Poor Queens

[Apiarist]

A brief input...

I also see that recent posts citing various issues around strain type. This is perfectly correct. Supercedure from this difference is quite common...you just need to keep knocking those cells down until the bees from the new queen hatch and take over. As pointed out, black bees are relatively poor accepters of queens they see as unrelated..including other black bees. Buckfasts tend to accept most types easily. None of that is hard and fast...just a tendency. Worst types I have ever seen for this phenomenon are Iberian black bees.

That's very interesting input, and beyond what could be termed as anecdotal due to your large scale experience. Thanks, we appreciate these little gems.

 

[Mabee]

"caged for a while" ... more than five days? maybe, why would one? Even imported queens from good suppliers will not be caged that long.
"rejected or superceded fairly quickly" ... yes, if the hive is left queenless too long or the queen isn't introduced properly; or the Queen is injured - meaning caged too long... think I'm going around in circles here!
"local(ish) suppliers...accepted with no issues"... you've been very lucky!... or they must have been introduced properly, the hive not left queenless too long and the queen not injured/caged to long....

From Murray’s post above, seems he may agree…”
We are of the belief that the problem mainly flows from the complexities and stress flowing from post Brexit rules, being enforced with zeal by the UK authorities. The issues with clearing them and delays in getting them into the country means they are spending too l0ong in transit, and then after that the importer has a full change of cages and workers to do, which also increases the attrition rate. (not a problen NI loophole users have).
The last two seasons, once we had all this cage changing to do, and having to collect in Calais due to failure of UK customs to guarantee prompt clearance, all cause delays, stress and death/damage in transit. We too have found the early queens now have a higher than we are used to rate of failure/supercedure/drone laying. All of these can in part be down to circumstances in transport.”

 

[Robinredcar]

So

Sorry Jeff, it appears I was being 'blinkered, prejudiced, and quick to jump to the wrong conclusions'.
My point is that people buy in a good queen of an exotic strain, often believing it will improve the drones in the area but all it does is add to the hopelessly hybridised mess that makes up most of our local bee populations. Instead of working to improve their local bees they look to buy in a decent queen, which may improve a colony for a while but is not a sustainable solution and adds to the problem of poor local bees.
Of course, others who are less blinkered, prejudiced and quick to jump to conclusions see it differently. After 160 years of imports they still believe imported strains are answer. I have reached a different conclusion in much less time than 160 years. A bit quick for some people.

I totally agree with you, I can never understand the logic of importing foreign bees you'd think people would learn by now that the subspecies evolved differently for good reason.
Unfortunately I think people are not of the same opinion.

 

[Nige.Coll]

I totally agree with you, I can never understand the logic of importing foreign bees you'd think people would learn by now that the subspecies evolved differently for good reason.
Unfortunately I think people are not of the same opinion.

Importing foreign bees is fine it just depends on their colour.
Don't hear anyone complain about AMM imports from Ireland yet the Irish Sea flooded the same time as the channel and the DNA is different mostly European due to imports. Thousands of colonies were imported from Europe into mainland UK and Ireland after the IOW disease and again after WWII all of which are different from the native AMM we had here.
Talking to queen suppliers AMM are the third most popular imported queens, but that's ok.
The native species of England was not black it was brown, black bees mainly in Scotland and Wales.
But hey let's not muddy the water with facts.
The hypocrisy is astonishing.

 

[jenkinsbrynmair]

"caged for a while" ... more than five days? maybe, why would one? Even imported queens from good suppliers will not be caged that long.
"rejected or superceded fairly quickly" ... yes, if the hive is left queenless too long or the queen isn't introduced properly; or the Queen is injured - meaning caged too long... think I'm going around in circles here!
"local(ish) suppliers...accepted with no issues"... you've been very lucky!... or they must have been introduced properly, the hive not left queenless too long and the queen not injured/caged to long....

I've seen this fashion emerging where beginners are told by the 'experts' to leave a colony queenless for a week or more to ensure it is 'hopelessly queenless' and then same beginners asking for advice as their newly introduced queen has 'disappeared'.
I have even learnt that leaving a queen caged in her new colony for too long before allowing the bees to release her reduces the chance of her being accepted.

