# General beekeeping > Native honeybees >  Italian bees

## Jimbo

I am looking for a sample of pure Italian bees to check the wing morphometry 
If anybody knows where I might source a sample can they please contact me. Thanks Jimbo

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## Neils

Are they italian looking enough to be any use?  I suspect that queen is mated in the general hodgepodge of bees around me given the time it's taken her to start laying since they pitched up but her mother ate pasta.

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## Jon

I am not sure many beekeepers in the UK are keeping pure Italians. in your area I bet most of the yellow banding originated in Buckfast Abbey. Plus the mixture of imports of each and every hue.

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## Neils

*whispers* they might have been imports rather than UK raised bees.  Not I hasten to add by me (waves BIBBA membership card), but I know where this swarm came from and where those bees originally came from.  I believe that pre-swarm that was still the original imported queen in the colony.

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## Jimbo

you are correct Jon, not many Italians to be found in Scotland as they don't like our harsh condition. Nellie it may be worth a try at morphometry with this colony if you think they are near pure Italians. The reason I want a sample is to compare pure Amm to the pure Carniolan that Jon posted last year to a pure Italian strain. The carnies were so far removed from the  Amm plot that the plot had to be adjusted so it would be interesting to see where the Italians plot ends up

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## Neils

I'll double check with the beekeeper whether they were still with the original queen pre-swarm. I believe they were NZ imports.

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## lindsay s

Yellow bees!!! I hope Jon puts on dark glasses before looking at the above picture. My mentor always told me to stay away from the Italians he said they built up to fast and and didn't do well in our cool windy summers.(I think he was meaning bees and not the tourists that arrive here every year)

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## gavin

They look part-Italian part-Carnie to me, Nellie.  Large parts of NZ used to be fairly pure Italian. Then a breeder imported Carnie semen and used it in crosses to their Italians to create something that was essentially Carnie but with traces of Italian in them.  Then queen raisers in other parts of NZ raise the queens and packages that have been sent to the UK which gives them a mix with more Italians.  That may be what you have here - part-Italian, part-Carnie.

Nellie could send some of them to you Lindsay then perhaps we'd hear about something other than neonics for a while.  Damn!  Mentioned them again.

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## Jon

Mine do look totally different

drones on frame.jpgsealed brood.jpgtwo good cells.jpgQ61.jpg

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## Jon

> They look part-Italian part-Carnie to me, Nellie.


There are certainly workers which are dark with wide Carnica type bands and others which have two very distinct yellow bands which suggests that the queen mated with a mixture of drones.
A colony like this can be fine but if you go one generation further it can produce a cranky queen as you don't know which larva is likely to produce the next virgin.

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## Jimbo

My colonies look just the same. I did have a colony that had some workers with a broad yellow band and when I did the wing morphometry I separated the yellow banded samples from the dark sample. I expected to get the yellow banded samples to plot outside the Amm box but they were in the box the same as the dark sample from the same hive.

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## Rosie

Roger patterson once tricked Peter Edwards along those lines.  Roger sorted out the yellow bees from a colony sample and then another set of black ones from the same hive.  He gave both sets to Peter and told him they were from different hives.  When Peter did the morphometry he found the two samples to be similar with the yellow ones being slightly more pure AMM than the blacks.  Dave Cushman always said that colour meant very little and I have always followed that advice but last season and probably this one I have been using colour as one of my selection criteria, merely because people expect the bees to be black so that will make them easier to sell in the future.  I think black ones look better anyway.  :Smile: 

Rosie

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## gavin

Ooops .. we're back to the discussion on what morphometry achieves and what we are trying to do.  Questions on whether pure Amm still exists anywhere, and whether it was ever fully isolated from admixture anyway before man came along.

