Buckfast queen

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Queen Bee
Joined
Jul 28, 2008
Messages
6,344
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Location
Hampshire uk
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
6
The Buckfast bee is a honey bee developed by "Brother Adam", (born Karl Kehrle in 1898 in Germany), who was in charge of beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey. In the early 20th century bee populations were being decimated by Isle of Wight disease. This condition, later called "acarine" disease, after the acarine parasitic mite that invaded the bees' tracheal tubes and shortened their lives, was killing off thousands of colonies in the British Isles in the early part of the 20th century.

Brother Adam discovered, that the surviving colonies were crossings between italian and native black bee. Buckfast bees' origin is today in these few surviving hives. Brother Adam became interested in honeybee breeding and he started in very early stage to use the isolated Dartmoor mating station for breeding purposes. There he could mate the selected queens with the selected drones. Drones and queens only mate in flight, and they can fly over 10 km in searching for each other. Brother Adam also became interested in the various honeybee races in the world and made several long journeys in Europe, Africa and Middle-East searcing for pure races or otherwise interesting local stocks. The book "In Search of the Best Strains of Bees" tells about this huge and very important work. From these journeys and with the help of new contacts he imported new stock from other nations. Every new beestrain or beerace was first crossed with the existing Buckfast Bee. The new desired qualities were, in most cases, passed on to the new generation and the new combination was then made stable with further breeding work. Every crossing with a new race took about 10 years before the desired genes were fixed in the strain. Little by little - this work took him half a century-he managed to create this vigorous, parasite-resistant honey bee known as the Buckfast bee. It started as a hybrid, but today it is a manmade beerace among the other more natural ones. However, the extensive import of bees and queens, which started in the second half of the 19th century, has mixed all beepopulations living near human settlement.

The Buckfast bee is popular among beekeepers and is available from bee breeders in several parts of the world. Most of their qualities are very favorable. They are extremely gentle, and some authorities rate them higher than the Italians in most categories. Their main drawback is that they are very liberal in their application of propolis to inner surfaces of their hives, thus acting to defeat one of the main purposes of the modern beehive -- that combs should be easily removable for inspection.
 
British Black Bees in Poland



I see that there is a state sponsored bee breeding station in a forested area of north eastern Poland that is dedicated to the preservation of Mellifera Mellifera as potentially of genetic value.

Should British enthusiasts of the British Black (which does not exist according to our seasonal bee inspector ) be looking to import some queens from Poland ?
 
Their main drawback is that they are very liberal in their application of propolis to inner surfaces of their hives

An abstract from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, which puts the reliability of this statemment into question.
I am wondering how many of the Buckfast strains use propolis extensively. And since one of the aims of Br. Adam was the lowest possible propolisation, and since this bee is still bred for this trait - many questions arise.
 
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No idea which book this came from but hopefully helpful.
 
Wing power.

I can just imagine them attaching a fishing line to the bee and putting it in front of a fan to see what speeds it could fly against. I guess now they would put the bees in a wind tunnel and race them.
:leaving:
 
We have a couple of buckfast queens and we don't seem to have a propolis problem, yet the mongrel in one of our colonys produces a good colony but propolise everything.
 
You will have a job beeting the Buckfast,they are a great allrounder,they pay for themselves many times over.
 
My Grandfather kept some very unusual items under the stairs, quite an eye opener for a 13 year old boy
 

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