Carny cross Bucky?

[Fusion_power]

And where has the aggression come from? Not from the buckfast bees.

Buckfast are described by their breeders as best maintained pure because crosses are often hot.

 

[Finman]

Buckfast are described by their breeders as best maintained pure because crosses are often hot.

Get the queens from such place which are not evil.
However the breeder says what he says. Who knows what the bees really are.

Strange rules... Bee races have tens of strains... Not much rules.

You get very swarmy bees if you use swarm cells on propagation... What ever the race is.

 

[Quis Custodiet]

I wish it really were that simple. Africanized bees crossed to Buckfast drones are much milder than the Africanized line. It is all in the perspective.

I was making brief reference to the situation in the UK and Ireland. There are a few isolated areas here among the mountains which are free of mongrel bees and Buckfasts can be bred without introgression. The aggression in a mongrel x comes from the latter not the Buckfasts and for good measure we have no africanised bees here!

 

[For want of a better word]

I was making brief reference to the situation in the UK and Ireland. There are a few isolated areas here among the mountains which are free of mongrel bees and Buckfasts can be bred without introgression. The aggression in a mongrel x comes from the latter not the Buckfasts and for good measure we have no africanised bees here!

Now that is where all this hybridised bee aggression is coming from.....
I wonder who imported them?

Nos da

 

[Into the lions den]

Much of this 'aggressive crosses' stuff has its origins in the *opinion* of some heavy hitters. There are one or two much quoted text books that are actually near to racism, albeit projected onto the bees, and just about as sensible.

Over tens of thousands of carnica/black crosses I can say with total confidence they turn out...for the most part...as intermediate in every way.

Over rather fewer, but still four figures, of buckfast/black crosses. Similar result.

Have done many deliberate Buckfast/carnica crosses in the last four years and find no issues with them whatsoever. Nice easy to manage bees.

However....it is easy to dismiss a colony as aggressive when in fact it may be as few as one sub family that is to blame. If 5 to 15% of the adult workers are nasty then you can think the entire colony nasty. Requeen it from its own progeny and there is a high chance that the new queen will come from a sub family that is not aggressive....so yes...a colony can change.

What is undoubtedly the case in our area is that everything, in time, reverts to black bee types. These can throw *some* nasty colonies in their crosses.

The thing that amuses me is that the black bee lobby say that when you cross a calm bee (carnica or buckfast in this conversation but could be others) with a bee of uncertain temperament, and the cross turns out unpleasant that they blame the calm side of the cross...............

The idea of restoring the UK (or Ireland for that matter) to an Amm heaven is a multi generation project and a pipedream, with uncertain results........to restore a bee which, until modern revisionism sanctified it, was considered 'difficult' by its keepers.

As a child with my father in the early 1960's we used to visit some (even by then) very elderly beekeepers who had been around pre IOW disease and had old native blacks in the glens of Aberdeenshire. They much preferred the 'new' bees to the old ones.

 

[For want of a better word]

Much of this 'aggressive crosses' stuff has its origins in the *opinion* of some heavy hitters. There are one or two much quoted text books that are actually near to racism, albeit projected onto the bees, and just about as sensible.

Over tens of thousands of carnica/black crosses I can say with total confidence they turn out...for the most part...as intermediate in every way.

Over rather fewer, but still four figures, of buckfast/black crosses. Similar result.

Have done many deliberate Buckfast/carnica crosses in the last four years and find no issues with them whatsoever. Nice easy to manage bees.

However....it is easy to dismiss a colony as aggressive when in fact it may be as few as one sub family that is to blame. If 5 to 15% of the adult workers are nasty then you can think the entire colony nasty. Requeen it from its own progeny and there is a high chance that the new queen will come from a sub family that is not aggressive....so yes...a colony can change.

What is undoubtedly the case in our area is that everything, in time, reverts to black bee types. These can throw *some* nasty colonies in their crosses.

The thing that amuses me is that the black bee lobby say that when you cross a calm bee (carnica or buckfast in this conversation but could be others) with a bee of uncertain temperament, and the cross turns out unpleasant that they blame the calm side of the cross...............

The idea of restoring the UK (or Ireland for that matter) to an Amm heaven is a multi generation project and a pipedream, with uncertain results........to restore a bee which, until modern revisionism sanctified it, was considered 'difficult' by its keepers.

As a child with my father in the early 1960's we used to visit some (even by then) very elderly beekeepers who had been around pre IOW disease and had old native blacks in the glens of Aberdeenshire. They much preferred the 'new' bees to the old ones.

Interesting... so you are saying that there must be a genetic driver for aggression in honeybees?