Wing morphometry is a method that gives you a snapshot of several genes that differ between Amm and eastern continental races.  Body colour shows you one other gene (OK, there are small effects of many others) that differs between Amm and some of those eastern races.  If you are trying to purify remnant Amm or something as close to it as you can get then you need to consider all of these and more - just as Peter Edwards does - as many as you can.  I don't even regard DNA tests as a decisive unless the test takes into account all the subtleties of allele frequencies across a significant number of loci.

Yesterday a group of beginners saw amongst my bees one that had a Carnie-like appearance, wasn't foraging unlike the others, had built up dramatically in March, had the queen still in lay after several days of poor weather unlike the others, and was particularly short of stores.  Bees with the brakes off, bees adapted to the much more reliable springs of Slovenia, and bees that are much more likely to starve even when being tended by caring beekeepers as this sneaks up on you unnoticed if you are used to bees that look after themselves in poor weather.

So, mostly, general appearance correlates with other aspects of the Amm/eastern race divide, but colour can be misleading because just one gene mixed in can greatly change the appearance (thanks Jon!), and carnica at least in its general body colour doesn't look that different from Amm.

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## Jon

The key think is that yellow is dominant over black so if one of my virgin queens mates and produces some yellow banded workers I assume it has mated with drones from outside my apiary.

This thread covered some of the issues and the link to the Woyke paper explains how the various genes intereact to produce the yellow banding in bees.

Some of my queens mate over my own apiary as I have witnessed it several times.
One of these queens settled about 10 yards short of the apidea it flew from and I collected the bees and returned them to the apidea. I used it to requeen a colony and all its workers are black and the morphometry looks like near pure AMM.

This one number 75.

75-apidea.jpg

Others which mated from the same apiary produced over 50% yellow banded offspring.

My experience differs from Steve with respect to colour.
The colonies with a lot of yellow bee in them have a discoidal shift further to the right and a higher cubital index.
In my bees colour is a fairly good indicator and I would never breed from a queen which was producing yellow workers, irrespective of what the morphometry says. I have several queens which produce 100% black offspring.

I have another queen which I accidentally kept locked in for 12 days in the apidea and when I opened the door it had eggs 3 days later and I suspect this one was so desperate it mated in my apiary as well.
I have this one in the garden and it also looks like a decent colony, also 100% dark workers.

col.68.jpg

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## COVENANTER

hi jimbo got your name from an irish black bee keeper.i am looking to buy  native black queen .i was at my local association  ,kelvin valley .b.k.a. and was impressed by the talk on native bees. i now wish to keep them.i have permission to put hives on three farms which are quite remote .if you will have mated black queens for sale later in the year please get in touch. art milton@talktalk.net or through forum thank you for your time

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## COVENANTER

hi jimbo    i am trying to buy a black mated queen .jon in nothern ireland put me on to you.if you can help me please get in touch my e mail is artmilton@talktalk.net.i will pay well in advance and i can collect it as i am not far away. end of may or june would be ideal.for me. cheers

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## The Drone Ranger

> I am looking for a sample of pure Italian bees to check the wing morphometry 
> If anybody knows where I might source a sample can they please contact me. Thanks Jimbo


Lots of wing morphometry data on Italians available from the States where they use the method to help produce pure bred Italian bees.
http://www.beeworks.com/morphometry/index.html

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## The Drone Ranger

> The key think is that yellow is dominant over black so if one of my virgin queens mates and produces some yellow banded workers I assume it has mated with drones from outside my apiary.
> 
> 
> I have another queen which I accidentally kept locked in for 12 days in the apidea and when I opened the door it had eggs 3 days later and I suspect this one was so desperate it mated in my apiary as well.
> I have this one in the garden and it also looks like a decent colony, also 100% dark workers.
> 
> col.68.jpg


Redneck bees available only in the deep south
"Howdy cousin you sure are a purdy lady"

They did produce Golden Queens at one time but their daughters always reverted to black when crossed

Cordovan Italian bees 
http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/queenproducers.html

nice but again colour is lost during crossing

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