 

[Robinredcar]

Importing foreign bees is fine it just depends on their colour.
Don't hear anyone complain about AMM imports from Ireland yet the Irish Sea flooded the same time as the channel and the DNA is different mostly European due to imports. Thousands of colonies were imported from Europe into mainland UK and Ireland after the IOW disease and again after WWII all of which are different from the native AMM we had here.
Talking to queen suppliers AMM are the third most popular imported queens, but that's ok.
The native species of England was not black it was brown, black bees mainly in Scotland and Wales.
But hey let's not muddy the water with facts.
The hypocrisy is astonishing.

Are Irish bees the same subspecies as English bees? Do you not think its curious how English and Irish bees where almost if not fully identical to Scottish and welsh bees and not to say AMC, or AML? Because they evolved for our climate, granted they might have slight variations but nothing at all the scale of the other subspecies or would you say otherwise? Is that muddying the waters?

 

[Swarm]

Personally, I don't think this year would be a very good example to choose for queen assessment.

 

[madasafish]

Are Irish bees the same subspecies as English bees? Do you not think its curious how English and Irish bees where almost if not fully identical to Scottish and welsh bees and not to say AMC, or AML? Because they evolved for our climate, granted they might have slight variations but nothing at all the scale of the other subspecies or would you say otherwise? Is that muddying the waters?

Be careful with the "evolved for our climate" argument.

I can see significant warming locally over the past 40 years. The local to me 1 meter deep snowdrifts of the19880s are long gone. As global warming is going to accelerate (COP is a virtue signalling organisation: no-one seriously believes it will influence the big polluters of USA and China), the UK needs bees adapted to warmer climates.

 

[jeff33]

Be careful with the "evolved for our climate" argument.

I can see significant warming locally over the past 40 years. The local to me 1 meter deep snowdrifts of the19880s are long gone. As global warming is going to accelerate (COP is a virtue signalling organisation: no-one seriously believes it will influence the big polluters of USA and China), the UK needs bees adapted to warmer climates.

@jenkinsbrynmair will start importing bees from his African beekeeping relations in a couple of years!!

 

[jeff33]

I totally agree with you, I can never understand the logic of importing foreign bees you'd think people would learn by now that the subspecies evolved differently for good reason.
Unfortunately I think people are not of the same opinion.

Maybe have a read at some of the earlier posts in the thread, especially from a commercial perspective and you will see why.
Let's not kid ourselves, the climate in the UK is quite similar to most of Europe and the difference will probably be in the number of days bees can fly rather than temperatures. I haven't heard of mass deaths of colonies in Europe or UK this summer during the heat waves so again, the argument of adaptability and evolution of different subspecies and honeybee populations is a weak argument.

 

[Into the lions den]

From Murray’s post above, seems he may agree…”

Yes...up to a point.

If you think of the logistics. At source....say in Piedmont, they collect queens all through the week. Carefully caged and looked after but it can take a few days to have a big order ready. The oldest queens (as in longest harvested) may have been out of the hive for say four days before shipping.

Then they travel by courier for one to two days...so could be 6 days by the time they reach the UK.. Post Brexit customs do not guarantee clearance inside 10 working days so most importers are not trusting to the vagaries of that....but even doing it yourself takes several hours. However..assume there is no time lost of that you still have to get then to home base and start the (can be stressful to the bees) cage changing...delays shipment out to the customer by 1 day..and even by special delivery it another day...so queen is likely to be 7 or 8 days out of the mating box before it reaches the end customer.

With UK queens...unless it is a smallish hand to mouth operation that can catch and ship same day your queen can still be four or five days from harvesting until you get it in your hands to introduce.

These delays are a factor in the failure/supoercedure rate, but far from the only factor.

Several years ago we used to bring in NZ carnica, and so late in their season that we were getting banked queens rather than fresh, some could be weeks old. Mostly it went fine although the final season the failure rate was huge. Then we downloaded the graph from the temperature tracker and there was a brief spike to 55C mid journey. Sitting on the seat of your bee vehicle in the sun can have the same effect......and failures rocket.

 

[Robinredcar]

Be careful with the "evolved for our climate" argument.

I can see significant warming locally over the past 40 years. The local to me 1 meter deep snowdrifts of the19880s are long gone. As global warming is going to accelerate (COP is a virtue signalling organisation: no-one seriously believes it will influence the big polluters of USA and China), the UK needs bees adapted to warmer climates.

