WHY the native black bee of Northern Europe is worth keeping; I have translated it, using my best schoolboy French, and I attach it as a WORD file. It is worth reading if you are interested in our native bee.

Finally, a party of beekeepers from the UK should go and visit Hubert Guerriat and see why he has been so successful in preserving the black bee of his region - and ask why we cannot do the same thing here? Before you ask - all his queens for the 2010, 2011, and 2012 seasons are already pre-ordered; also -when I asked him if he could sell me some of his superior black queens - he said he would not send queens to the UK 'on principle'. His view is that each strain of native black is genetically adapted by evolution to the specific locality in which it thrives. So his 'lesson for the day', to me, was - 'you must start with the bees you have in your local area and selectively breed them back towards the native black - over many years'.
 
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Unfortunately not having Word, or office for that mater the diagrams have not come across.

Can you do it as a PDF file?

PH
 
Hard to justify the expense of MS Office for home use. However, OpenOffice is capable of opening all Microsoft spreadsheets, presentations, documents etc. and is perfectly adequate. It is completely free - check it out here http://www.openoffice.org/.

P F
 
Well yes Finno...it is. Except that when I try and open this word doc on Open Office I get one page and no pictures and when I click on the pdf I get invalid link :smash:
 
Unfortunately not having Word, or office for that mater the diagrams have not come across.

Can you do it as a PDF file?

PH

Down load 'open office' it's free and will open all 'microsoft office' documents !:D

John Wilkinson
 
Well yes Finno...it is. Except that when I try and open this word doc on Open Office I get one page and no pictures and when I click on the pdf I get invalid link :smash:

I'm afraid I get the same thing on the original word doc.
 
Admin - PDF attachment problem for your attention please

PDF copy of the above file for those lacking Microsoft Word or similar.

D.

View attachment 1637

Admin - this is what comes up when the attachment at post # is clicked upon. Is this something that you are able to sort please?

PH. I know that it's a long time ago now, but you really should get yourself OpenOffice.org
(from Oracle now - with issues) or LibreOffice from libreoffice.org (Open Document Foundation).

It's free and compatible with Office file types. No excuse being in business and not having something to read and write emailed letters from/to your potential and recent customers I would think?
 
Oops, I suppose it might have helped if I had remembered to post the output of clicking on the link, instead of looking up the details for LibreOffice . . .
 
Thanks for the article - and the link worked fine.

It's good to see the cause of AMM being pursued in other parts of its native range.

BIBBA also prefer breeding from local stocks but, its difficult to find anything to start with in some places.

The despair of all colonies stinging, following swarming - you need outside help.
We should be a little more free with passing round genetic material, even if it is restricted to your region The North or The Midlands, The South etc. It would increase the gene pool.
 

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