Well if you have the kit why not? The forecast for your location this week is for temperatures to reach 19-21c and if your bees are flying well and they are calm I would take advantage and transfer them. Isn’t a 4 box nuc a bit unwieldy?
Once robbing starts it's often over in a day or two at the most ... sometimes a matter of hours.
I'd say leave it to overwinter in the nuc stack where it's already organised its brood and stores, rather than transferring it.
Aye but your lasses have the Braveheart gene
You are correct, it is we who would like it otherwise, jus to annoy I spin the boxes 180 degrees from time to time.
Yes and they are a locally adapted dark bee. A number of our colonies were tested a few years ago and we had a few that were over 90% pure A M M
That's an interesting stat, what was the overall average? With a relatively closed population I'd have imagined a pretty stable population unless someone's actively working with a different subspecies/strain.
I can’t disagree with you on that and yes I know that bees prefer to work vertical rather than horizontal. But I am only saying what I would do. With the climate you have in the south of England there’s still plenty of time for the bees to sort themselves out. Let us know how you get on with them E&MBees.
Some of us are members of The Scottish Native Honey Bee Society and they tested samples from a number of colonies here in 2019 as part of a bigger survey which was funded. A lot of samples came back as having AMM traits but were hybrids and at the other end of the scale some were 93-94%pure AMM. I don’t know of the full picture as the results were kept confidential. My mentor actively sourced AMM queens and bred his own strain of bees here from the seventies till about two thousand. He supplied a lot of beginners with bees in that time and there’s a high chance that his strain is still present here.
https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy199546Some of us are members of The Scottish Native Honey Bee Society and they tested samples from a number of colonies here in 2019 as part of a bigger survey which was funded. A lot of samples came back as having AMM traits but were hybrids and at the other end of the scale some were 93-94%pure AMM. I don’t know of the full picture as the results were kept confidential. My mentor actively sourced AMM queens and bred his own strain of bees here from the seventies till about two thousand. He supplied a lot of beginners with bees in that time and there’s a high chance that his strain is still present here.
The last major import of bees to here was in 2002 when a beekeeper sourced 80 colonies of dark bees from the Inverness area which was varroa free at the time. Since then we have been trying to maintain our varroa free status by encouraging beekeepers not to take colonies in and to only source local bees. There’s slightly more than 150 colonies here now but I don’t know the exact number.
Some of us have nearly pure AMM and hybrids in the same apiaries which leads to the question “why haven’t the AMM become hybrids in all of this time”
My theory and it’s only a theory is that the AMM bees are managing to mate with each other in our cooler climate when the hybrids are not out in the same numbers.
My tin hat is on and I'm prepared to be shot down in flames
I think it’s also that amm queens mate more with amm drones?Some of us are members of The Scottish Native Honey Bee Society and they tested samples from a number of colonies here in 2019 as part of a bigger survey which was funded. A lot of samples came back as having AMM traits but were hybrids and at the other end of the scale some were 93-94%pure AMM. I don’t know of the full picture as the results were kept confidential. My mentor actively sourced AMM queens and bred his own strain of bees here from the seventies till about two thousand. He supplied a lot of beginners with bees in that time and there’s a high chance that his strain is still present here.
The last major import of bees to here was in 2002 when a beekeeper sourced 80 colonies of dark bees from the Inverness area which was varroa free at the time. Since then we have been trying to maintain our varroa free status by encouraging beekeepers not to take colonies in and to only source local bees. There’s slightly more than 150 colonies here now but I don’t know the exact number.
Some of us have nearly pure AMM and hybrids in the same apiaries which leads to the question “why haven’t the AMM become hybrids in all of this time”
My theory and it’s only a theory is that the AMM bees are managing to mate with each other in our cooler climate when the hybrids are not out in the same numbers.
My tin hat is on and I'm prepared to be shot down in flames
This was where my own question was going although equally, accepting natural losses over time it seems strange that there might still be a strong hybrid population. It's a shame the the results of the survey you mentioned were kept confidential.
After discovering some more data the survey was in 2018 but we only got the results the following year. The best samples from Orkney were sent to Denmark for DNA analysis. Out of the 15 samples 7 came back as pure / nearly pure AMM and the others were hybrids. It was only a small snapshot of the overall picture here and most of the people who sent bees for testing thought they might have had AMM anyway.
Thanks for that Antipodes. It seems to back up my theory. The same for you as well Curly.
I’m going to leave them in the nuc. They have arranged it how they want it. Me interfering now won’t benefit them. I will transfer them across in the spring. I’ll think of an alternative way to position the vaping tray that avoids moving the nuc as much.
A little over a month after hatching from an emergency cell raised in an apidea. I was about to go and unite the colony today so a late reprieve. Now we will roll the dice on if they get through winter ok. The colony has been Q- for months and I've topped up with the odd donation of brood. They have done a good job of filling up both sides of a frame full of pollen so fingers crossed they will go for it in the next 10 days of lovely weather forecast.
