Buckfast Bees

[Hivemaker.]

JC you need top bar hives for healthy bee's.

 

[JCBrum]

How can you return 50 or 100 years back? It is impossible.

Try starting in the former Soviet Union, on the border with Finland perhaps ?

(only kidding )

.

 

[JCBrum]

JC you need top bar hives for healthy bee's.

Oh yeah, forgot about them ! ................... thankfully

 

[BDaddy]

Thanks Finman interesting point. The obvious answer is you can't but isnt that the point.
If a breeding programme has been followed with due regard to the genetics of the bee's being used, then there should be at least some evidence of a population closely related to one of the earlier strains. I'm sure you have experienced a particular strain of queen producing brood which subsequently emerges with totally different physical charcteristics. Worse still, if there are multiple examples of emergent brood with different charactertistics then clearly the purity of the strain becomes compromised since the queen must have mated with different strains of drone.

 

[Finman]

.
As far as I know, succesfull bee breeders have good contacts to beebreeders in other countries and they make continuous co operation.

Bee strains have developed all the time to better directions and now they have speed contacts to other breeders.

 

[BDaddy]

I totally agree with you. The only problem seems to be I cannot find many!! What I have found is just how helpful having others to bounce ideas off. Wish I'd have found this forum earlier!! I have also spoken to a few really helpful breeders who have been only too eager to answer specific questions on their breeding programmes.

 

[Crg]

If you want as near to pure Buckfast as you can get then you will have to import them.

Unfortunately this seems to be true.

You can get island mated Buckfasts from Denmark but they will cost you 90 euros.

The normal queens are 50 euros from Denmark, no real need for the average hobbyist to pay for island mated.

This strain was taken from Buckfast and with island mating has remained as pure as possible but inevitibly, and rightly, there will have been subsequent selection so is it still pure Buckfast?

It's still Buckfast.

You will also have to keep importing queens more or less every year if you wanted them to remain pure. An expensive business and currents thoughts are to stick with your local bee and through selection improve it.

If you don't have enough control over who your bees will mate with to keep Buckfast reasonably pure, I can't see that you're going to have enough control to improve your local bee through selection.

Sticking with local bees, particularly in my area, would mean lots of surprises finding out what kind of bee ended up in each hive each time they got a new queen.

 

[BDaddy]

Hi Bdaddy
i see you are also asking for pure carniolans,do you intend on mixing these with the buckfasts,or isolating them as much as possible so there drones don't interfere with your buckfasts,drones travel great distances.Perhaps you would be better to go in for II to keep them pure.

Hi Hivemaker,
Sorry not to have replied...missed this one! Not sure yet. I'm inclined initially to keep them separate but then try a hybrid later on. All depends on getting decent queens from reliable source.

 

[Chris J]

This is my first post so please be gentle with me.
Some 20 years I used to live in Buckinghamshire and found a couple of old hives in the woods on a friends farm. They were both full of small black very aggressive bees so wanting to finally get involved after 10 years of reading the odd book I contacted the local bee club and did a beginners course.
I then bought a pair of WBC hives and plucked up the courage to re-home the bees into them.
I still had them the next summer and was inspired by reading a book by Brother Adam I decided to ring the Abbey, I was most surprised when I asked to speak to him I was asked to hold on and after about a 10 minute wait the man himself came to the phone. I had the most wonderful 2 hour conversation with him finally plucking up the courage to ask him for a couple of queens. He said ok and asked me to ring his friend in Ireland Dr Carr (I believe) who would arrange things. Anyway a couple of weeks later I got the Queens from somewhere in Texas and they gave me a few years of pleasure.
I then moved to Oxfordshire and took the bees with me and decided to requeen the hives with "pure Buckfast bees" and rang the Abbey again to find that Brother Adam had sadly passed away but the chap who was looking after the apiary agreed to sell me a couple of mated queens in some weeks time. About a month later they duly arrived and again they served very well.

Sadly before moving here to Norfolk some 3 years ago I lost all four of my hives one spring !!

So I have been bee-less for the last few years, but this spring I intend to put that right.

 

[BKF Admin]

Hello Chris,welcome to the forum.
Thats a great first post and a nice story

 

[MuswellMetro]

Sticking with local bees, particularly in my area, would mean lots of surprises finding out what kind of bee ended up in each hive each time they got a new queen.

yes agree, london is full of different strains of bees golden, black, grey and any combination , in fact anything but AMM

 

[drstitson]

selection

The original Buckfast strain was the result of cross breeding and selection.

With or without active human intervention the bees at Buckfast breeding station today will have undergone on going selection and so whilst descended from those originally produced by Bro. Adam can in no way be described as identical.

I would imagine that the whilst the danish island reared strain will also have undergone both natural and unnatural selection they are as true to the "originals" as modern Buckfast sourced stock.

Until we rely totally on AI and develop cloning techniques then unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint), selection and cross-breeding are a fact of life.

 

[BKF Admin]

I have read a few times that the best Buckfast stock was removed from the abbey and sent to Germany around 1993 where you can still find/buy the nearest "Buckfast" type around today.

From memory I think the Buckfast strain was mainly Carnie X monticola with a little AMM ect added.

Drstitson,welcome to the forum,are you forces based ? we may of worked together up at Oxford in the past.

 

[RoofTops]

I am not sure any of the Buckfasts obtainable from Europe are "original" anymore. Keld Brandstrup in Denmark (www.buckfast.dk) says he introduces new blood from time to time which I guess ensures they do not get in-bred. The important point is he breeds to maintain the original characteristics of the Buckfast bee.

