# General beekeeping > Native honeybees >  Why AMM?

## Neils

I've been mulling this over for a while now, and tried to figure out a "nice" way to ask the question, but I can't so I"m just going to go for it.

Why the interest in the "British Black Bee"/"Apis Mellifera Mellifera"?

The people that I know here that had them aren't that sorry to see the back of them.

My bees live through winter and give me honey, in my brief time beekeeping I havent had to consider much else. Why should I, as an individual beekeeper care what their provenance is?

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## gavin

Because you care, not just about your bees but about the bees that were always here.  The heritage of your forefathers, the bees that lived in the trees in the woods before man took over.

More than that, they offer beekeeping something extra.  Compact colonies attuned to our weather.  Long-lived queens and workers.  Better mating in poor weather.  Better winter survival, on average, given that they can fly in cooler weather, they don't mind protein rich winter food, and they are very frugal.  Effective, sustainable bees rather than high maintenance, high-input variable-output bees.

Why do the beekeepers around you not have pleasant memories of them?  They are not remembering the pure type but hybrids with imports which look similar.  Also, they are comparing a lightly bred bee of old with highly bred bees of commerce.  Amm could do that too if they were given a chance.

Will that do for now?!  

Gavin

PS  Oh, and two 'll's, one 'f'.   :Stick Out Tongue:

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## Jimbo

Hi Nellie, 

A good question but an easy one to answer. On the Rosneath Peninsula we decided to start a bee breeding group back in 2006 to improve our local bees. The first objective was to determine what kind of bees we had locally. We surveyed all the local colonies and with the help of BIBBA found we had a high proportion of colonies that were either Amm or near Amm, therefore we started to improve the Amm. The reason for this is in my opinion it is easier to improve a pure strain of bee than a hybrid strain of bee. We surveyed the area again a few years later and found that the number of Amm colonies had reduced. The reason was the new beekeepers on the Peninsula obtaining colonies that were local but were hybrid colonies. The main aim is now to set up an isolated site for breeding and to conserve the Amm stocks we still have. We are more fortunate than beekeepers is England where we have a low density of beekeepers and a better geography for this aim, we also don,t have any commercial beekeepers near us which may also affect us in conserving Amm

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## Rosie

In large tracts of North Wales we have put our heads together and decided that the best way to get decent bees that breed true is to all keep similar bees so that open matings will result in bees as good as the parents.  In a chaotic system, where everyone keeps different bees, there is almost no point in selecting the best to breed from because open matings will always produce variable results - often very aggressive results.  In our area, which is pretty marginal for bees, the race that seems to do best are the purest of the AMMs that we  have and so we have decided to concentrate on them.  Pretty soon I am sure that the areas cooperating in this initiative will soon be full of bees that are as good as the best of our stocks.  These best bees are gentle, healthy and productive.  However, we have to keep vigilant as any exotic strains that are brought into the districts can undermine all our good efforts so we hold regular meetings, carry out wing morphometry and cooperate with BIBBA to gain access to their DNA testing project.  The movement is growing, our numbers are swelling and the bees are improving.

In more clement areas you could probably do something similar with other races but I suspect it will always be easier to concentrate on AMMs as natural selective forces of nature and the environment will work in your favour.  

In addition to the self interests of beekeepers, AMMs are an important part of the native flora and fauna and many of us feel duty-bound to try to preserve them for future generations.

Steve

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## chris

In his book on the black bee in Europe, Christophe Gauthier states that a comparative study shows that AMM harvests a greater quantity of pollen from a wider variety and a greater number of plants. The wider variety helps create a healthier, longer living bee.
 It also means that more plants of more varieties are pollinated leading to a greater biodiversity in the foraging area.




> In addition to the self interests of beekeepers, AMMs are an important part of the native flora and fauna and many of us feel duty-bound to try to preserve them for future generations.
> Steve

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## AlexJ

In line with Gavin and Rosie's comments, Ruttner notes in 'The Dark European Honey Bee', published by BIBBA, on the general behavioural characteristics of AMM as "extreme economic caution as expression of a defensive strategy directed against a harsh environment".

Putting altruism to one side, in my part of the world it makes perfect sense to support the indigenous bee (notwithstanding discussions on the current genetic make-up of bees) proven over millennia to cope best with a northerly climate.

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## Eric McArthur

Hi All

Nellie wrote
Why AMM? 
I've been mulling this over for a while now, and tried to figure out a "nice" way to ask the question, but I can't so I"m just going to go for it.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
I read the replies of Gavin, Jimbo and Rosie with interest and would re-phrase Nellies question in the hope that further deep discussion might take place to convince the AMM doubters that there is indeed a case for flooding areas which might be unsuitable for such a bee.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
Rosie/Steve wrote:
In more clement areas you could probably do something similar with other races but I suspect it will always be easier to concentrate on AMMs as natural selective forces of nature and the environment will work in your favour.
A rather interesting statement!  In more clement areas you could probably do something similar with other races.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;  ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;  
Gavin wrote:
Because you care, not just about your bees but about the bees that were always here. The heritage of your forefathers, the bees that lived in the trees in the woods before man took over.
..................................................  ...........................
The environment has changed quite dramatically since even 1900. Where are these woods now.  White clover has virtually disappeared in Scotland except where  Grizzly and Margie bee keep.  Hedgerows have been removed in favour of fences.  According to both Ruttner and Adam AMM is susceptible to acarine and is a stinger.  Berhards Maud bees were inveterate swarmers according to personal communication.  AMM historically is not a particularly fecund bee, reportedly with the advancement of modern agriculture AMM honey production became inferior to other races especially in the spring.  
However depending on bias this bee can be all things to all men.  But I feel sure commercial beekeepers will not be fans of AMM.
As Devils Advocate  - 
 Why not concentrate on pure race A.m. carnica (now with the added bonus of selecting for Varroa tolerance. Doris already knows about this facility!)  in these more clement areas in the UK?  Much as the Germans did prior to WW1, which ultimately displaced the dominant black bee in favour of the Carniolan: confining the dark bee to the heather region of the Lüneburger Heath, where it is legendary for its slow build up, which coincides with the heather bloom, as opposed to the rapid spring development of the Carniolan, which would be ideal for OSR in the UK, for which AMM is most definitely not the bee. The heather (late!) areas of Scotland would be ideal for the fostering of AMM, which as Rosie quite rightly implies  - viz  I suspect it will always be easier to concentrate on AMMs as natural selective forces of nature and the environment will work in your favour.
I am not in favour of the blanketing of Scotland by AMM as a fetish, romantic notion, but by being selective with habitat the best of both worlds could be enjoyed by the AMM enthusiasts and the rest of us.

Eric
.................................................

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## Jon

> As” Devil’s Advocate”  - 
>  Why not concentrate on pure race A.m. carnica (now with the added bonus of selecting for Varroa tolerance. Doris already knows about this facility!)  in these more “clement” areas in the UK?  Much as the Germans did prior to WW1, which ultimately displaced the dominant black bee in favour of the Carniolan: .


If you read this paper by Robin Moritz you will note that AMM was never displaced by Carnica in Germany. The modern German bee is actually a hybrid between AMM and Carnica. 




> more than 40 years have not been sufficient o replace the
> autochthonous mellifera race with carnica.


This paper also illustrates some of the pitfalls associated with distinguishing bee races on morphometry alone.

I keep AMM (at least I hope they are AMM - dna confirmation pending) because they are the native bee of Ireland and the UK.
I think it is important to preserve native species as they are the best adapted to local ecosystems where they have evolved alongside local flora and fauna for tens of thousands of years.

At a personal level I find my bees are very gentle to handle irrespective of the experience of Ruttner.
I rarely have to use smoke other than a puff or two on removal of the crown board and I handle them with just surgical gloves and a veil. (with the rest of my clothes on before someone makes a quip.) I have done an inspection of 20 or more colonies over an afternoon and not picked up a single sting even though the bees could sting my hands at will. On a bad day you will pick up a few stings around the fingers but that happens with any race of bee. 
I checked colonies today and they all have loads of stores left. Frugal overwintering is one of the desirable characteristics of AMM.
I have been reading on various beekeeping forums where people have left a couple of supers on a colony and still had them run out of stores. I don't want to be bothered with bees like that.

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## gavin

I think that it is important to realise that Amm was once the bee right across the UK, not just in heather regions.  Here in the east our bees would always have had plenty of spring forage.  Those lowland eastern Amm stocks would be attuned to the forage here including sycamore and dandelions around the same time as OSR now.  Even without the conservation considerations, Amm still has a lot going for it.

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## Rosie

I used to live in an OSR area and my bees, which I believe to be near native and exhibit all the usual AMM traits, used to do particularly well during the rape season.  They were brilliant at finding pollen and if I wanted an early start with the rape I used to stimulate a few colonies with thin syrup.  There was no need for pollen patties such as some recommend.  The ones I did not stimulate still got a worthwhile crop of rape and did not suffer from the problem of early swarming which early bees such as Carniolans or stimulated AMMs are prone to.

One advantage of AMMs is that they can be managed easily.  They respond to the environment, even if you are manipulating it, and will succeed regardless of what's thrown at them.  It is not surprising that they suit the conditions so well as they have had thousands, if not millions of years to adjust to it.  It seems daft to me to throw away such a wonderful resource and it's not true, by the way, that all bee farmers prefer exotic bees.  I know three that use local bees and at least 2 of them are working hard at breeding from their purest AMMs and their results are improving year by year.

Rosie

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## Eric McArthur

Hi Rosie
Rosie wrote:
I used to live in an OSR area and my bees, which I BELIEVE to be near native and exhibit all the usual AMM traits.
The ones I did not stimulate still got a worthwhile crop of rape and did not suffer from the problem of early swarming which EARLY BEES such as Carniolans or stimulated AMMs are prone to.
..........................................
How would pure race AMM perform? In the light of their being historically slow developers, with relatively low fecundity; building to a maximum of 8 British Standard frames of brood, this bee is not noted for the enormous amount of honey, which even the much maligned Scottish acclimatised mongrels are capable of producing. I wont quote from my own experience but this is rather similar to Ian Craigs who regularly harvests averages of 90 lbs of surplus year on year.
I personally would welcome a comeback of AMM in the marginal late areas where there is considerable presence of bell and ling. This I reckon is  do-able.  But the present scenario of burgeoning imports by the commercial beekeepers is undermining  the precarious existence of the Scottish acclimatised mongrels without exacerbating the problem with an unknown quantity resulting from cross, cross breeding with AMM in the more productive areas like Perthshire, the North East and the East coast.  AMMs historical susceptibility to acarine is also a major factor, despite the low incidence of the disease in Scotland, currently. This low incidence could be attributed to the presence of the  more acarine resistant mongrels (hybrids)
As an aside the legendary brilliant white cappings are due to AMMs propensity for not filling the bottles and leaving a large air space above the sealed honey!

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## Jon

> with relatively low fecundity; building to a maximum of 8 British Standard frames of brood,


Most of mine limit themselves to a maximum of 8 or 9 frames of brood but the odd one needs a second brood box and I had one last year produced 20 frames of brood in May.
It was 85% amm according to wing morphometry.

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## Eric McArthur

Hi Jon
Jon wrote:  
It was 85% amm according to wing morphometry.  

.................................................
Hybrid, heterotosis vigour?

Eric

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## Jon

I don't think the queen was a hybrid although she must have mated with a couple of non amm drones.
The scattergram is in the other thread, colony 31.
I reared quite a few daughters from her but too early to assess them yet.

