looking for Native Dark Queen Bee

[DanBee]

i which case would there not also be a chance of varroa free nucs from the the isle of man ??

You would be bringing in bees with no exposure to varroa and placing them in an environment where they will rapidly be invaded by mites from surrounding feral or managed colonies. If our mainland stocks have developed any resistance/tolerance traits in the past twenty years you would simply be undoing this.

 

[iombeeman]

hi danbee,you are correct, isle of man bees have no resistance to varroa because they have never been exposed to it.as to undoing built up resistance in british bees i do not know.are you saying that your bees are resistant to varroa,if so please tell me more as i would be very intrested.

 

[jameskilty]

This is a big problem with the purchase and import to an area of any queen or nuc from stock that has not been bred for resistance/tolerance at least as a work in progress. There are now groups looking for bees that have some characters that reduce varroa, such as grooming varroa off themselves and other bees (yes we have seen this), damage mites they remove from wherever (yes we have this), and chew out pupae at the purple eye stage or near (yes we have this) presumably to get at varroa - see http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk/beekeeping/improvement.htm. There is a recent study of bees on IOM in the latest edition of Bee Improvement. This is definately worth a read. There are a lot of nasty tempered hybrids there showing recent impoirts of Italian stock.

 

[covenanter]

hi if you get a source of black queens could you let me know or sell me one.i have three hives one empty and several empty nucs.all gifted to me i have permission to put hives on three farms and they are well off the beaten track and a good distance from each other.i would like to keep black bees on these farms