Why that's the whole point every one seems to miss, for me stop importing breed what we have or start from as local stock as possible (amm) then keep going. The bees have evolved for melenia to suit their respective climate why should it be diffrent now?
Climate change is another argument but I do believe starting with our native stocks or close to and go from there approach is the key, if the climate changes dramatically the bees will evolve to suit it don't you think?

 

[JamezF]

if the climate changes dramatically the bees will evolve to suit it don't you think?

It depends. Evolution requires a sufficiently slow rate of change of the environment to allow beneficial mutations to spread. If the environment changes too fast then organisms that don't have an adequately high rate of reproduction are likely to die out. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but at the pace our climate currently seems to be changing, I don't have confidence that honey bees reproduce fast enough to escape the effects they can't cope with.

James

 

[Nige.Coll]

Are Irish bees the same subspecies as English bees? Do you not think its curious how English and Irish bees where almost if not fully identical to Scottish and welsh bees and not to say AMC, or AML? Because they evolved for our climate, granted they might have slight variations but nothing at all the scale of the other subspecies or would you say otherwise? Is that muddying the waters?

Same subspecies but evolved differently, what is left of them, mostly European genetics from the study they did and some pockets of native Irish bees, their DNA is different to the mainland UK and European subspecies, not a lot but different, if you consider the difference in dna between a pig and a human is 2% a small change makes a large difference.
It's also hard to tell due to the huge amounts of imported AMM bees during the last century and the lack of survivor colonies after IOW.
The constant waffle about black bees grinds my gears, they weren't black in central England they were brown similar to the ones found in the south west. Dark bees not black bees.
A few years ago as a member of BIBBA we were told BIBBA doesn't supply queens get them from x, which were not in mainland UK they actively encouraged the importation of foreign AMM stock to replace the locally adapted stock they had, even beowolfs bees were requeened with foreign AMM. Granted they had swarmed a lot and gone to pot after his death.

The whole thing has been transformed from a group of like minded individuals promoting the benefits/conservation of native bees to what is now a political lobbying movement with members infiltrating positions of power in a multitude of beekeeping organisations/fora to effectively silence opinions opposed to their beliefs. Absolutely crazy.

 

[Robinredcar]

I dont k

It depends. Evolution requires a sufficiently slow rate of change of the environment to allow beneficial mutations to spread. If the environment changes too fast then organisms that don't have an adequately high rate of reproduction are likely to die out. I'm no evolutionary biologist, but at the pace our climate currently seems to be changing, I don't have confidence that honey bees reproduce fast enough to escape the effects they can't cope with.

James
[/QUOTE
I dont know I think dramatic climate change has happened in the past and life manages to survive, honey bees especially.

 

[JamezF]

I dont know I think dramatic climate change has happened in the past and life manages to survive, honey bees especially.

The survivors are the ones that were already able to cope with the change, or that evolved sufficiently fast to be able to cope. In any particular instance we can't really be sure which applied to honey bees. It's not only the bees that might have to evolve either, it's all the parts of the ecosystem that they're dependent upon.

The figures generally seem to be assumed to be lower than reality, but there are estimates that anywhere between 200 and 1,000 species become extinct every year. Some such as the dodo and possibly some species of giant tortoise from the Galapagos are extinct because humans have wiped the species out directly. (Tortoise is apparently tasty. Who knew?) Others have died out because the environment changed (often as a result of human activity) to a point where the population could no longer sustain itself. Some (the Passenger Pigeon, for example) are a bit of a mixture of both. One assumes that like honey bees, those species (or their ancestor species) have managed to adapt to past changes, but eventually fail. Past performance is not an indicator of future results, as someone once said.

James

 

[user 20833]

How many conversations on beekeeping forums (fora?) end up being an argument about sub-species of bee? 50%? Don't know why. Odd, seeing as the vast majority are hybrids anyway.

 

[JohnRB]

I'm not particularly invested in either argument, but I am a bit bewildered by the idea that seems to be pushed here that we take some AMM and selectively breed over years and generations so that they perform the same as existing bees already available, apart from the colour.