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## beebread

Some people are breeding great bees from AMM.It is unfortunate for us in England that we only have imports or mongrels.It may suit people with 100 plus hives to import vast amounts of queens. As far as i know Scotland as breeding groups of amm.Other places such as ireland for example have the galtee black bee group.Not forgetting some people are trying to save the Laeso bees in Denmark.Apathy along with stupid EU import rules will further damaged our bees.I am not trying to rewrite the book,although i think we should take another look at it.

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## gavin

Peter Edwards in Stratford upon Avon runs 100+ colonies of Amm so it can be done. Not easy, and it needs lots of stocks to pull it off, but it can be done.

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## Jon

I think he has 160 colonies. He was a speaker at the ubka conference in March and gave a couple of very good presentations about his work.
The Galtee bees are great to work - bare hand bees.
I have a few colonies with part galtee genetics and I intend to graft a few from them this summer.

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## beebread

Hi Jon and Gavin,I wish i could get my hands on some galtee bees.I was tempted to ask Micheál Mac Giolla Coda at Stoneleigh.Although i think he now just breeds for the amm groups.Breeding enough drones to keep them pure would be difficute.Dave Cushman had a great website dedicated to the Galtee bees at one time.The website is now down unfortunatly.Interesting to here about the other amm breeder in stratford.Did he get them from Ireland ?

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## Jon

Hi BB

Peter mainly uses local stock although he has brought in the odd queen from here and there. He uses Morphometry to eliminate unsuitable breeder queens and he raises his own queens every year.

The Galtee bee site is here.

http://www.gbbg.net/

Micheál Mac Giolla Coda now only sells queens in Ireland south of the border so I would have to go down and collect one or get it posted to an address in the South to pick up.
I have never actually bought a queen in my life but I have some of my own queens mated with Galtee drones and I have a daughter of a Galtee queen which I swapped one of mine for.
No matter what bees you start with you can improve them a lot if you select carefully.

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## Rosie

Peter tells me the "Odd bees from here and there" were from Ben Gillman in the East Midlands, Prof. Ratnieks and Galtee.  Of the three I get the impression that he favoured the Ben Gillman strain.  In his conditions the Ratnieks ones were a bit defensive and the Galtee ones were prone to chalk.  Thats' not to say thoug that those problems would not apply to all queens from those sources or to all localities.

Conversely not all Ben's bees are wonderful as I know one couple who bought a colony from him that turned out to be swarmy, nasty, yellow and ridden with acarine.  They died out and were subsequently analysed at the bee unit.

Rosie

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## Jon

> "Odd bees from here and there"


LOL. Didn't mean to imply he was casual about it!
He did mention the sources in his presentation.

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## The Drone Ranger

I haven't found any problem with keeping hybrid bees
If I have a black and white dog which chases sheep that doesn't mean I have a sheepdog let alone a border collie.
There are AMM bees in existence but lots of people claim to have AMM type bees which are most likely are crosses
Wing morphometry only really tells whether its worth DNA testing and then typically small samples tested (50 bees)
In most of Britain it would be impossible to maintain purity even if you started with a 100% AMM queen
Lot's of statements like hybrids have bad temper etc are just sweeping and untrue
Unfortunately sometimes beekeeping feels like standing in a complex of caves 
Someone with a loud voice shouts and the echoes seem to go on forever
I am all in favour of keeping Black Bees but lets not get overly zealous about it.
"All we are saying is give bees a chance" as the beatles sang.

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## Jon

Hi DR.
The trick is to establish a bee breeding group with local beekeepers where everyone is singing off the same hymnsheet.
After a while open mated queens start to produce good results.

Hybrids or random crosses can be fine at first but in my experience a lot of beekeepers who start out with good bees run into problems with aggression after a couple of generations.

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## gavin

With such a cracking user name I'm looking forward to hearing more from you Drone Ranger.

To continue your sheepdog analogy, a black and white dog may not be much use.  But if you picked a black and white dog that had straight short to medium length hair, was of medium size, an alert look about it, ears that sat above the head and usually flopped over then you would be increasing your chance of finding a pure-bred sheepdog than any old black and white mongrel.  Your selected sheepdog would then be found to possess the traits required of a sheepdog, such as attentiveness, intelligence, a willingness to concentrate for long spells and to accept and learn commands easily. 

Yes, maintaining purity in bees stocks is hard, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try.  After keeping whatever local mongrels came my way for well over a decade I've decided to try to do something to help maintain pure stocks and select mild, productive bees.  I reckon that you are wasting your time doing that with mixed types of bee as the results will remain unpredictable.  At the moment my bees are very mixed - this is due to me restocking thanks to the generosity of beginners who had obtained very mixed bees themselves.  I can see Carniolans, Italians, maybe Buckfast and Amm all in there.  They get tetchy readily, and some of them are very swarmy.  However we've been able to stock our new association apiary with bees that seem purer.  These bees are less swarmy and better behaved on the whole than mine.  From those I'll be selecting the best-behaved types and propagating queens from the best.  Some of that propagation will be at a remote site.  You aren't so far away and would be most welcome to come and see the progress (when and if we have some!).

G.

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## The Drone Ranger

Gavin and Jon thanks for your comments I like what you are saying and I would not want to disagree for the sake of it but it's beyond difficult and just inside impossible to maintain an AMM colony with open mating so it's A.I. or nothing.
 You will probably have used this program already http://www.drawwing.org
called DrawWing which some people use to select their breeding stock You would need to cut the queen's wings off (don't go there ) or you will have to settle for the poor old drone again I think.
Because of the swarming season I have lots of hives which I will reduce before winter approx 25 only 2 or 3 are grumpy ungrateful so and so's, but they will be dealt with when I recombine hives by choosing the gentlest and best. I don't bother what colour they are some of the best may be black some of the worst may be black I seen both.
If I lived in central London again I would choose a UK bred queen possibly  from KBS they are totally yellow completely gentle and not even slightly likely to sting the neighbours. OK that queen might have to be replaced by another after a couple of years but it's horses for courses.
The bees I have at the moment are very swarmy but they build up fast for the oil seed rape, they are (mostly) very gentle, they make it through the winter every year so that's most of my boxes ticked.,
Now I would be happy enough to add a selection criteria of AMM type but black isn't that its just a colour.
Gavin I hear you have made great progress in a very short space of time with the apiary so well done on that plus thanks for the EFB pics elsewhere

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## Trog

Daughter and I had a lovely afternoon with our mongrels yesterday.  Some are yellowish, some black, some in between.  Most go back years and the queens mate with whatever drones are around.  All behaved impeccably and we enjoyed working with them.  Even the ones left open for a good long time while we split them were good-natured.  The only pure AMMs we ever had died of acarine after a year and, given that we had no other bees at the time, they must have brought it with them.  So we continue to breed for good nature as that's the most important when B & Bs go wandering round the garden, get modest amounts of honey, and sometimes are able to split or pick up a swarm, though none of them are particularly that way inclined.  They're delightful girls, whatever their origins!

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## Jimbo

Hi DR,

We are familiar with Drawwing and Beemorph as well as the good old projection of wings on a screen method. A number of Scottish beekeepers attended a training for trainers course organised by BIBBA. The aim of the course was to look at the various methods and then train our local beekeepers in the technique. For a sample you require the right wing from 30 - 50 worker bees, not the wing from a queen. There was a bee breeding course organised last Sept at Scotlandwell. Details of this course is on this forum. Gavin may provide the link for you. If you would like to check the % Amm in your colonies e-mail me for further instructions on how to take the sample and where to send them. The results will eventually be used in a Scottish survey of Amm. There are currently some areas of Scotland that pure native Amm still exist and we aim to try and find more areas. Scotland is ideally suited for preserving our native bees as we have fewer beekeepers than England and also have geographic isolation.
You just can't go on the colour of bees there are a number of other factors to consider Drawwing is just one of the tools to use in assessing your bees there are many more.

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## gavin

I note with some satisfaction that Googling 'Scottish Bee Breeding' gets you there.  Here:

http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/

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## Jon

Hi DR.
My queens are all open mated and I have a couple which are 100% AMM according to Drawwing.
I have near native queens mated at my own apiary and also at another one which had a dozen colonies producing Galtee drones.

There is a series of scattergrams posted in this thread.

Open mating is clearly not as controlled as AI but the trick is to flood your mating apiary with your own drones and don't let dodgy colonies make drones. I put frames of drone brood from preferred colonies into more iffy colonies and this largely suppresses their drone production. The preferred colonies are thus stimulated to produce more drone brood and I give them drone comb to promote this. I was surprised at results I got from matings at my main apiary on my allotment.

These ones were mated there 

col33-dec-2010.jpgcol48wide.jpg

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## The Drone Ranger

Jimbo I hope you know I was kidding about the queen wing  :Smile: 
The 50 worker sample will each only be half sisters to the queen possibly 75% related if the drones were from her own hive.
Whereas the drones she produces would presumably be 100% representative of her genes which is why I put them forward for the chop.  :Stick Out Tongue: 

Thanks for the kind offer to genotype my bees but they are beyond redemption Lol .

Jon I am truly amazed by your results keep up the good work 
I'm still like (Nellie who started this thread) not sure why I need AMM bees mine are OK but I'm glad somebody loves them

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## The Drone Ranger

> I note with some satisfaction that Googling 'Scottish Bee Breeding' gets you there.  Here:
> 
> http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/


Gavin surely if you need a sample of 50 bees to check if they are AMM that must be nearly half the colony  :Smile:

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## Trog

Ha ha!  :Big Grin:

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## Jon

Non prolific bees is the way to go but perhaps not quite that mean with the brood rearing!

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## Jimbo

Nice one DR but you would be suprised what some people send you for Drawwing. It has been known to find the odd queen in the sample.

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## gavin

All this talk of queens in wing samples reminds me that I forgot to check that I didn't have the queen in two samples I took recently!  Ooops.

However there were a gazillion bees in those colonies so the 50 were about one in ... oh ... a fiftieth of a gazillion so I should have missed her.

G

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## keith pierce

just look at her beauty

RL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/811/npro011.jpg/][/URL]

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

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## Jon

Hi Keith. I have loads just as pretty as that one.
Found another two laying in apideas today.

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## The Drone Ranger

Keith 

that's a fantastic pic 
C'mon then Jon get the camera out and lets see what you've got  :Smile:

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## Jon

Ok. will get a few pics. I have 19 native queens mated so far this year and about another 30 virgins still in apideas.
I saw keith's pics on beekeeping forum and he has a lot of apideas on the go as well.
The one I am grafting from is a daughter of a Galtee queen.

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## keith pierce

This lot were due to start laying today.  




Uploaded with ImageShack.us

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## The Drone Ranger

Hi Guys

How was the "Standard" arrived at to describe AMM bees

sorry about the chicken breeder terminology

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## Rosie

According to Ruttner, Milner and Dews the standard for the British AMMs was derived from analysing museum and archaeological samples which pre-date the importation of exotic races.  They then compared them with mainland European samples and found the wing and body shapes were similar for their whole range.  It seems that the only feature that changed significantly was tongue length which increased towards the Southern extreme of their range.  

This work is still continuing as Bangor University have recently borrowed a number of AMM samples from Oxford University for DNA and morphometry testing.  I just hope the results eventually see the light of day.  Another researcher from Bangor is testing wing morphometry of enough samples in Denbighshire and Flintshire to plot a "contour map" of bee race for the area.

Leeds University, in conjunction with BIBBA are testing modern populations.  They are also using both DNA analysis and morphometry so will be ideally placed to test the correlation between the two.

