Slight confusion: I said that it was spurious to claim that mellifera was more suited to our climate than any other race (this is often cited as a reason to keep mellifera). Perhaps that was true tens of thousands of years ago but not any more. Just look at the "winter" we have had...hardly a winter at all! All we seem to get now is a few days of frost and lots of rain.
Good post IMO.
There is a big divergence of expectations too. The more 'natural' orientated tend to favour Amm as they point out they were here for a long time, but that is all about a bee that can survive and says nothing about its value as a kept bee with proper management input. After all we keep bees at a far higher density and surviving for far longer than would be the case if it was individual feral colonies in an unmanaged situation. The climatic situation has changed and the floral pattern and timings, especially in agriculture is very different.
We are not in the old days any more, and keeping bees has rather diverged into two camps and a bridge of opinion in between, the mainstream camp who keep them for interest and economics and just want good bees (often with little preference for race), and the conservation group who are very much for the black bee and do not want to take too much honey if indeed any.
FWIW Amm throughout its range are generally known as black bees, and its often used in a derogatory way (such as Finmans 'black devils') though it need not be so. However in some parts of their range they are also known as dark bees or brown bees. They do vary a little.
I need to pay the mortgage and so do several of my people. A bee that is a mere survivor is ok purely for conservation but the colonies tend to be smaller and the pollination input less plus less honey. Its all about what the beekeeper wants from his bees..............and that is where the real problem lies. The target will NEVER be agreed as there are so many different agendas.
Meanwhile we constantly experience Amm incursion into our stock...open mated colonies revert to black and to *relative* mediocrity (not bad, just tending towards basic local stock) in only 3 or 4 generations. If you see my pics from yesterday on twitter, these flying bees are all black, yet these colonies were established a few seasons ago with more coloured bees. The survivor drones have an advantage in open mated situations and that is one reason we are drone flooding around the mating yards. Just to try to get reliable production queens.
My main beef with Amm is not that it cannot make very good and strong colonies because it can. Not that it cannot make heather honey in quantity because it can. Its is however much more erratic in those respects and the proportion of excellent colonies is lower. Also the temperament is less predictable (one day fine the next day not, seemingly at random) and the management more intensive as the swarming is worse. There are disease susceptibility issues too that are not the subject of this thread.
BUT
They are a sound working bee in our environment, and whilst not the bee of our choice they are undoubtedly better than SOME stock from other races. There are good and bad in both home stock and imported, but, unless in a very particular climatic niche (Cornwall and other wild and windy western fringes may be an example) the idea of locally adapted needing to be close to home is rather a myth. Good bees from most of the UK will do perfectly well in most of the UK, and you can actually extend that much further afield, much of Europe north of the Alps or Pyrenees actually. Strangely enough the old native range of Amm.
We bring bees bred in Herefordshire up here, bred there and now no longer anything other than the local stock from that area, and in Perthshire they perform no differently in any way to our own locally raised stock. You would never know the difference.
