Which type of bee?

[Tim.S]

I have been keeping bees for 4 years now and it has been great fun. Like a lot of people I started out with a swarm given by a fellow beek, and most of the bees I have today are descended from that swarm. Trouble is they are a touch swarmy and as my time for beekeeping is more limited these days due to other commitments, the time has come to change to a more cooperative bee. I tried a couple of Buckfast queens last year and they came through the winter quite well and seem to be nicer to handle. The big plus in my book is my local girls are now making queen cells everywhere and the Buckfast are happily minding their own business not making cells.
So the question is, time to replace the rest with Buckfast, or do you have a better breed in mind?

 

[Tom Bick]

Others will obviously disagree and I do like my local queens but from time to time I also like to buy in a queen from a breeder and it will always be a Buckfast.
I will be getting a couple this year one for myself and a one for a friend as I am trying to wean him of Italians.
You can always remove the QC’s from your swarming hives and then give them a frame or two with eggs from your Buckfast hives in the hope they will produce QC’s from them once they start to try and swarm again, this way some of the Buckfast characteristics will be passed on.

 

[Finman]

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If you want to select bee strain, first you should evaluate how is you basic beekeeping.
Modern queen lays much and national brood +half is too small to nurse.

The style of nursing should follow the size of colony. If the queen is good, you give as much laying room as it needs. if you do not so, the colony has only one idea in its mind: swarming.

I kept carniolan bees 10 years. I had several strains. It is swarmy and it started swarm preparations at the beginning of summer. Even controlling them with artificial swarm was difficult.

italian bees I have had 40 years. The strains are many. There are well behaving and bad behaving. It depens on you how you select the queens in your yard. What bees you have in surrounding affect to you yard when virgins mate with next door drones.


One example: we inspected my friend's hives. One hive was very strong compared to oher hives. It had 2 box full of bees. Many other hives had medium box full of brood but they are just emerging.
Hives had swarm cells. Reason was that lower box was full of pollen, nectar and winter food.

I saw too that hive had Carniolan blood. It has hybrid vigour. It has a big tendency to collect pollen, and that is why it had started brood rearing very early. It had good pollen stores after winter.

So what? this hive is speacilly good and it needs individual care. You may get 150 kg honey from this hive if you can keep it properly. With normal nursing you are in conflict with its own style.
What we did is another story. We put queen to lay in a queenless hive and bees and brood we share between 3 weak hives. So with this hive we lifted 3 poor hive to good cathegory.

Normal brooding started here 3 weeks ago when willow started blooming.

I have had many other bees too but ....
.
.

 

[herefordshirehoney]

One thing i've noticed on my travels in the association other last few years is a lot of beekeepers on brood and a half seem to have very smarmy bees. Even know I dont have hardly any experience its not hard to tell picking a queen supplier should be top priority then the hive type.

However, trying to get that knowledge of who supplies good queens is another story. I wont know myself till near end of the year if ive made the right choices. I went for buckfast as I wanted the nice traits as well as the honey gathering.

 

[Gilberdyke John]

One thing i've noticed on my travels in the association other last few years is a lot of beekeepers on brood and a half seem to have very smarmy bees. Even know I dont have hardly any experience its not hard to tell picking a queen supplier should be top priority then the hive type.

However, trying to get that knowledge of who supplies good queens is another story. I wont know myself till near end of the year if ive made the right choices. I went for buckfast as I wanted the nice traits as well as the honey gathering.

Perhaps this has been done and I haven't found it but a table of strains of bee/queen, size of brood, tendency to swarm (scale 1 to 10) and ease of keeping would make a good point of reference for us newbies.

 

[Finman]

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Swarmy and swarmy....there difference what is "swarm"

When I read this forum, I see that hives swarm even if there are one box of bees.
Once I bought Carniolan queens which started to swarm even if it was not even summer.

My Italians swarm when they have 4-6 boxes. They normally produce 2-4 kg swarm which fill 1-2 langstroth boxes. Then I join them again to brood hive.

Now I read that one guy put his 6-frame swarm on rape field which works like "wax making machine".

 

[madasafish]

Comparison of different bee types


http://www.beesource.com/resources/usda/the-different-types-of-honey-bees/

 

[mbc]

Comparison of different bee types


http://www.beesource.com/resources/usda/the-different-types-of-honey-bees/

Not too helpful in the British Isles though.
I've tried to produce a more relevant table below :

AMM = native indigenous bees
Anything else = not

 

[Finman]

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That kind of comparisions have no value.

It depends on strains what do well in local circumtances.

When virgings mate with local other bees, it mix yard in 2 years.

The queen may bee good but it looses its features after 2 generation.

 

[Little John]

Finman is right of course - unless new mated queens are routinely added, all colonies eventually become 'local bees'.

To my mind swarming has both positive and negative aspects: sure, it's a pain in the butt for the beekeeper, but it's a sign that those bees are capable of looking after themselves.

My ideal strain of bee is one which can mate successfully at 14 degrees - 'cause right now that's all that the Britain weather has to offer.