Rosie

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## The Drone Ranger

Thanks Rosie,

How far back do the museum samples go I have heard people say that the black bees colonised Britain after the ice age.
Are these fossil samples ?

Had a search on the net for Ruttner and got this lively link

http://www.bbka.org.uk/members/forum...=28&t=3891&pg=

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## Jimbo

I have read that some of the samples came from York Museum and bees found in a Viking burial.

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## Jon

The viking bees were circa 1100 I believe. I'll have to check my book. There are also bees in the Linnean collection from 17 something which Ruttner did the morphometry on.

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## Neils

1100? Seems a bit late for vikings.

[edit] Oops, seem to have managed to lock the thread somehow, my apologies.

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## Jon

Nellie is now outed as a Viking pedant. I looked it up in my Ruttner Milner Dews Dark European honeybee and it is 954 AD. Close but no cigar. I will never mention Vikings or winged helmets again on the forum for fear of drawing a bad house down on myself if not complete ridicule.

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## Neils

> Nellie is now outed as a Viking pedant.





> I will never mention Vikings or winged helmets again


/pedant 
They didn't wear winged helmets
 :Big Grin:

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## Jon

The jury is still out on that one.
They taught me in my teacher training that winged helmets was an urban myth but you only have to look at the Danish football support to get a whiff of the true heritage.

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## Neils

Can't help it, you invoked pedant mode.

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## Jon

Funny I mentioned Elmer Fudd just last week as there is a local bka member called Elmer but  my comments re. Elmer Fudd were met with the usual blank stares. Why is it that I only store the wrong kind of information in my head? I thought Elmer Fudd was a household name.

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## Neils

the death of the saturday afternoon looney toons fillers I fear.  Something to plug the gap between wrestling and the football scores.

Anyone who doesn't know the entirety of the clip above needs a good slap, it's one of the greatest cultural 6 minutes of the last 100 years.

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon you posted in another thread

""Ruttner did the morphometry on those wings in the 1980s.
There is a table on P42 of the Dark European Honeybee comparing these wings with modern AMM, AM Iberica, and AM Carnica, along with the York and Oslo wings,
He did morphometry on wings from archaeological specimens found in York circa 1000 AD and Oslo circa 1200 AD

The measurements from the wings in the Linnean collection are:

CI Di Shift
Bee 1 left wing 1.61 -4.7
Right wing 1.58 -2.5

Bee 2 left wing 1.94 -4.5
right wing - -2.5

Bee 3 left wing 1.91 -5
Right wing 1.82 +1
mean 1.82 -3.33 ""

Just copied that over Jon if that's ok
There seems to be big differences between the left and right wings or am I not reading that correctly
 Why is the right wing reading more positive relative to the left ?

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## Jon

There is natural variation between right and left wings. I assume it is random. The linnean collection only has the 3 workers.
The trick is to take a large sample, as the queen mates with maybe 15 drones, so you need to get some data on the scattergram from every drone she mated with.
It's just an indicator. I don't use morphometry to chose queens but I do use it to eliminate queens from a breeding programme if the scattergram shows that their offspring are heavily hybrizised, ie she mated with a lot of non native or mongrel drones. If you breed from these your results will be completely unpredictable. 

If you positivity select queens based just on wing morphometry you may well be selecting solely for wing patterns rather than the underlying genetics which would be a bit silly. There is a paper by Moritz which looked at the German Carnica programme and he noted that Carnica bees with the 'correct' wing pattern had some AMM genes.

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon 

Thanks for that explanation
I am still deciding whether it's morphometry for me in future or one of the other possible contenders which at the moment I have narrowed down to Phrenology or Dowsing.
Morphometry has the advantage of being more fun but on the other hand dowsing is easier to spell

On the genes subject I did get hold of a paper from 2004 which analysed the genes of several beekeepers bees which were likely to be AMM pure.
That included Colonsay I personally couldn't make head nor tail of the whole thing there seemed to be any one of 4 or 5 markers that qualified the bees as AMM
It was too big to get on here as an attachment so I have stuck it on google docs.
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&p...jMWQ1&hl=en_GB 
If you get a spare moment you might be able to have a look at what it says and give the rest of us a clue

It would be great if morphetry (spelled it wrong again grrr!!!!) works cause it will give me something to do during the winter with the dead bees off the floor :}
Originally I intended to put a few of them in each bottle of mead sort of along the tequila and worm idea

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## Jon

That paper is also on the bibba website.

Gavin is familiar with it and genetics is his day job so you will get more sense out of him than me. Jimbo will be familiar with it as well.
It is basically looking at the introgression of genetic material from Ligustica in populations of AMM which are supposed to be pure AMM.
One of the geneticists can give you the spiel about mitochondrial dna and microsatellite markers.

There is currently work being carried out at Leeds university by Kate Thompson who posts here sometimes. Amongst other things she is looking at how well wing morphometry correlates to the genetic markers in her samples. There are genetic markers characteristic of each honeybee sub species and the presence of a marker associated with ligustica in a bee which is Amm (allegedly) tells you that there has been intromission of genetic material from ligustica at some point in the past.

Like the bee in the mead idea. You could compete with Guinness if you used black bees.

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## The Drone Ranger

Thanks Jon I'm glad you like the mead idea

I previously had the idea of honey with a few bee legs in it which I tried out on the missus and her family (sort of a focus group) That bombed completely

A few years ago I went mad and bought 2 apideas and 8 white kieder? mating nucs

I picked my best honey producer with nice manners and produced 18 queens from her 

The following Spring I had the worst chalkbrood outbreak ever
I got all of the hives on fresh frames and foundation (bank balance plummets)
THen I melted down all the old combs using a steamer
That left me with a bucket quarter full of chalkbrood and half a bucket of water and honey where I had to work out a method of disposal which didn't risk re-infecting my bees or worse someone elses
I put the buckets in a bee secure shed while I figured out what to do with them
Now this shed was bee proof but it obviously wasn't rat proof because they got in, ate all the chalkbrood AND drank all of the sugary liquid
Thats how we recycle on this ranch partner  :Smile:

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## Jon

> I previously had the idea of honey with a few bee legs in it which I tried out on the missus and her family (sort of a focus group)


Most of the honey I see on market stalls in Mexico has bee legs in it so you will have to fight it out with the _campesinos_ re. the patent.

The white ones are Kielers. I don't like them as they are neither fish nor fowl. They need far too many bees in them and an Apidea is your man if you want to rear a queen with a paucity of bees.

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon
Re the Kielers they are gathering dust in the shed now 
Are there plans afoot to make a correx version of the apidea ??
Those Mexicans better watch out Tonto and me know a thing or two about dealing with them

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## Jon

Haven't tried a correx one but another 25 cells went into apideas this past two evenings.
The problem with correx is that it is probably not insulating enough for a mini nuc.
Apideas work with just 300ml of bees as they are so well insulated.
If you had a couple of weeks of weather with no cold nights a home made mating nuc would probably work.

The Mexicans will have a laugh if you bring your sidekick with you given that Tonto is Spanish for stupid.

Hasta la vista

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## The Drone Ranger

Him now off in Huff !!

Jon,
Presumably all these queens will provide the flood of drones for next season.
That being the case you will probably be grafting from another queen raiser next year

Do you think you might have to wait longer for the drones to be available as that should be an indicator that the bees are closer to AMM types.

Carniolans will be the first types to build up in any given year They reach peak of breeding and numbers much earlier than Italians or Black bees that's why they have a perhaps overstated reputation for swarming 
They are ready earlier hence they are good on the rape and inclined to swarm before Italians or AMM

It might be a way of getting more AMM genetics into the bees by grafting and rearing later in the season course it would be much easier the other way round by going for early queen production and mating you would be maximising the possibility of Carniolan drones and minimising the likelyhood of black bee drones being around.

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## gavin

... especially when the rather mixed-up commercial apiaries around you go to the hills, eh?!  But yes, there will be a bias towards Amm late in the season, though as you pointed out somewhere else you may have exotic or hybrid drones already squatting in your colonies so they will be protected from the clear-out in the colonies of central and eastern European provenance.

In fact I think that the differences in timing between the races are exaggerated so there will be a lot of overlap.  It puzzles me though that beekeepers with predominantly Amm bees can keep them so when surrounded by folk with exotic imported stuff.  Apiary vicinity mating?  Drone layers at different heights?  I've no idea ...

Greatly enjoying the banter guys.

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## Jon

> . Apiary vicinity mating?  Drone layers at different heights?


Well I posted in another thread that I saw two mating swarms this week over my own apiary so that cannot be ruled out.




> Carniolans will be the first types to build up in any given year


Fortunately there is very little carniolan stock in NI although one wide boy has started to import queens and sell nucs. He advertised them as 'gentle Irish Carnica' 
Funny last time I looked out the window I was in Belfast rather than Ljubljana.

The problem here is Buckfast types which I would more accurately describe as yellow mongrels. The temper is often very bad.

AMM certainly can mate late. A friend of mine had a queen mate and start laying around 15th October last year.





> Presumably all these queens will provide the flood of drones for next season.


Hopefully. I had drones ready by the middle of may this year. 

A lot of people I know reported all the drones kicked out in the middle of June this year. That was after 5 weeks of rain. People actually lost colonies to starvation. I look after my drones and all my colonies still have thousands although, they are dropping like flies with all those apideas to attend to. Dropping like flies in the best possible way of course.




> there will be a bias towards Amm late in the season


This colony is headed by one of my queens mated from my own apiary last July. No Galtee in this one.

col48wide.jpg

Have you seen the difference between AMM wings and carnica wings?

carnica plot with AMM.jpg




> That being the case you will probably be grafting from another queen raiser next year


Almost certainly. I swapped a couple of my queens for a couple of Galtee daughters yesterday and they are Daughters of different Galtee queen from the one I am mainly grafting off this year. We don't want any more bad chatter about inbreeding from the top of the totem pole. I am sure Tonto listens to Captain Beefheart on his Ipod and will know what I am talking about.
I put one into a colony in an introduction cage a couple of hours ago so keep your fingers crossed for her.

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## The Drone Ranger

Gavin

The thing is that if carniolan bees are ready to swarm early and the black bee is not
The bees will provide drones in line with the colony growth and requirements to mate queens
If I use Snelgrove boards early in the season this creates queen cells in the upper box 
These queens fly and mate with available drones
Those drones won't be AMM because you have already made the case that Amm bees are not considering swarming till late June/July
Therefor I should be able to breed out AMM charecteristics from my bees 
Not Black thats just a colour 
I just select for the best temperament which in itself probably discriminates against AMM
My drones fly like eagles they do not squat 
Cheeky monkey  :Smile:

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## gavin

> Well I posted in another thread that I saw two mating swarms this week over my own apiary so that cannot be ruled out.


Doh!  So you did.  AVM rules.  Maybe drone flying height and drone flying in cooler conditions does too.

G.

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## Jon

Interestingly, what I witnessed was in perfect calm weather about 20c so there was nothing to stop a queen flying a couple of miles to mate.
The second mating swarm I saw was from an apidea filled with mongrel bees which had one of my virgin queens in it so that would suggest to me that apiary vicinity mating, if there is such a thing, is determined by the queen rather than the workers.

Or maybe it happens with all bee sub species not just amm.

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon

I doubt there would be much chance of inbreeding causing problems 
That is generally regarded to be a problem only where two copies of an undesirable normally recessive charateristic show up.
That would be most likely in crossings say of chickens with their own father and brother etc and it doesn't happen that often even then.

