Genetics for the Beekeeper - Helen Mooney

Helen keeps 20 stocks of bees in the West of Ireland in County Mayo. The climate is tough on bees that are not locally adapted to harsh damp weather, and with 12 years of beekeeping experience she has come to value the survival traits of the Dark bee. There is hybridisation to the North, in Sligo and also in South Mayo, but further South, in Connemara, County Galway are fellow Dark bee breeders and the overall Irish population remains robust and pure.
Helen is a Bee Master with the Federation of Irish Beekeepers Associations and a member of NIHBS, the Native Irish Honey Bee Society, for which she has written a chapter on basic genetics for beekeepers. Along with maintaining and breeding dark bees in several apiaries, she now teaches on the Diploma in Apiculture in the University of Galway, her friendship with Prof Grace McCormack, who set up this course, dating back 30 years to when they were both PhD students in that University.
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[@harrywthomasaba]

Excellent talk. Nice to have a refresh on genetics and the process of selective breeding to gain recessive phenotypes.

[@LoessHillsBees]

Randy Is now buying none VSH bees from other beekeepers so he can continue doing treatment research because his selective mating has been so successful. Flooding the area with mite resistance bee will eventually self select as long as the resistance is in the population.

[@iananderson8526]

Can anyone supply the links to papers which prove AMM is the native bee of britain

[@johnstockburn6396]

The so called AMM bee just seems to be an agenda being pushed quite loudly by a minority of very vocal people , for years keepers have had access to many different strains of bees and undoubtedly have mixed with what once was the native bee
Move along and work with what we have and for goodness sake stop pushing for a mass cull that does not fit your profile .