Andrew Abrahams: The Colonsay Black Bee Reserve
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- Опубликовано: 4 янв 2024
- Andrew Abrahams has kept bees commercially on Colonsay, an island in the Hebrides, an archipelago off the west of Scotland, for over 40 years. Colonsay is home to one of Europe’s few populations of pure Black Bees (Apis mellifera mellifera), the UK’s native honey bee. As well as being managed for commercial honey production and queen rearing, the bees are of unique interest to honey bee conservationists and scientists studying bee diseases. Years of selection have produced a productive and gentle strain in the 50-60 stocks of Colonsay Black Bees which have been isolated and self sustaining for decades.
This presentation outlines the harsh and often difficult conditions where our native honey bee survives and thrives on this remote Hebridean island. A beekeeping management system closely tied to Colonsay’s bee forage has evolved over decades. This management system has aimed at improvement, but also the stability and the long term maintenance of a unique gene pool. These are normally opposing and divergent aims! Andrew also highlights some of the adaptive traits of A.m.m. that have evolved over millennia by natural selection. It is these traits that allow Colonsay’s bees and their keeper to survive at the edge!
A real interesting style of apiary management; I think this is the kind of sustainable management that is needing taught to all beekeepers.
The AMM native bees are quite hard to come by from Queen sellers; it would be nice to see more main players sell exclusively native Queens.
I heard Roger Patterson described the yellow coloured queens as satsumas because they couldn’t get through the winters iv been breeding for native traits and appearance ever since. 😅
I was interested to see the notices (27:10) about the Colonsay Black Bee Reserve at Oban Ferry terminal last summer and this has been a fascinating insight into what's behind that and much wider questions raised about the value of locally adapted bees. Superb presentation, thank you!
Is there any way that anyone in the United States could purchase any of these amazing bees, Queens, or semen? I would love to have their genetics here in the northern USA
Also, how do they seem to be responding to the threats posed by varroa? Thanks!
The last North American apis mellifera mellifera black bee was found fossilized in a Nevada dry lake in 2017. They are truly native to North America. That fossil re-named neoartica proves the recent idea of them not being native is wrong. However the known last living Apis mellifera mellifera black bees died out in North America in the early 1990s from the new Varroa Destructor mite. You can not find them in North America anymore at all as they are completely extinct here although nobody cares to make mention of it nor realize it.
Get to Europe is almoust imposible, get to USA... i knowe one get Colonsay eggs and same day put in hys hives.
It's illegal to import honey bees into the USA.
@@PaulyPaulPaulWe can't even buy garden seeds from outside USA anymore. It's becoming a prison. And they kill anything that they don't think is " native " with herbicides and other non biodegradable poisons. We found a black bee apis mellifera fossil in 2017 so honeybees are native here too after all! Even though it's identical in EVERY way to apis mellifera mellifera the government decided to name it neoarctica to try to keep us thinking of their stupid ice age Wipeout theory but it was found in a perfectly intact dry lake bed in the great state of Nevada.
I'm unclear why you would introduce bees from elsewhere in Scotland or Ireland if you already had bees that were adapted to your environment.
With a selection interval of 3 years, you'd make very slow progress in a breeding programme as each generation is 3 times longer than a programme that recycles every year.
If you don't kill queens, they're still influencing your population through their drones. This is all very well if you have a good individual, but, it can be a problem if you have a "tetchy" one. Are you keeping track of sister-groups (maternal line breeding), or, are you treating every colony as an individual?
Big beekeeping supply corporations imported the Italian yellow queens because they are subtropical and will produce huge amounts of bees to sell as packages very early because they don't prepare for winter the way our dark bees do. They are like a tropical tree that doesn't know to drop its leaves and sap for freezes. The bee companies advertised these Italians as the best to get them sold. There were so many being sold they bred out the good bees for sustainable northern beekeeping. They said only Yellow Italian bees were gentle and disease free and black bees were no good. The big bee companies did the same in USA in 1857. They flooded the market with packages that would be impossible to take from endemic black bees in early spring. Black bees are the best hands down for real beekeeping. Italians are for selling bees for profit.
Hi to u sir why the Bees work on the planet in the morning its good afternoon its not good for the day 👌 OK thanks
Is there any way that anyone in the United States could purchase any of these amazing bees, Queens, or semen? I would love to have their genetics here in the northern USA
Which state?
They are the best for the northern beekeeper that's for sure.