Your queens are probably too valuable but I usually just soak the queen in very very dilute sugar solution and bung her in at night aka Snelgrove

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## gavin

Inbreeding is more complicated than that.  Haven't you been listening to Eric?!   :Stick Out Tongue: 

From what I see any colony builds up in spring initially as workers-only then as the colony hits 6-7 frames of brood it makes drones in quantity too.  All races make drones in spring.  OK, your Carnie and hybrid colonies may get to actual swarming earlier but they will all be making drones.  The Carnies spread around the UK by the undiscriminating bee traders are indeed swarmy, cheap, mass-produced queens coming from 'breeders' who don't care about the quality of the bees. The ones imported recently from NZ are more highly bred creatures that actually sit tight and bring in a crop, and are slow to get angry.  These swarmy types are a real nuisance.  The rape crop isn't even over and they're trying to divide and fly off into the distance.  A nightmare for the beginner beekeeper to deal with.  The swarming attempts are also too early when the weather and so mating is less certain, and therefore you are also in for more problems of queenlessness or drone layers.  Much much better to have bees that swarm in the June gap, or quietly supercede late in the season. 

I don't want to have to use Snelgrove boards to cope with early swarming!  I'd like queens that go for 2-3 years rather than 11 months in a mediocre colony before calling it a day.

Amm is a variable entity when unselected.  Breed within it for gentleness and you will get gentleness that lasts.  Breed in a hybrid mish-mash for gentleness and things will be different next year when they mix again.  At least that is what I like to believe ...  :Wink:

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## Jon

DR
Re, inbreeding, you need to search the site for csd locus but be warned, a lot of the posts pulled up will feature Some erroneous article Eric published in the Scottish Beekeeper.
To be fair to him, he did eventually reach a point of spiritual enlightenment which lasted for about a fortnight and then it was groundhog day all over again.

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## gavin

Get yourself a large mug of tea and plenty of biscuits.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...another-puzzle

There's a wee treat in post 76 if you get that far.

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## Jimbo

Oh no, not the csd locus again! where are the paracetamols?

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## The Drone Ranger

Gavin followed the link - tedious stuff 

I still haven't seen the answer to Nellie's original "why AMM question"

I don't think there is one other than

There are beekeepers who want to have black hybrids which they call pure

Then there's the rest of us who don't care if our bees are mudbloods (in Harry Potter parlance)

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## Jon

> There are beekeepers who want to have black hybrids which they call pure


Quite the opposite. I have colonies which are black as yer boot which I would not breed from precisely because they are hybrids.

If you breed from hybrids the entire breeding process is a lottery. The trick is to get predictability by using stock which breeds true if crossed with drones from the same stock.

I don't doubt there is some intromission from other bee sub species in AMM but there is a big difference between some historic intromission in the AMM gene pool and breeding from AMM queens which have mated with carnica or buckfast. In breeding terms that almost guarantees you a disaster.  You might get something productive in the FI due to heterosis but after that it will go belly up.

The natural ranges of the honeybee subspecies overlap to some extent so you would always have had some exchange of genetic material at each interface. This is completely different from letting your queens cross with the mish mash of drones which your neighbours happen to keep which may have their origin in Slovenia, Greece or New Zealand.

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## gavin

> Gavin followed the link - tedious stuff 
> 
> I still haven't seen the answer to Nellie's original "why AMM question"
> 
> I don't think there is one other than ...


I thought that the first three answers on the thread (unusually!) explained the reasons very well!  Give me a couple of years and maybe we'll have a local strain 35 min from you with the qualities the others talk about.

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## The Drone Ranger

Well Gavin I had read the first three entries starting with your own which is describing a bee which you believe existed in antiquity and can be re-created now.
Good luck with that project
My friend piloted Southampton to the top of the Premier league but that was Fantasy Football Manager

For some reason people seemed to go off into the genetics of inbreeding
The question or thought I had in my mind simply was
If 
You start with a pure bred AMM queen supposing one existed
You graft from that queen 
The daughters are open mated crosses 
The drones they produce are all Amm 
You wait till the drone congregation area is taken over by these drones
You now graft from another pure AMM queen replacing the original daughters
The idea being to avoid preferential mating problems which some people believe exist
The new daughters will fly and mate with Amm drones and return
The workers and drones should all be AMM in a perfect world

So is there any point in cutting the wings off your bees before having gone through these first steps other than to see where your starting point was ?
Why bother with workers in the first place when drones provide the essential information about the queen if you have a method of measuring ?

Is Wing morphetry something to worry about when you are nearly there rather than not even at the beginning?.

I have been able to breed for 1 characteristic which is easy handling 
I have hybrid bees I presume and out of 32 full size colonies I have one which is TA (total agro) and two which could try harder 
To requeen those is a piece of cake so I don't agree with Jon on the "If you breed from hybrids the entire process is a lottery"

What I do agree with and I am sure Jon is talking from experience here is if you try to breed Amm bees from hybrids the whole experience probably is a lottery.  

The list of qualities which are claimed for AMM are the qualities that anyone would be happy to see in a bee colony but it remains to be seen how many of the those objectives have been achieved.

If it can be done they should be the bee of choice and become the new Fastbuck bee move over Brother Adam 

Meanwhile I hope you still keep printing the hive labels " This Product May Contain Nuts" for along time to come  :Smile:

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## Jon

Hi DR.



> ...describing a bee which you believe existed in antiquity and can be re-created now...


No one is trying to recreate it. It never went away from parts of Scotland, Ireland and the nether regions of the UK.

You start with a pure bred AMM queen supposing one existed



> You graft from that queen 
>  The daughters are open mated crosses 
>  The drones they produce are all Amm 
>  You wait till the drone congregation area is taken over by these drones
>  You now graft from another pure AMM queen replacing the original daughters
>  The idea being to avoid preferential mating problems which some people believe exist
>  The new daughters will fly and mate with Amm drones and return
>  The workers and drones should all be AMM in a perfect world


I know people who do exactly that. To an extent I adopt that approach myself although I don't graft from a single queen each year.




> I have hybrid bees I presume..


Maybe your bees are almost pure Carnica and that explains their good nature. Have you ever checked using morphometry? Are they dark like Carnica or do you have bees with some yellow banding?

In the Galtee project they have used artificial insemination for quite some time so are not relying entirely on open mating to keep breeding lines pure.

roger-patterson-&#6.jpg

This is the AI house at the Galtee apiary. Note Roger Patterson bowing his head in the presence of Micheál Mac Giolla Coda. :Wink:

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## The Drone Ranger

Gavin they are good natured I don't hold with the assumption that makes the Carnica or anything other than that.
I think you should select for the qualities you want and you will have as much chance of getting the right bees as cutting off their wings and measuring them
Now as scientist you will probably favour the scientific cut off the wings method
I would say if you select for slow build up, small colony,non swarming honey gatherers you must end up with AMM
Because as you point out these are the qualities that differentiate AMM  from the rest of the mudbloods

Is that the same Roger Patterson that can't get his queens mated because we used to use Apistan years ago ?

I'm being cheeky here and so should go to the naughty step

I was saying the other day how Rocking horses never do but Hobby horses produce mountains of the stuff 

I know because I keep a few well rehearsed Hobby Horses of my own they're always ready for a gallop if I don't restrain them

Rotten weather for beekeeping today

You Know one of the examples old W Herod Hempsall give in his two volume monster book of beekeeping
(Beekeeping New and Old) ,which he uses to demonstrate the earning potential of bees, is of a Glasgow beekeeper and his costs including a colony of Dutch Blacks which were very expensive

They would possibly still be around in the melting pot so terms like British Native Bees etc. are immotive but essentially misleading

I do wish you well with the breeding program because discounting all the stray matings one of the things my bees have in common is two large colonies of black bees from around Montrose and two large colonies of black bees from around Motherwell

Lot of years ago now but their genes will still be in there somewhere possibly 

AMM (may contain nuts)
mudbloods rule OK
 :Smile:

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## Jon

Hi DR.
It is the same Roger Patterson, but the early supersedure is not necessarily the fault of Apistan. none knows.

You are over egging how AMM people see wing morphometry. It is not crucial, just a useful tool at times. if you are selecting a queen as a breeder queen to graft from you want to be sure of its genetics. The wing checking can give you info re.hybridization which is not apparent from colour or other traits. I imagine most people who keep native or near native bees don't bother with it at all. it does come with caveats re how useful it is.

On the old bbka forum someone uploaded a video of French AMM being unloaded from a train in scotland in the 1930s and installed in Craibstone so noone is under any illusions about a mix of genetic material.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheShena...11/D7F5u7Uqt1U

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## Rosie

I select my near-natives by behaviour but I also find wing venation invaluable.  The behaviour of a colony is almost entirely governed by the queen's genetics but any grafts taken will also contain drone genetics.  If a queen is producing worker wings that differ from the normal for her bloodline it's prety evident that she has mated with something odd and grafting from her progeny would be a lottery so I would use her only for supplying drones and honey.

This season I have been including colour in my selection criteria for the first time to try to darken my stocks but in previous years and probably next year I will be back to behaviour alone.

Since making selections more thoughtfully and making extensive use of wing morphometry I have found my bees have divided into two strains which I try to maintain.  One is totally black and visually appears to be pure AMM and are extremely calm.  The others contain some yellow banding but have purer-looking wings and are more flighty and prolific.  I have representatives from both lines in my mating apiary but new queens almost invariably follow the traits of their mothers.  I have one odd one this year which I intend to watch closely to see if it has traits from both bloodlines despite being grafted from the black ones.

Wing venation adds a whole new and fascinating dimension to your queen rearing and I would urge anyone who doubts its value to give it a fair trial.  I think they would be won over by their own experience.

Rosie

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon and Gavin 

I am only kidding really but I genuinely don't understand why not just check the first drones from your  mated queens to see where you are going rather than the workers.
By the way the link took me to somebody building a super frame with manley style sides (was it a test ?  :Smile:  )

I checked 4 wings from some old dead bees 
what a carry on  
my scanner does film but I was genuinely losing the will to live.
Some stray cat hair got involved and that gave a reading of AMM
I wondered why Oliver (the cat) was so bad tempered LOL!!

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## The Drone Ranger

Rosie do you have a tick list of traits you are breeding towards 

Re grafting totally agree but if you bring in a queen 100% AMM you could follow the plan in my earlier post and in two generations have pure AMM queens in all your hives so wouldn't that be easier

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## gavin

Hi DL

Always enjoy reading your posts.  Never mind Southampton, my team is Dundee United and occasionally the fantasy football breaks out into real life, such as at Hampden last May.  But mostly it is fantasy.  We can shout a lot and have fun while we're at it, and even indulge in some communal signing.  A bit like bee breeding then.  Actually I was once at a beekeeping meeting where communal signing was part of the experience.  Interesting and a little odd I thought.

So far all I've done is select bees that I like the look of, and which behave in a reasonable way.  No morphometry yet with these bees, largely because I've been too preoccupied and/or lazy even to take up an offer to do them for me.

As far as breeding goes I think that you can achieve almost anything within any race, although each has its particular characteristics which you will have to struggle against.   If you breed from hybrids then you just add some unpredictability.  Keep at it and you will create another Fastbuck to use your term, something fairly stable and recognisable.

Is everything around here mixed-up and hybridised?  Yes and no.  There are some very mixed stocks, yet three of the four swarms I've seen in the last couple of weeks look superficially like as pure a sample of Amm as you can get.  I know, I haven't really checked them.