Luckily we do not seem to have a problem with aggressiveness within our Cornish Amm population..... either bred out by the successive generations of beekeepers in Cornwall or not imported in the first instance?

Queens heading up aggressive colonies in my yellow stripie bees... get the chop straightaway!

Yeghes da

 

[B+.]

Interesting... so you are saying that there must be a genetic driver for aggression in honeybees?

Not just in aggression (https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2007/01/m6058/m6058.html).

As ITLD suggests, individual families possess these characteristics.

 

[SDM]

What about supercedure ? Is there any inclination.for the aggressive families to be the ones selected ?

 

[Into the lions den]

Interesting... so you are saying that there must be a genetic driver for aggression in honeybees?

Luckily we do not seem to have a problem with aggressiveness within our Cornish Amm population..... either bred out by the successive generations of beekeepers in Cornwall or not imported in the first instance?

Queens heading up aggressive colonies in my yellow stripie bees... get the chop straightaway!

Yeghes da

Aggression being genetic? Yes indeed. Either that or it is an acquired (learned) characteristic.............which I don't believe. These old stagers I met had bees that were unpredictable to handle, and had never met imports until after IOW. I believe that the aggression mostly comes from the black population. Another poster on here calls them the black devils.

Go to the south of France or northern Spain and try to work the bees there.....jeepers they are hot in the wrong conditions.

Here ALL bees are pretty good in the right conditions, but try today....rain showers after a rotten week, robbing everywhere, and a total nectar dearth...and you see what is workable for us and what is not so easy.

Like you anything really unpleasant gets the order of the cull, either immediately or more likely by uniting it to a new colony with a gentle strain queen in it at seasons end.

That you have gentle black bees in Cornwall I do not dispute, I have never seen them. However, and I have posted this before, a researcher I respect has experimented with several sources of black bee and found ONLY the Cornish were worth persisting with as the others underperformed in their trials.

I HAVE trialled other black lines and generally found them to be no improvement on our own stock (which did need improving anyway, hence our queen rearing project). However......its a subject I have an open mind on as the black bee does have some characteristics that we find desireable, and their ability to get a passable harvest at the heather in marginal conditions is significant. Would be interested to trial a couple of your queens to see how they fare up here with a view to incorporating the line in the programme. If they are even half as good as you say they would be a good addition.

Probably a subject for an exchange of PM's.

 

[Finman]

.
Of course stinging is genetic in bees. That is why they have a sting. But they only defense their nest.

Thanks to varroa, it killed all AMM from Finland. It was worse nuisance than mite.

.

 

[Bryang]

What is your starting stock? Island mated (F0), or open mated which depending on circumstances is usually the equivalent of F1.....which is what I suspect you are calling Buckfast, so you are already onto F2 when you allow them to mate, which is 75% local and only 25% Buckfast.
And where has the aggression come from? Not from the buckfast bees.

Queens sourced from Hook Norton area and from Exmoor area, all were open mated. I suspect the aggression is possibly linked to the local drones... there is a local beek who is very proud of his aggressive bees... he told me it keeps the idiots away from his hives ( Personally, I think he is the idiot).....I've been "flooding" the area with the "AMM" drones. Caught a swarm in a bait hive 28/5 they are a very dark bee, and so far appear docile.... time will tell.

 

[Beefriendly]

Thanks. You are starting with F1's that are at worst 50% Buckfast and diluting the Buckfast genome from there on.
I have an interesting situation in that one of our local "black" bee men has relocated an apiary close to me as he reckons he gets better mating's and better bees in this area. As the topography stands he is probably getting the benefit of my Buckfast drones and hasn't realised this...yet. Possibly wishful thinking. He has commented on the fact his bees are now lighter in colour (hmmmm).
What I do know is the local mongrels from my immediate area are simply horrible.

 

[Anduril]

Bryang. Yes definitely nasty bees. Hopefully he hasn't sold any of his bees.

 

[Bryang]

Bryang. Yes definitely nasty bees. Hopefully he hasn't sold any of his bees.

Hi Graham.... I hope he hasn't sold any either.....If he has/does sell any I pity the recipient, they and their neighbours will have a great shock waiting for them around the corner!!

 

[beesbeesbees]

So my split I made about a month ago has raised a new queen and her mother was a skinny black AMM queen but she is a fat and very yellow bee
New queen lookalike
honeyfieldsbeefarm.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/JRB_1040aa.jpg
Old queen lookalike
nihbs.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/cropped-cropped-66727_524899147534201_1027280646_n31.jpg
Sorry couldn't post as actual links yet cus >10 posts