Strain identification

[Monsieur Abeille]

Does anyone have a favourite site for identifying strains of honeybees?

Have read the various wiki entries, but some nice comparative photos would be very helpful

 

[Finman]

.
They are impossible to identifye without DNA-analyses.

What do you do with that knowledge? After 2 years they are something else in free mating.

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Hi Finman, I realise they are more likely to be mongrols than anything else, but it would be interesting to see pictures showing typical carnies, italians etc

 

[drstitson]

strains

do you mean photos of the bees in general or the specific morphometric features used for identifying strains????

good table here:

http://www.beeworks.com/morphometry/

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Nothing too clever for me Doc, its simple photos I'm after.

 

[wilderness]

Bon soir Monsieur,

Voici quelques photos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_honey_bee

There are more available down the page.

 

[jameskilty]

I gave up in my google searches for a site with pictures of ligustica, mellifera, carnica, cecropia etc etc.The main criterion I use is that melleferan bees have a wider segment on the abdomen than carfnican. Ligustican are generally yellow, though there are reports in the US that they can be bred black! Though many of my haive contain a proportion of hybrids, showing an orange colour in this segment, usually dull, even onl;y part of it light brown, the rest are either black or dark brown. I see no obvious evidence of carnican, even though from time to time we hear of them being brought in near enough for drones to reach us. I have not yet measured anything else except occasionally wing venation - which I will do again an March in a workshop in Cornwall run by BipCo. I am hopeful I will get some genetic information soon.

 

[Bcrazy]

How about this?

 

[Midland Beek]

People look at wing venation when they eventually work out that looking at appearance of bees is not very meaningful given the high level of hybridization of bees in the UK.

 

[Bcrazy]

HI Midland Beek

People look at wing venation when they eventually work out that looking at appearance of bees is not very meaningful given the high level of hybridization of bees in the UK.

Sorry mate but i do not fully understand what you are saying. Could you be a little more specific?
Mo

 

[Mike a]

Hi Finman, I realise they are more likely to be mongrols than anything else, but it would be interesting to see pictures showing typical carnies, italians etc

Admin posted this album.

 

[Monsieur Abeille]

Admin posted this album.

Yup, thats was the sort of thing I was after thanks

 

[bee-live]

They look at the veins or branching of their wings.
Is as each "strain" has a particular fingerprint.
the results depends on statistics and the number tested.
My bees are apis mellifera NN
By the way what is the difference between bee breading and queen rearing?

 

[drstitson]

"bee breeding" is what it says on the tin and is the overarching process of selecting, crossing, maintaining, propagating bee strains for whatever characters you wish.

"queen rearing" is the actual production of new queens from fertilised eggs, however you go about it. no breeding input necessarily needed - splitting a hive with swarm cells into several nucs is queen rearing at simple level.

so brother adam will have bred his buckfast bees and as part of the process will have reared queens.

 

[Finman]

.
Nowadays bees are identyfied from gene map. No one read veins.

If you do not sell queens. You need not identyfy strains.

 

[Bcrazy]

I sell my queens that I raise during the season but do not give out information regarding strain of bee because I do not know where the drones have come from? So if anyone askes I just explain they have been breed from my best queen.

Mo