I think that bees are more like porridge than imported wine.  Pour half a glass of white and half a glass of red into one container, and one wee wheech later with a chopstick and you'll have something that resembles rose but tastes horrible.  Dye some porridge pink and another lot blue, tip them into the same pot and stir with a chopstick and you'll have something quite different.  Go in with a teaspoon and you might scoop out something mostly pink or mostly blue. 

Yeah, I know that there are some Dutch, German and French oats in there, but things were probably always thus to some extent.  Any bee race is a bit of a sponge, tidied up at the edges by the forces of natural selection.  

My own bees are a real mixture.  A few casts from you-know-who, gratefully received.  A couple of my own which have crossed with local stuff at random since I bought the stock from Douglasfield.  Some of that crossing might have been to some iberiensis which a local imported years ago.  My own stock include one unpleasantly aggressive colony, now requeened, and the various casts from you-know-who are OK most of the time but have a tendency to get irritable before most of the bees at the association apiary along the road.  Some are also quick to make queen cells and don't stop doing so, even when I ask them nicely.

So, hey, let's give it a go and see what happens.  If we end up rescuing a bee type which was gradually heading off into bastardom, so much the better.

G.

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## The Drone Ranger

Dundee United -tangerine and orange stripes thats a long way from the right colour but lets check out the wings  :Smile: 

The ones who want to make lots of queen cells are really useful in your breeding program if you can get them up to a good strength before the make swarming preparations ie double broodbox early on then split them over your swarm board.
Because they make lots of queen cells instead of one or two you can harness that by removing the cells they make and giving them a frame from your best queen
They will make lots of queen cells as they are programmed to do 
You can harvest them just leave them one that will fix the bad behaviour and tendency to swarm

With supposedly 24 sub species of AMM it should be possible to get a top quality queen before next year from someone if they have any bees with wings left to keep the hive going  :Smile:

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## Jon

> Jon and Gavin 
> 
> I am only kidding really but I genuinely don't understand why not just check the first drones from your  mated queens to see where you are going rather than the workers.


Well you need to look at the mother of the queen you are breeding from to see what her drones are likely to be like.

As far as I know noone has standardised the drone wings for the various bee sub species. I am sure you are right in that they would give valuable information but there is no way of comparing drone wings from one sub species with another. All the drawwing stuff is with worker wings.




> Re grafting totally agree but if you bring in a queen 100% AMM you could follow the plan in my earlier post and in two generations have pure AMM queens in all your hives so wouldn't that be easier


Yes but that is queen rearing rather than bee improvement - working to improve what you have got. That would work, but you don't know what useful genetics you may or may not be discarding by starting with a queen from outside your own stock and getting shot of what you already have.
I could quite easily work with pure Galtee stock and I know some people who do but I also think that I have some very good bees which happen to be near 100% amm which do not have any Galtee genetics in them as far as I know and I do not want to lose that.

A friend brought round a cell starter box earlier this evening. He had grafted 27 cells into it from a pure Galtee queen, one hatched and mated in the Galtee valley, and 24 were started. We put 18 into one of my strong queenright colonies and he left 6 in the swarm box. Hopefully might get a few nice queens from those but I am running out of Apideas.

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## The Drone Ranger

Aha !! I see what Bibba means now should have twigged really  :Smile: 

Might be an idea to get some drone wing data  that could be an interesting project
Probably just samples of the best types being bred at the moment would be a starting point 

Drawwing doesn't recognise ligusta wings yet apparently 

Hope you do well with the Galtee queens Jon (stick a spare one in the post to Gavin)

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## Rosie

Hi DR

My list includes traits that suggest AMM behaviour and traits that you would want in any race of bee.  The latter includes defensiveness (particularly meeting and following), health, productivity and non-swarminess.  The former are low prolificacy, pollen gathering and storing pattern, winter thriftiness, cool weather mating, cool weather foraging, winter broodlessness.

I don't need to deliberately select for some of these as mother nature does it for me but for others I keep record cards.  Peter Edwards uses a very sophisticated records system and uses a computer database to sort out his best donor and drone colonies.  You can download his software for free but for me I fear it would remove some of the fun out of the selection process and would turn the whole exercise into a chore.

Rosie

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## The Drone Ranger

Hi Rosie

I only select for good behaviour as I have said before but what would be top priority for you in selecting queen breeders

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## Jon

> Hope you do well with the Galtee queens Jon (stick a spare one in the post to Gavin)


Gavin wants to work with what he has got locally which is a good approach imho. You can bring in a bit of outside genetics when you have some stability in the breeding programme. the key thing is getting a group together to do bee improvement.

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## The Drone Ranger

> Gavin wants to work with what he has got locally which is a good approach imho. You can bring in a bit of outside genetics when you have some stability in the breeding programme. the key thing is getting a group together to do bee improvement.


How about a couple of drone wings then  :Smile: 

By the way Dundee United are Tangerine and Black sorry Gavin

Wing, Persson ,Dossing ,Berg ,and Yogolini 

Thats the last time I went to a football match Gavin

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## gavin

Did I say communal signing?!  Oh, you know what I mean.  Unfortunately our star black and tangerine winger is off to Cardiff where he'll just look like a blue spot.

Drone wings can be rather precious, as the drones carrying them are a lot fewer in number than workers.  And by the time a colony is making drones it is a bit late to control the drone population in the area.  Better to look at the generation before I think, mum's the word!

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## The Drone Ranger

Gavin 

I did my best but Jon is keeping all his queens (hundreds of them)
The idea of breeding from what you have got sounds like a very long and bumpy road.
You are right about the shortage of drone wings A few people I know have jumped on the "breeding for resistance "bandwagon and now their drones dont have any wings at all. 
Where do you think your drone congregation area might be in relation to where you are
(don't give too much away or a white van might drive off with all your hives)
Jon might be directly under his -- that would be handy

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## gavin

Jon's strategy is to take over the Belfast area with half-Galtee natives.  The stock will get here eventually as I'm sure drones could cross the Irish Sea if they really wanted to.  He might be under a DCA but I'm under a drone black hole, if my mating success in those poly nuc boxes is anything to go by.  At least that means that the drones there are largely the ones we put there.

We have a fierce collie to protect the apiary site.  He'll harass any potential bee thieves by continually begging them to throw a ball for him.  That should hold them up long enough for the police to arrive.  That's the plan anyway.

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## Trog

Ours is protected by a spaniel who'll thwack folk on the legs with a stick ... and a goose!

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## Jon

> I did my best but Jon is keeping all his queens (hundreds of them)


Not all mine as we have about 20 people in the new breeding group.
I am doing most of the grafting and keeping an eye on the apideas until the queens get mated.
Some of the members take home the apidea when the queen starts to lay but the cuter ones take home the queen in an introduction cage and get another cell in right away. One member took away 6 queens in introduction cages last Thursday and I put in 6 cells within an hour all of which have since hatched.
The group gives access to a lot of apideas and makes things a lot more efficient.
I try and have at least a dozen cells hatching per week as it means you can replace queens which have mated, or virgins which have got lost.

Tim the guy who brought over the grafts in the swarm box yesterday has 15 Kielers and 4 Apideas so it is good to get him on board to expand the numbers. I reckon that takes the mating nuc count over 90.
There is no point grafting 20 at a time if you only have a couple of apideas to put them in.

It's a good deal. You pay a tenner to join the group, to cover the cost of the grafting equipment, and can put as many queen cells as you want into your apideas. It was a bit tricky at the start when everyone turned up at once but now that the apideas are populated it is a case of weekly replacement.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

We have a fierce collie to protect the apiary site.  He'll harass any potential bee thieves by continually begging them to throw a ball for him.  That should hold them up long enough for the police to arrive.  That's the plan anyway.[/QUOTE]

Hi Gavin

Wx was worried about their site in town being robbed until we came up with the idea of "borrowing" nextdoors LLama 
Apparently they make fantastic guards just ask any shepherd (rustlers beware)
At first there was some concerns about it being stung but after a visit to correx.jon.uk we came up with this great hat ( the veil was removed for the photo)

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Trog
like you at  home I am relying on the family pet -- Oliver (the cat)
Recently a mix up during a marathon wing scanning session resulted in him being classified a near native Apis Melifera Melifera
which accounts for his generally foul temper but also makes him the ideal hive guard (until the llama arrives)
 :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon 
your breeding group sounds great .How many queens do your hive need in a season? they must be outnumbering the drones 2 to 1 by now  :Smile: 

By the way I notice you haven't put the drone wings in the post yet presumably they are all worn out. 

You are certainly getting your moneys worth out of that little paintbrush.

----------


## Jon

Neither dogs nor cats in Belfast have interesting wing venation, in fact to date I have only seen examples bereft of wings but replete with two pairs of legs. Our dog, a labrador pointer rescued from the dog pound in Lisburn, has a fierce bark and growl but is a total coward. I had to feed and water a pair of Guinea pigs today for a friend who is away on holidays. I took the dog with me and when one of the cavies made a quick movement, she bolted out of the garage with her tail between her legs and did not venture back in. Most dogs treat guinea pigs like rats.
With regard to apiary safety, she would collude with the bee rustlers as she has no time for bees and would be glad to be shot of them.

----------


## Jon

> Jon 
> your breeding group sounds great .How many queens do your hive need in a season?.


Personally, I need about 12-18 queens per season as I work around 12-15 colonies plus whatever nucs I make up.

Got another 10 into apideas today. Two hatched in the panniers on the back of the bike on the way up the road. All that jiggling, even though I was trying hard to avoid both potholes and 12th July band parades. Lets hope they don't end up hybrids, leaning against kerbstones when they should be organising a team of workers to collect pollen and nectar.

PS. Why have you put a large block of cheese on the head of your llama. I am not knocking the idea - just curious.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

LOL!

Jon
Thats Correx it keeps the bees from stinging his head where male pattern baldness has left him vunerable  :Smile: 

You have better queens in your panniers than we have in our hives.

----------


## Jon

> Thats Correx it keeps the bees from stinging his head where male pattern baldness has left him vunerable


I have been mulling over growing some wool on my pate for the same reason, but I don't want to get refused entrance to pubs on account of unorthodox appearance. Might be able to pass myself off as a Rastafarian beekeeper.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> Might be able to pass myself off as a Rastafarian beekeeper.


Yes but if you had a ready supply of wacky Baccy in the smoker you will never be stung again
Wonder if it would work on varroa ??

----------


## Jon

> Wonder if it would work on varroa ??


I am sure it would. They would just sit there. C'mon chaps, liven up they are just about to seal a big slab of drone brood on the next frame.
Whatever. Mañana.

----------


## gavin

Is this a good time to say that an apiary I some of my virgin queens visited earlier this summer (and the bees were fairly Ammish, just to keep on topic) had some wacky baccy growing beside it in a field margin?  I don't know if the apiary owner would be horrified to learn this or not, but I don't think that I'll tell him.  I'm blaming my queen mating problems on them being affected by the herbs nearby.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Gavin 

Have you any links to pics of AMM queens ??
I have googled for some but no real joy
(actually had better results with "unicorn")

I have reported your earlier drone abuse pics to the RSPCA

There definitely was a bad weather window right in the middle of the best part of the mating season
Goodness knows what its like inside one of the poly hives with the rain battering on the roof
Must be like a Ginger Baker solo.

----------


## Jon

> Must be like a Ginger Baker solo.