 

[Teemore]

From reading "Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey" by Bro. Adam, selective breeding was going on at Buckfast from the early days of the 20th Century. The books references to their breeding programme would suggest that they were selecting particular characteristics to form the Buckfast Strain and that they carried out experimental breeding to identify F1/F2 hybrids that favoured use in their commercial apiary. There is good awareness in the book of the need to avoid excessive inbreeding and my understanding is that rather than being definitive, the Buckfast strain was and remains in continual development.

 

[Crg]

The original Buckfast strain was the result of cross breeding and selection.

With or without active human intervention the bees at Buckfast breeding station today will have undergone on going selection and so whilst descended from those originally produced by Bro. Adam can in no way be described as identical.

I would imagine that the whilst the danish island reared strain will also have undergone both natural and unnatural selection they are as true to the "originals" as modern Buckfast sourced stock.

Until we rely totally on AI and develop cloning techniques then unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint), selection and cross-breeding are a fact of life.

We're surrounded by plenty of examples of breeds in everyday life, so I'm finding it hard to work out why there seems to be so much misunderstanding of races and breeds in the beekeeping community.

Is it because bees have six legs and wings and "all look the same" that people don't transfer the knowledge they must surely have about other animals?

Or is it a group of older or misinformed beekeepers planting their confusion in new beekeepers' minds about how the Buckfast breed today isn't the original or that the breed is a mongrel?

I don't really frequent poultry forums, but from what little I have seen there doesn't seem to be so much misunderstanding and confusion.
Jumbo quail for example people are always trying to improve on. They're actively selected to be big as that's a trait that is expected from breeds of jumbo quail.

In the same vein I would be surprised to go on a cattle forum and expect a discussion about how an Aberdeen Angus cow today isn't a clone of the original cows Hugh Watson bred back in the 1800s. There have been numerous efforts to improve it as a breed and it's actively selected for traits which are seen as desirable. Desirable traits can, and do, change over time.

Going back to subject the Buckfast breed of bee, if Br Adam was still alive and actively breeding today his bees wouldn't be exactly the same as the originals. He would be trying to improve on them and make them a better bee for today's environment.

That's also what you'd expect from current Buckfast breeders.
Why wouldn't you want to improve the breed?
Why wouldn't you want to make the breed more resistant to varroa, nosema ceranae, or any other modern problems we have?

Also you wouldn't expect all breeders to have exactly the same stock but as RoofTops pointed out the important point is they breed to maintain the original characteristics of the Buckfast bee.

 

[RoofTops]

Yes - and of course improve them as well. There are rare breeds enthusiasts who try to breed back to create long extinct races of animals. An interesting hobby no doubt but in the bee world I'm all for breeding the better bee by selection. I can't see the point of breeding back to create an AMM replica. I don't care what the bees look like as long as they gather honey, don't try to kill me when I approach the hive and are resistant to diseases etc., and of course pass these characteristics on to their off-spring which can be the difficult bit in this crowded isle.

 

[Norton]

Hello,
A problem that keeps coming up in the Buckfast breeding programs is a decline in vigour. In the long term the programs are in BIG trouble.
There has to be an input of new selected genetic material every decade or so to keep the hybrid vigour between the lines at a high level.
One solution in the artificial insemination procedure is to use semen "mixes" from a large number of drones and colonies that have the desired characteristics. This is how Professor Cobey got around this problem in the NWC program or at least delayed the effect of loss of vigour from using too few breeding individuals.
Best regards
Norton.

 

[Scutellator]

Hello,
A problem that keeps coming up in the Buckfast breeding programs is a decline in vigour. In the long term the programs are in BIG trouble.
There has to be an input of new selected genetic material every decade or so to keep the hybrid vigour between the lines at a high level.
One solution in the artificial insemination procedure is to use semen "mixes" from a large number of drones and colonies that have the desired characteristics. This is how Professor Cobey got around this problem in the NWC program or at least delayed the effect of loss of vigour from using too few breeding individuals.
Best regards
Norton.

I respectfully disagree. The NWC is a closed random mass selection program with expected "life" maximum 20 years, whereas the Buckfast programs are something different. They are always opened. They rely on line breeding, crossbreeding and combination breeding. In the Nature there is no "pure" race, since the honeybee pays no heed to racial or political and national frontiers. There is always interchanging of genes between the one race and another. In that way the genes from the iberian bee, for example, could be passed to the greek bees, but in that case they have to pass along the french bees, then Ligurian, Carniolan, Macedonian, and finally to the Greek bees. That is the way the bees' adapt to the ever changing environment - with an ever changing bee. The Nature will breed out the unsuitable genes (from Nature's viewpoint) in given population of bees and another ones MUST come from somewhere, to minimize the inbreeding, which the bee is so sensitive to; or in other words - to prevent from genetic erosion.
That is what the Buckfast breeders do - they stick to the Nature's way of breeding (but in their case they can transfer genes from the iberian to the greek bees excluding Ligurian, Carniolan …., something the Nature can't do).

The Buckfast bees are maintained in lines, and after every two generation of inbreeding (cousin-cousin matings) follows crossbreeding between two lines, to prevent from loss of vitality. The F1 is a cross, in the F2 there are new combinations, which involves selection, and then follows achieving stability of the new combination/combinations in the F3. And the cycle is repeating again.

When two races are crossed (for adding a new genes, not to make use of the hybrid vigor), instead of lines, it takes about a decade before the new combination becomes stable and to be integrated to the Buckfast strain.

The Buckfast strain possess a large genetic pool, which no other race have. And the loss of vitality is a problem that has been recognized by br. Adam a long time before any other breeding program to take it into account.


Donnie

P.S. I am not a native speaker, so please excuse any grammar mistakes.

 

[BKF Admin]

AH that would explain why the internet is full of breeders with seperate codes for each line that share queens around to outcross the Buckfast lines.

Thanks Donnie,I understand now.