.
Text from year 1926
The Bee World, 8, pp 4-5,
June, 1926.
Original in Gleanings in Bee Culture.
By Phillip J. Baldensperger,
Nice, France
Apis mellifica, var. lehzeni, V. Buttel-Reepen (1906). An able bee-book written by H. Lehzen, in honour of whom the adjective “lehzeni” was given, describes this bee as different from the brown bees just described. This author, who has kept the heather bee in the heather regions of Luneburg especially (though she extends all along up to Holland), says: “This bee is a product of the German bee, and has been differentiated by many centuries of breeding into the actual race — that is to say, a very diligent, hardened bee, and one of great swarming propensities.” The bees swarm two to five times a year, and a first swarm usually swarms again in good seasons. Swarming may even go on with second swarms. The heather bee begins brood-rearing early in the year, and continues late in the fall. V. Buttel-Reepen says: “The bee is an outcome of natural breeding, and has not been produced by beekeepers in their selection. Their swarming propensities are so great that a single stock has gone up to an increase of fourteen in the same year in specially good seasons. They liberally build drone comb, and second swarms build drone comb in the first year which are readily utilised by the young queens.”
When the Germans, after the Great War, had to furnish a number of colonies of bees to France and Belgium they delivered numbers of heather bees. Mr. Tombu, permanent secretary of the International Beekeepers’ Congress, and the Belgian delegate at the meeting of that congress in Quebec in 1921, who, together with the French beekeeper and professor at Nancy, had to receive the bees in Germany, refused many thousands because of their swarming propensities. He said that when they had received a consignment of bees they set them up in the railway station, and as late as November the bees would swarm and cluster about the railway poles. This disagreeable feature finally caused them to refuse further shipments of these bees. The French beekeepers mostly complained of having received a very inferior strain of bees, and refused to receive any more of the kind.
The abdominal segments of the heather bee are black, bordered with yellowish fuzz, while on the thorax there is black fuzz. In queens and drones this fuzz is completely black all over. They build up to 50 queen-cells, being an intense swarming race.
No doubt the early Dutch settlers in America brought over this strain of heather bee, which has been an inhabitant of America since 1638. It not only was the companion of the white man, but, on account of its great propensity for swarming, even preceded the white man into the west, and is actually found all over the United States and South America. This accounts for the disagreeable characteristics of the American brown or black bee, which is very aggressive and unstable, running about the hive when disturbed and dropping from the combs when lifted up, indicating that the American black or brown bee is a descendant of the heather bee and not of the better race previously described as the brown European bee.
When the British Isles were almost completely swept clear of its bees as a consequence of the great bee plague known in 1904 as the Isle of Wight disease, heather bees from Holland were brought over. These did not prove satisfactory, but this was a good way of filling the gap and receiving Italian queens, which have taken the place of the old English bee; but to what extent is not now known.
Campine bees living in the heather regions of Holland, as well as the northern bees of the Scandinavian regions, are very likely of the same race, though possibly somewhat modified by their isolation. The introduction of foreign races, which is going on there, will also completely eliminate the pure strain.