I was playing Crossroads on my acoustic earlier this evening but had no  drummer to accompany me.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

:Big Grin: 

Gavin do you have any pics or links to AMM queens

I have googled for them but there were less results than "unicorn"
Actually "unicorn" also brought up a few pics of Carnica 
Boy are those bees popular

Try not to give me any offensive material as I have aready reported the drone abuse pics to the RSPB who squirmed out of doing anything by claiming the 'B' is for Bird
Thats not what they said when they were collecting cash !!

Those ammish still show up when you least expect them 
Heres another couple looking for a likely DCA

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon 
Crossroads now your showing our age

I expect the neighbours might be glad there was no drummer but 
They are probably up anyway putting something on the stings.  :Smile:

----------


## Jon

Well I was talking about the Cream version rather than the Robert Johnston original.

there are pictures of amm queens on this very thread. Post 56.

or what about these ones of mine.




> They are probably up anyway putting something on the stings.


If you keep decent bees noone should get stung.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> Well I was talking about the Cream version rather than the Robert Johnston original.
> 
> If you keep decent bees noone should get stung.


Sorry I must have been thinking about putting Cream on the strings not (stings)

I have seen the pics Jon and lovely though they are what I am trying to get is a good comparison between the banding on the AMM queen and the Carnica queen
Due to recent visit to spec savers they all are starting to look alike

Re the drone mating areas is it possible that the queen you picked up belonged to someone else and was downed by your drones.
Some people say the queens fly a long way to avoid meeting related drones.

If it turns out that it is a stray queen which you have nabbed I think you should hand it over to Gavin as it could be one of his

Actually Q61.jpg punches the right button as I can see her markings very clearly

----------


## Jon

Some of mine are completely black and other have that banding like 61. Some of the Galtee queens I have seen have the banding as well.
I have a queen which is brownish and has pronounced banding but according to the voodoo morphometry the colony is 100% AMM. All the workers are black.

I don't think I have a picture of the queen but these are the workers.

queen1..jpg Col44..jpg bees-col-44..jpg

The Queen shown here (RIP) is the grandmother and you can see some banding.

Pure carnica queens look like this, much wider bands.

We don't have a lot of carnica imports here, Buckfast types and yellow mongrels are the drones to watch out for and thankfully they show up quite easily due to the yellow bands in the offspring. I have a colony at the bottom of the garden headed by a black queen and three quarters of her workers have yellow banding.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon

Thanks very much for the pics 
Mostly my queens start very dark but soon show banding
Like an accordion opening
Generally I just ignore colour as long as they are well behaved but it will be interesting to check them all out
Strangely the web is awash with Carnica queen pics but I couldn't find good AMM ones

Have to be careful not to let Tonto hear any of this


By the way I read this today

Northern latitudes, the black bee has evolved and adapted to take immediate advantage of
even a short improvement in the weather, to achieve a successful mating. Occasionally,
virgin-queens have even been observed to mate in the immediate vicinity of the apiary
itself if the weather is poor.. Other non-native species of bee seem less-able to take
advantage of such short breaks in bad weather and may fail to mate successfully because
they lack this evolutionary adaptation to bad weather.

sound familiar  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> I've been mulling this over for a while now, and tried to figure out a "nice" way to ask the question, but I can't so I"m just going to go for it.
> 
> Why the interest in the "British Black Bee"/"Apis Mellifera Mellifera"?
> 
> The people that I know here that had them aren't that sorry to see the back of them.
> 
> My bees live through winter and give me honey, in my brief time beekeeping I havent had to consider much else. Why should I, as an individual beekeeper care what their provenance is?


Well Nellie
As you started this thread I wonder what you think now ?
Strong opinions have been voiced for and against
You can see that feelings can run high on the subject 
Terms such as mongrels are used by even nice people
Claims about Britishness of black bees are probably unfounded
Lots of imported bees were black and AMM types
Amm good traits are expounded and bad points dismissed.
Temper? who knows except people who saw and kept British Blacks 150+ years ago
The impressive commitment of great beekeepers working to restore Amm type bees
The need for isolated mating stations 
But worryingly the separation of beekeepers into the good and the bad
The them and the us
Personally I have learned a lot from reading Gavin Jimbo Jon and Eric's posts
You might be wondering why if AMM have all the best qualities and hybrids the worst
Why then if you select queens for the best traits don't you end up with AMM queens
Personally I feel if you want AMM bees you had best start with a queen of that type
I can understand the wish to breed AMM from what you have got already and perhaps Gavin is better qualified to do this than most of us with his scientific background

My choice is to carry on enjoying keeping the bees I have and not worrying about their ancestry colour or wings other than as an extra interesting side issue.

How about you ?

 :Smile:

----------


## Trog

I use the word mongrel about my bees as a compliment to them!  Some mongrel dogs are extremely intelligent.  My hens are mongrels, though I started with assorted pure breeds.  Never had any intention to breed them pure - as long as they're gentle, reasonable egg-layers and, above all, hardy.  Funnily enough I have the same attitude towards my queens!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> I use the word mongrel about my bees as a compliment to them!  Some mongrel dogs are extremely intelligent.  My hens are mongrels, though I started with assorted pure breeds.  Never had any intention to breed them pure - as long as they're gentle, reasonable egg-layers and, above all, hardy.  Funnily enough I have the same attitude towards my queens!


Sorry Trog no intention to give offence 
I could have said the use of the word "pure" as it is equally is divisive when used in certain contexts 
I was just expressing concern that some people can take the issue too seriously leading to division
I prefer mudblood myself  :Smile: 

this is little extract from internationalhero.com

At the beginning, Tonto was not quite the same character we are familiar with. He was a little, old, wizen half-breed. His function at the beginning was predominantly for The Lone Ranger to have someone to talk to. He was not the strong, young partner he morphed into over time.

----------


## gavin

Hi DL

I continue to look forward to your posts - thoughtful, entertaining, and a different perspective nicely expressed which is always good.

> Amm good traits are expounded and bad points dismissed.

I hope that I haven't done this.  Amm is different.  Also it is a variable entity, a blank sheet on which to draw the tracings of the selectors and breeders. (Is that the wine talking tonight?!).  Unless you think that you have the Maud strain of Bernard Mobus or a perfect Galtee bee, in which case you might simply be trying to keep it.  Amm comes is unpleasant and unproductive forms as well as the sort that beekeepers would like to keep.

Those who would like to breed bees probably are best to do so within a given line rather than try to create a new one - that way you will have a degree of stability.

> Personally I have learned a lot from reading Gavin Jimbo Jon and Eric's posts

Interesting set of posters!  I'll not ask why ...

> You might be wondering why if AMM have all the best qualities and hybrids the worst .... 

No, I don't think so.  Not all Amm have good qualities (some are awful) and many hybrids are good bees.

> My choice is to carry on enjoying keeping the bees I have and not worrying 
> about their ancestry colour or wings other than as an extra interesting side
> issue.

A fine position.  Most beekeepers will continue down that road.

We must drag you along to the East of Scotland apiary sometime DL.  Don't expect anything much at the moment, except some weak splits and half-baked grafting attempts.

cheers

Gavin

----------


## Trog

No offence taken at all, Droney!  My Welsh Cob is as pure bred as they come and I'm a pure bred Scot but my bees and hens are a happy mixture.  Actually, one of the things I like about both the hens and bees is that being home-bred over the years, I can see the mother's characteristics coming through in one or two of them and there's great pleasure in that.

----------


## Jon

DR

Of course some hybrids are good. The problem is they do not tend to breed true like pure strains of bee -  be they amm, carnica or Ligustica. Your pleasure will be short lived and you need to pay homage to the god of heterosis.

Amm has its limitations. If your main honey crop is oil seed rape from mid april to mid may it will probably not have built up enough.

There is a lot of propaganda put out about amm, the main stuff being that it was wiped out 100 years ago by isle of wight disease and also that it is overly aggressive.

I don't think it was lost from the more far flung regions of the uk and ireland and re. the aggression, I have recently requeened a few colonies with this years mated queens and they are unbelievably docile. Some of the nicest bees I have ever handled. The people I know with mongrels (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) do their beekeeping dressed like astronauts and handle colonies wearing something looking like welding gloves. What does that tell you about levels of aggression. Nitrile gloves and a veil is enough for my colonies.

I try to avoid a 'them and us' situation as some of the posters I most respect such as Dan Basterfierld, Richard Bache Adam.D or Pete.L are hardly native bee people. I only take issue when people start making gratuitous jibes about the native bee as I find that to be a bit tedious. Not accusing you of that, and like Gavin I am enjoying the debate.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

AMM temperament?
I don't know because in the days of skep beekeeping the bees were left alone till they were killed so only after movable frames appeared did temper jump to the top of the list of desirable qualities

"Those who would like to breed bees probably are best to do so within a given line rather than try to create a new one - that way you will have a degree of stability."

Again I don't know. You are probably familiar with black rock laying chickens They are very popular free range hybrids produced by crossing two line bred strains one of Barred Rocks and one of Rhode Island reds 
You can't buy a cockerel of the breed  I don't think it would be possible starting with only black rocks to breed Rhode Island red's and Barred rocks.
You might if you had a very long life breed birds similar to Rhodes or Barred Rocks but if the neighbours cockerel jumped the fence every night and mated with your hens then game over.


Interesting set of posters!  

The 4 posters represent, the ideals, the methods, the practicalities, and the doubters view.



We must drag you along to the East of Scotland apiary sometime DL. 

That reminded me of a man in Florida who was tried for tying his wife to the bumper of his car, dragging her for three miles, throwing her in a ditch, pouring petrol on her, and setting her alight.
When asked why he did it he said " I was mad at her at the time"
If he had been British that would qualified as typical British understatement

Thanks for the invite hope I don't have to be dragged though  :EEK!:

----------


## Jon

If you select for temper you will see progress in two or three generations and there is no need to hark back to the days of skep beekeeping irrespective of the bee race you keep. Temper is obviously a strongly controlled genetic trait.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon

"do their beekeeping dressed like astronauts and handle colonies wearing something looking like welding gloves."

Fraid I do my beekeeping dressed like a skinflint tramp my bee jacket has holes in it and they get in.

I'm going to get a new one

Two pairs of gloves though and then I can take the top ones off each hive and the new ones go on easily

I put this link up somewhere else www.justgloves.co.uk they have all types and sizes latex synthetic nitrile aloe vera lanolin you name it

If I was in your area I would happily convert and join the breeding program 

Where we are it's probably best to just go with the flow  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> No offence taken at all, Droney!  My Welsh Cob is as pure bred as they come and I'm a pure bred Scot but my bees and hens are a happy mixture.  Actually, one of the things I like about both the hens and bees is that being home-bred over the years, I can see the mother's characteristics coming through in one or two of them and there's great pleasure in that.


Pure Bred Scot now they are supposed to have dark eyes and fiery red hair

Most  of my family and friends have dark hair and fiery red eyes

At one point we had 10 cockerels of various breeds until I put the damn incubator in the loft

Never could bite the bullet and dispose of the little guys 

When they grew up I had to make 10 separate runs and hen houses  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> If you select for temper you will see progress in two or three generations and there is no need to hark back to the days of skep beekeeping irrespective of the bee race you keep. Temper is obviously a strongly controlled genetic trait.


What I always find strange is that requeening the bad tempered ones sometimes has the bad girls doing away with your chosen leader as soon as she has layed a couple of frames.
Then they seem to be able to raise another lunatic from the available larvae

By the By L E Snelgrove no less believed that all bees revert to one of the main races naturally over time.