LJ

 

[Finman]

My ideal strain of bee is one which can mate successfully at 14 degrees - 'cause right now that's all that the Britain weather has to offer.

LJ

ideal strain? What is that? It really needs imagination.

wow! Our bees need 20C and perhaps 20% mates in 18C.


My bees do not even forage at 14C temperature.
.

 

[Finman]

Finman is right of course - unless new mated queens are routinely added, all colonies eventually become 'local bees'.



LJ

of course, but difference is that you speak carbage. Very funny.

local to me means that the queen has been reared in Finland by professional beekeepers who have 300 - 1000 hives.

I can bye queens which have "Finnich genetic origin" but they have been mated in south Europe. Results are too variable. Some are good and some are not able to over winter here. For example all NZ hives die here.

 

[madasafish]

Finman is right of course - unless new mated queens are routinely added, all colonies eventually become 'local bees'.

To my mind swarming has both positive and negative aspects: sure, it's a pain in the butt for the beekeeper, but it's a sign that those bees are capable of looking after themselves.

My ideal strain of bee is one which can mate successfully at 14 degrees - 'cause right now that's all that the Britain weather has to offer.

LJ

14C? More like 8-10C here at present...

 

[pargyle]

The problem facing anyone who is looking to buy replacement bees, at present, is being confident that the bees you are buying are actually what they are claimed to be. There is such a UK shortage that I suspect there will be people throwing together ANY bees they can find to fill the void left after the (according to our RBI) disasterous losses over the winter - he indicated that 40% losses were becoming the norm... and the bee suppliers will be charging high prices to boot.

The ideal bees, in my opinion, are those obtained locally from known beekeepers who can demonstrate the parentage of the bees and the characteristics of the colony from which they have derived. I fear that these are going to be few and far between and very late in the season in some cases.

The reality is that we will probably have to take whatever we can get and look at re-queening colonies that have detrimental characteristics with more appropriate queens in due course.

Sorry - bit off topic but relevant insomuch as 'beggars can't be choosers !'.

 

[keith pierce]

ideal strain? What is that? It really needs imagination.

wow! Our bees need 20C and perhaps 20% mates in 18C.


My bees do not even forage at 14C temperature.
.

Average minimum and maximum temperature over the year for ireland.
My bees start to fly at about 9c and are actively foraging at about 13c but it not till the temps hit between 15 to 18*c that the hive starts to explode with bee activity. If there is a wind chill then this changes. If we were to wait for 20*c then or bees would stave to death.

 

[Graham40]

You might dislike bees that swarm a lot however bear in mind that some strains are a real pain to propogate, getting them to produce new queens can be problomatic unless you are into graffting. In the end it comes down to how you manage your stocks.

I split my colonies before they get to the point of swarming. I then either let them raise their own queen or buy in one.

I prefer raising my own weather dependent.

I prefer the local dark bee, they are a bit of a mix as you need to add new genes to the pool every so often otherwise you end up with problems.

Italian bees don't do well in the NE of Scotland

 

[Finman]

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Last May I had 3-box hive on balance. There was 13 hectares autumn rape in bloom 5 weeks.

It was all the time sun. One week, when it was 15-18C, bees flyed much but they got nothing even if I saw nectar droplets in floers. Bees flied "actively" but they returned with empty stomach. The rise in balance was 3 kg per week.

Then it came a day and 23C and bees got 5 kg more weight.

During 5 weeks blooming I got practically nothing.


What I learned and I am surprised, how wind affects foraging.

I am astonished why folks are broud if their bees fly inlow temperatures.
Any way, they get nothing then.

If your bees are able to forage in 10C temp, your annual yield should bee 300 kg per hive
and you should not have those poor matings.

.

 

[Finman]

Italian bees don't do well in the NE of Scotland

our guys keep Ialian bees near Polar Circle. But more popular is Carniolan in north.

Practically no one has AMM. Varroa killed it.

 

[DanBee]

One thing i've noticed ... is a lot of beekeepers on brood and a half seem to have very smarmy bees. Even know I dont have hardly any experience its not hard to tell picking a queen supplier should be top priority then the hive type.

Brood and a half indicates that the colony expansion is either unpredicted or unmanaged. Compression induces swarming. If they had looked at the bees and added a second brood box when required then they would have been in a much stronger position regarding management options. Brood and a half gives all the disadvantages with none of the advantages of double brood.

Sorry to say it but there is an expectation raised in some quarters that "native" bees do just fine thankyou on a single national brood box; even Beowulf Cooper disagreed with this. There is also the old stereotype of a hive having one brood box and several supers. Neither helps the novice who finds the bees expand beyond the space available, IMHO.

 

[Graham40]

Yeah Scots are to mean to feed the ravenous Italians.. they tend to chomp through their stores to quickly so when its wet n cold they don't take down enough stores to keep them going.
The black bee tends to have more fat reserves on them slower metabolisim so they don't eat as much so in spring the black bees have a larger strength. I have an Italian stock its just a handfull of bees at the moment... I should really just bump it off as its more trouble than its worth trying to bring it back to life.
by comparison the black bees are across the box side to side.