 

[Robinredcar]

Same subspecies but evolved differently, what is left of them, mostly European genetics from the study they did and some pockets of native Irish bees, their DNA is different to the mainland UK and European subspecies, not a lot but different, if you consider the difference in dna between a pig and a human is 2% a small change makes a large difference.
It's also hard to tell due to the huge amounts of imported AMM bees during the last century and the lack of survivor colonies after IOW.
The constant waffle about black bees grinds my gears, they weren't black in central England they were brown similar to the ones found in the south west. Dark bees not black bees.
A few years ago as a member of BIBBA we were told BIBBA doesn't supply queens get them from x, which were not in mainland UK they actively encouraged the importation of foreign AMM stock to replace the locally adapted stock they had, even beowolfs bees were requeened with foreign AMM. Granted they had swarmed a lot and gone to pot after his death.

The whole thing has been transformed from a group of like minded individuals promoting the benefits/conservation of native bees to what is now a political lobbying movement with members infiltrating positions of power in a multitude of beekeeping organisations/fora to effectively silence opinions opposed to their beliefs. Absolutely crazy.

But you think the difference in subspecies is not comparable with

Same subspecies but evolved differently, what is left of them, mostly European genetics from the study they did and some pockets of native Irish bees, their DNA is different to the mainland UK and European subspecies, not a lot but different, if you consider the difference in dna between a pig and a human is 2% a small change makes a large difference.
It's also hard to tell due to the huge amounts of imported AMM bees during the last century and the lack of survivor colonies after IOW.
The constant waffle about black bees grinds my gears, they weren't black in central England they were brown similar to the ones found in the south west. Dark bees not black bees.
A few years ago as a member of BIBBA we were told BIBBA doesn't supply queens get them from x, which were not in mainland UK they actively encouraged the importation of foreign AMM stock to replace the locally adapted stock they had, even beowolfs bees were requeened with foreign AMM. Granted they had swarmed a lot and gone to pot after his death.

The whole thing has been transformed from a group of like minded individuals promoting the benefits/conservation of native bees to what is now a political lobbying movement with members infiltrating positions of power in a multitude of beekeeping organisations/fora to effectively silence opinions opposed to their beliefs. Absolutely crazy.

I'd say the same subspecies is probably alot closer dna match than different subspecies?
I'm all for banning imports of any subspecies. Although AMM from Ireland are much closer to native than anything imported from Europe and certainly better adapted to the UK than the poor stocks hear.
I'd disagree as it seems alot more native stocks survived IOW than the sellers of imported exotic stocks made out, maby to boost their sales?

The 2% between pigs and humans kind of makes my point, why wouldn't we choose to either breed from what's already hear or start with more native stocks from say Ireland, its surely a better bet than a diffrent subspecies?!

I'm not a member of bibba, I love their work and ideals on improving what we have. When you say foreign queens where they from Europe or Ireland?

I believe there was lots of localised variations in AMM throughout the UK before the mass imports even between county's but we are so far from that just now, they where all still AMM with slight variations but now it's a complete cock up of just about everything.

 

[Robinredcar]

The survivors are the ones that were already able to cope with the change, or that evolved sufficiently fast to be able to cope. In any particular instance we can't really be sure which applied to honey bees. It's not only the bees that might have to evolve either, it's all the parts of the ecosystem that they're dependent upon.

The figures generally seem to be assumed to be lower than reality, but there are estimates that anywhere between 200 and 1,000 species become extinct every year. Some such as the dodo and possibly some species of giant tortoise from the Galapagos are extinct because humans have wiped the species out directly. (Tortoise is apparently tasty. Who knew?) Others have died out because the environment changed (often as a result of human activity) to a point where the population could no longer sustain itself. Some (the Passenger Pigeon, for example) are a bit of a mixture of both. One assumes that like honey bees, those species (or their ancestor species) have managed to adapt to past changes, but eventually fail. Past performance is not an indicator of future results, as someone once said.

James

I read that flora and fauna where found in the south of England from around 400 years ago that would be more suited to Italy than the UK. I assume the bees must have evolved to suit the change.
I think honey bees are better adapted to environmental changes than most creatures. I watched a seminar about honey bees and their evolution or part of it, I think the fella reckoned that if all the uk stopped treating for varroa we'd loose around 98% the national stocks, but what's left would be treatment free. I think he said not forever and certain attributes would be lost maby honey production ect.
Also I believe he showed genetic analysis of bees that started as exotic imports and became more AMM over the years due to the way bees mate and what was best for their survival. Incredibly short space of time for evolution which it essentially is.
I've never tasted tortoise, that's maby what happened to the one that's disappeared from the sea life center though