----------


## gavin

> What I always find strange is that requeening the bad tempered ones sometimes has the bad girls doing away with your chosen leader as soon as she has layed a couple of frames.
> Then they seem to be able to raise another lunatic from the available larvae
> 
> By the By L E Snelgrove no less believed that all bees revert to one of the main races naturally over time.


Around here the big beekeepers tend to have done quite a bit of importing exotica ... and yet their bees do tend to drift back to something Ammish.  So let's go with the flow but try to divert it into better channels as we do so?!

Sorry to disappoint but Trog doesn't have red hair nor dark eyes if I remember correctly.  We're all hybrids really!

----------


## Trog

> DR
> 
> The people I know with mongrels (and I mean that in the nicest possible way) do their beekeeping dressed like astronauts and handle colonies wearing something looking like welding gloves. What does that tell you about levels of aggression. Nitrile gloves and a veil is enough for my colonies.


You shall have to come over and meet my lot.  I would handle them without gloves but I'm too ticklish!  And when I was learning the craft there were some vicious bees around so I've always used gloves and rather got used to wearing them.

----------


## Jon

I have nothing against gloves, just the excessively thick ones. I use disposable nitrile/surgical gloves. A lot of people use marigold.
Watching people try and lift the little frames out of apideas while fully suited and wearing thick gloves looks like overkill to me.

The disposable gloves are good from a disease point of view. Some of the leather gloves I see look like they haven't been washed for years and they probably give off a smell of sting pheromone as well.

I am convinced that bees, AMM or otherwise, react badly to leather.




> What I always find strange is that requeening the bad tempered ones sometimes has the bad girls doing away with your chosen leader as soon as she has layed a couple of frames.
> Then they seem to be able to raise another lunatic from the available larvae.


I have never noticed that other than the early supersedure problem which seems to occur in a lot of colonies now irrespective of temper.




> Most of my family and friends have dark hair and fiery red eyes


Too much booze!!

----------


## Trog

Ah, well, Jon, I wouldn't dream of wearing my kid gloves for anything as small as an apidea, should I ever go down that particular route!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Do AMM bees have any identifying feature that is recessive i.e. absent(not expressed)in hybrids ?
The wing thing doesn't seem to fit the bill 
I'm thinking of something like blue eyes (in humans)
I'm not discounting wings its just if even the left and right wings on the same bee don't match that's a worry
There must be something better

----------


## Jon

> There must be something better


Yep unique DNA markers!

There are 30 odd morphometric characteristics as well, tongue length and suchlike.
Get out your measuring tape and check those hybrid tongues.

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/morphometry.html

----------


## The Drone Ranger

This one looks like it would be worth a few quid as a breeder

Check the eyes

I have had a look at the site before 
Dave Cushman will be missed

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon 

something that puzzles me in a way is how there is variation in the colour of the drones all from the same queen some with stripe some black only
I mean in my hives not yours
Could the drone colour be a non lethal test / check
I still would not like to kill my bees and in fact had a bad experience at Ian Craig's microscopy course some years ago
I used IKF (insect killing Fluid) from the microscope suppliers
It was a sealed killing jar and they spent 24 hours in the freezer
When the jar was opened at the lab it took about an hour for them to start flying around the place
Tough little critters  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

[QUOTE=gavin;6012]Around here the big beekeepers tend to have done quite a bit of importing exotica ... and yet their bees do tend to drift back to something Ammish.  So let's go with the flow but try to divert it into better channels as we do [/QUOTE

Gavin good plan but what's the best way to begin ?

I have read some of Edward Jeffree's papers and I like his approach
For example when he studied the best size for overwintering colonies he estimated the numbers by photographing the bees on the combs.
He then counted the bees in the photographs and then used those photos as templates to estimate the numbers of bees on other frames.

Now wing morphology seems to me a middle step rather than a first 

Perhaps photographing the combs and then counting the numbers of bees who are mostly black,mostly yellow, banded or not banded might be a first step
I think that's a fairly simply challenge for a software programmer

Middle stage wing measurement

Late stage measure their tongues (using a glossomthing or a small Blarney Stone--Jon)

Final stage DNA

I expect to live long enough to see the first stage  :Smile:

----------


## Jimbo

Drone Ranger, 
Already at the final stage. Some of my bees from my selective breeding program which give a 95% Amm and above result using DrawWing are winging their way (pardon the pun) down south for DNA analysis as part of a BIBBA project.

----------


## Jon

> Jon 
> 
> something that puzzles me in a way is how there is variation in the colour of the drones all from the same queen some with stripe some black only
> I mean in my hives not yours
> Could the drone colour be a non lethal test /


If you have different coloured drones from the same queen they must have very mixed up genetics. I sometimes see yellow banded workers but the drones are always black.
As drones are haploid they carry only a single version of a gene there will be no way for a drone to carry a lethal gene as in a recessive gene in a diploid organism.

Gavin or Jimbo are best equipped to explain this. I would probably dig a hole for myself.

----------


## gavin



----------


## Jon

No thanks!!

----------


## gavin

OK then!  I was wondering if you were about to say more on non-dark drones having a lethal condition in your apiary.

Anyway, yes, variation between the drones from a queen tells you one thing - the queen was hybrid for the traits you can see in the drones.  

She has two versions of every gene and each drone gets just one of each pair.  No sperm are involved in making drones.

----------


## Jon

I think my drones are always dark as I am careful about which colonies I allow to make drones.
I would never breed from a queen which had some yellow banded offspring as you could be rearing queens from some of the hybrids.
These colonies can still produce the drones you want of course.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> OK then!  I was wondering if you were about to say more on non-dark drones having a lethal condition in your apiary.
> 
> Anyway, yes, variation between the drones from a queen tells you one thing - the queen was hybrid for the traits you can see in the drones.  
> 
> She has two versions of every gene and each drone gets just one of each pair.  No sperm are involved in making drones.


Sorry guys I didn't mean lethal genes or anything I meant a quick and easy check for which queens might make good breeding material without the killing of the 50 bees (lethal for them) hence the non lethal check

I never see yellow drones and black drones from the same queen but I do see completely black and black with thin grey bands I will try to get a photo.

Are you saying something akin to
The queen has 32 genes but the 16 she gives to her drones are not replicated in all the drones so the drones are in fact very varied in their make up.

Possibly the black colour is dominant so they all basically will be black

However the thin bands might be determined by another gene pair neither of which is dominant hence its a coin toss which one the drone gets bands or no bands.

Does that then mean the queen must be a hybrid or could she still be AMM under those circumstances ?

By the way Jimbo top marks for getting to the end game  :Smile: 
What scanner do you use for your bee wings ?
You must have the patience of a saint 
Even a couple of wings was more than enough for me  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> 


THought you gave up the gardening or is that a long range hive tool

----------


## Trog

Perhaps it's the sort of hive tool you need to handle non-AMM bees ;D

----------


## Jon

DR
You can remove the right forewing from 50 bees, scan them, plot the points with drawing, then export them to morphplot which plots the scattergram in about 45 minutes.
Any scanner which scans at 2400 dpi will do. Mine is an Epson V330 which cost under £80.




> Are you saying something akin to
>  The queen has 32 genes but the 16 she gives to her drones are not replicated in all the drones so the drones are in fact very varied in their make up.


A diploid organism has two sets of chromosomes which are paired off. One set from the father and one from the mother as in sexual reproduction.

The haploid drone has a single set which is inherited exclusively from the queen, thus the saying a drone has no father, but it does have a grandfather. I'd better stop digging before one of the geneticists comes back to hit me with the shovel.




> is that a long range hive tool


That's what you remove the wings with, and also doubles for giving the morphometry volunteers a decent burial.

----------


## Jimbo

Just at the start of the end game. If the results of DNA analysis confirms the DrawWing results then you can be fairly confident that DrawWing can be used by beekeepers to improve and conserve their native stocks. As it has been stated many times before wing morphometry is only one tool that can be used to improve the Amm strain there are many more like white cappings,measuring hair length, tomenta width etc as well as the other characteristics that beekeepers should be breeding for like docility, non running on the comb, non following, low swarming, etc.

----------


## gavin

> I never see yellow drones and black drones from the same queen but I do see completely black and black with thin grey bands I will try to get a photo.


The differences I see are usually more the overall colour and the hair colour.  Buckfast and some continental types have gingery hair but Amm are darker.  Young drones do have extra hair, I wonder if that is what you are seeing?  But you are right, we should pay attention to our drones more.

----------


## Jon

> like docility, non running on the comb, non following, low swarming, etc.


Low swarming tendency is a godsend.
Most of the people in my bka keep yellow mongrels**, as the guys who supply a lot of the nucs keep yellow mongrels.
The first swarms this year were reported in the first half of April which is totally ridiculous in a location as far north as Belfast.
Prime swarms which were housed mid April built up and swarmed again before the end of May.
I had one colony swarm a couple of weeks back and I found queen cells in a couple of colonies this week. That's 3 out of 12 have thought about swarming this year and quite late on as well.
If you want a honey crop, you don't want your colonies to be swarming all the time.

The problem is that people 'donate' cast swarms to beginners and perpetuate the swarmy genetics.
There is also a mentality that if someone finds a nice queen cell they automatically make up a nuc with it - again perpetuating the swarmy genetics.
The colony I have grafted larvae from this year has not made a natural queen cell yet but has about a hundred daughter queens, around 40 mated so far, the rest still virgins.
I requeened a few colonies about 3 weeks ago and the new queens seem to be very good although early days yet. Temperament is very good as the colonies are among the most docile I have handled.

Non swarmy bees make beekeeping a lot easier.

**will be changing soon due to queen rearing programme.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> The differences I see are usually more the overall colour and the hair colour.  Buckfast and some continental types have gingery hair but Amm are darker.  Young drones do have extra hair, I wonder if that is what you are seeing?  But you are right, we should pay attention to our drones more.


Jon thanks for the scanner tip

Re drone
paraphrasing Jon
Ok - queen diploid gives copy of half her genes to haploid drone

So if these genes number 32 for the queen and 16 for the drone 
Each gene pair represents heads or tails in coin toss terms
then the drone is now in possession of 16 coins each one showing either heads or tails
The number of possible outcomes is large it could be 2 to the power of 16 (maths not strong point might be wrong)
However if some of the coins have double heads or double tails the number of outcomes will be reduced drastically
The possibility of loaded coins representing dominant genes these coins will always land the same way 
That reduces the possible outcomes further

That means the possible number of inherited characteristics might be fewer that at first seems possible

So if black is dominant then if one drone is black all the rest will be black
But if stripes are present on some drones and not on others then stripes can't be masked by dominance
So if pure AMM drones never exhibit stripes and are a uniform black ( I rely on you here I've never seen one)
The conclusion would be if I look in a hive and find drones with faint stripes their mother is a hybrid

Wouldn't that make life easy  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon 
Do you have oil seed rape in your area? 

We have field after field of the stuff

----------


## Jon

> JOk - queen diploid gives copy of half her genes to haploid drone
> 
> So if these genes number 32 for the queen and 16 for the drone 
> Each gene pair represents heads or tails in coin toss terms
> then the drone is now in possession of 16 coins each one showing either heads or tails
> The number of possible outcomes is large it could be 2 to the power of 16 (maths not strong point might be wrong)
> However if some of the coins have double heads or double tails the number of outcomes will be reduced drastically
> The possibility of loaded coins representing dominant genes these coins will always land the same way 
> That reduces the possible outcomes further


DR
It doesn't work like that but I will stand back and let one of the erudite geneticists explain it in fewer words than I can.




> Jon 
> Do you have oil seed rape in your area? 
> 
> We have field after field of the stuff


Not much where I am. there is a farm near me which grows it every second or third year.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon

Fair enough are all your drones black ?

You are lucky with the rape because the bees fly past everything else to get it.
The honey goes solid in the combs
The swarming season is brought forward by the massive early flow
By this time in the year swarming is not so much of an issue

I put on swarm boards early in the season before the bees are thinking about swarming
That means during the rape period the hives get on without interuptions collecting nectar
Each hive has been induced to produce queen cells so new queens are available 
The bees select the larvae and the retained cell themselves so queens are usually good uns
By the time rape is nearly over swarm inspections begin in earnest Reduced nectar flow gets them in the mood 
Doing it this way makes sure that swarmy types are not over represented

I think a proper breeding program is best but using a board is better than looking for queen cells and making splits, because as you point out that just favours the swarmy stocks.,

----------


## Jon

> Jon
> 
> Fair enough are all your drones black ?


yep but like I said before, if I am not confident about the genetics of a colony, I don't let it make any drones.
I give it frames of drone brood from a colony I am confident in.

----------


## gavin

> Ok - queen diploid gives copy of half her genes to haploid drone


Yup.  At least she gives one copy of each gene to each drone.  

2^16 possibilities, yup.

Dominance?  No, it doesn't exist in a drone.  Each gene comes in only one flavour so there is no dominance in the usual sense.  A worker or queen has two variant of each gene, so one variant can mask the effect of the other if it is dominant. 

Although there are lots of possibilities for combinations of gene variants, each drone gets a copy of each gene. 

There endeth the lesson for today.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> Yup.  At least she gives one copy of each gene to each drone.  
> 
> 2^16 possibilities, yup.
> 
> Dominance?  No, it doesn't exist in a drone.  Each gene comes in only one flavour so there is no dominance in the usual sense.  A worker or queen has two variant of each gene, so one variant can mask the effect of the other if it is dominant. 
> 
> Although there are lots of possibilities for combinations of gene variants, each drone gets a copy of each gene. 
> 
> There endeth the lesson for today.


Thanks for that Gavin 
No dominance, that's great because it means if a drone looks black it is black  :Smile: 
Weather still not great
Yesterday I was taking full advantage getting into the bees
4 bad tempered ones at the moment 
2 have new queens so just waiting for the old bees to go to the great beehive in the sky then hopefully they will be fine
One which is too big to deal with will have to be moved so the queen can be removed
One which looks queen less but didn't make queen cells when they were given brood

Rest are ok but I am trying as you can tell to figure out a quick way of deciding which queens are kept later when some of the hives are combined later in the season after first varroa treatments.

How are things at your end  :Smile:

----------


## gavin

Supplement to the lesson:

16 was an odd number to choose as there are 16 chromosomes.  The 2^16 calculation was only for your example of 16 genes and is nothing to do with chromosomes.  Chromosomes add a whole new dimension that wasn't suitable for lesson 1.

My own bees?  Not bad really.  Only one of my 8 colonies has last year's queen, and another is queenless.  Two are filling supers and two more are ready for a super.  I'm going to my heather site early as there is some bell heather there (in full flower) and I saw the first ling (usual heather) flowers out too.  Just a few, the main flush is a fortnight away.  Another reason for going early is that my bees are bringing in lots of ragwort and that is distasteful if not downright poisonous - so I'd rather that they were away from that.  The behaviour of my bees is OK but the ones at the association apiary are better.  No problem colonies at the moment.

So I'd had a lot of splitting and swarming this year (my apiary isn't - yet - Ammish) which means that few colonies were in a good state for the blossom flow (which hardly happened anyway).  I was told by a prominent local bee farmer that this is one of the worst blossom years he can remember.  On the other hand an ex-SBA president in the Glasgow area was positively beaming on Sat as the nectar is pouring in and he's running out of equipment.

----------


## Trog

> On the other hand an ex-SBA president in the Glasgow area was positively beaming on Sat as the nectar is pouring in and he's running out of equipment.


I know the feeling!  Away to make up some more super frames after I've changed 4 beds and got the first of the washing on!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> I know the feeling!  Away to make up some more super frames after I've changed 4 beds and got the first of the washing on!


lucky devil

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Good luck with the heather then Gavin hope they only bring back honey and no nasties

Yes chromsomes, but no, ah yes madam as Frankie Howard would say

Now can the queen produce drones with thin stripes and still be pure AMM ?

To be (stripey) or nor to be

That is the question

Weather could have been better for the rape this year and I now have a couple of supers still on which are solid but only part capped
Have to get the bees to clean them out because they will just ferment if stored.

----------


## Trog

Not so lucky when there are four beds to do and I've not even had breakfast yet!  Just cooking brunch .. but the sun's out and I want to be out there with the bees!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> Not so lucky when there are four beds to do and I've not even had breakfast yet!  Just cooking brunch .. but the sun's out and I want to be out there with the bees!


Sun ?? It's chucking it down here

I found an add for bee that sounds great better even than AMM

Available for sale £35
(per Queen, including Royal Mail Special Delivery. £30 for collection)



An extremely popular choice for beekeepers due to their many favourable qualities, the main drawback is that they are liberal in their application of propolis to the inner surfaces of the hives, thus acting to defeat one of the main purposes of the modern beehive  that combs should be easily removable for inspection. The Buckfast bees do not run on the frames, fly in cool weather conditions and are not prone to stealing, instead they are excellent honey producers and additionally, extremely gentle (some authorities rate them higher than the Italians in most categories). Colonies are noted for their gentle behaviour, high levels of honey production lack of swarming tendencies and hygienic hive conditions. We breed our stock using carefully selected queens and as well as rearing our own buckfast queens we also import them (all our imported queens are licensed and have successfully passed through quarantine requirements in accordance with Defra regulations ).

Cheap too none of your £65 £90 mullarkey every hive should have one

 :Smile:

----------


## Trog

Yep!  Sun.  However I didn't get round to the bees, though might go out and see if I can do them now.  Excellent drying weather, though, with a stiff NW breeze.

----------


## Jon

> I found an add for bee that sounds great better even than AMM
> 
> Available for sale £35
> (per Queen, including Royal Mail Special Delivery. £30 for collection)


The Buckfast strain died the same day as brother Adam.
Anything with a couple of yellow bands gets marketed as Buckfast these days.

Does you ad above refer to a UK breeder or an overseas one? I presume Uk if Royal Mail is the courier. I  am opposed to bee imports in principle as Defra can only screen for known diseases but cannot screen for Donald Rumsfeldt's unknown unknowns if you see what I mean.

Anyway I found another ten of my delightful black queens had started to lay when I checked Apideas earlier this evening so put that in your pipe and smoke it! And none of them have ever needed a passport or a nod and a wink from the Defra man. That's 50 mated so far. Might still make 100 with a following wind. 38 more cells to put in apideas this week. My mate Tim left off 4 apideas ten days ago and all 4 now have laying queens so that's 4 for a tenner. Why pay more? Or maybe you like queens the colour of custard.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> The Buckfast strain died the same day as brother Adam.
> Anything with a couple of yellow bands gets marketed as Buckfast these days.
> 
> Does you ad above refer to a UK breeder or an overseas one? I presume Uk if Royal Mail is the courier. I  am opposed to bee imports in principle as Defra can only screen for known diseases but cannot screen for Donald Rumsfeldt's unknown unknowns if you see what I mean.
> 
> Anyway I found another ten of my delightful black queens had started to lay when I checked Apideas earlier this evening so put that in your pipe and smoke it! And none of them have ever needed a passport or a nod and a wink from the Defra man. That's 50 mated so far. Might still make 100 with a following wind. 38 more cells to put in apideas this week. My mate Tim left off 4 apideas ten days ago and all 4 now have laying queens so that's 4 for a tenner. Why pay more? Or maybe you like queens the colour of custard.


LOL!! :Big Grin:  :Roll Eyes (Sarcastic):

----------


## Jimbo

Not wanting to take sides! I noticed this little bit of research done in 1967 and published on the Galtea Bee Breeding site      http://www.gbbg.net/nativeversusbuckfast.html

----------


## Trog

Very interesting.  Has anyone repeated this investigation to take account of current weather patterns?

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> Not wanting to take sides! I noticed this little bit of research done in 1967 and published on the Galtea Bee Breeding site      http://www.gbbg.net/nativeversusbuckfast.html


Jimbo 
Thanks for the link that was an interesting little article

Just a bit of fun really 
Just comparing the claims made for Buckfast and AMM they are very similar 
Brother Adam achieved something remarkable in breeding a new race of bee which bred true (in isolation obviously)
If this was creating a new breed of chicken it would be difficult enough but with bees he must have been a very patient and methodical man.

Jon knows I'm not advocating buying Buckfast bees because he is right, mostly they have been lost to Fastbuck bees but they are a valuable bee in their own right and need to be preserved and protected by somebody using isolated breeding stations.

Better weather today thank goodness by the way Jimbo are all your drones black or do they show thin grey stripes. ??

Is the sport of bee baiting legal ?

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Good point Trog

And oil seed rape although there might be less of it on Mull
Just guessing  :Smile:

----------


## Jimbo

Never really looked at my drones but I will look next time I am in the hives. I have some colonies on an isolated site where I keep my good Amm for breeding and my mudbloods on another two sites. My queens that have hatched and mated from my apideas this year are black as coal although the mother which is 98% Amm has a bit of brown. 
I hear the Buckfast is quite popular in the central belt in particular the Coatbridge/Airdrie area

----------


## Trog

Thankfully, Droney, the nearest thing our bees have to the dreaded OSR is bolted brassicas!  Just hoping we get some honey taken off before the B & Bs finish our existing stock of it - they fairly ladle it on then buy a jar to take away!

----------


## gavin

> Better weather today thank goodness by the way Jimbo are all your drones black or do they show thin grey stripes. ??
> 
> Is the sport of bee baiting legal ?


And do they spread TB?!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> And do they spread TB?!


Spoke too soon about the weather grrr!

Something turned one of my nuc hives upside down 
I've just finished getting it back on its stand
Luckily they used so much propolis nothing moved

Lets hope the TB (total bol---- ??) doesn't spread otherwise I might be culled

Please Santa can I have an AMM queen by Christmas ??

----------


## Jimbo

T shirt weather again today. The nectar is flowing. Just put my 3rd super on some of my hives and about time too. I was starting to panic that I was not going to get any honey this year due to the wet May/June
Still getting a few hives trying to produce queen cells which is very late for our area.
I had a good look at my hybrid colony drones and they are generally black with some having a faint grey line. I still need to look at the good Amm drones

----------


## The Drone Ranger

I am going to check all my drones 

Does Drawwing work on drone wings ?

I can't sample the bees because our freezer doesn't work That's Zannussi  appliance of science for you

Could microwave them I suppose but the timings might be difficult

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Hi where can I download Peter Edwards Morph Plot ?
It doesn't seem to be a working link on the Bibba website

----------


## Jimbo

If it is not working from the BIBBA site contact Peter by e-mail. He is on this forum site. He is still making improvements to the Morph plot and sent me the most recent version.

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## The Drone Ranger

Thanks Jimbo but he will be hidden by his forum name which I don't know

By the way since posting my microwave idea I have gone back to Dews and Milners original text and it appears boiling the bees is the recommended method but still no advice on the timings.  :Smile:

----------


## Jimbo

w0076ea7.jpg 

Hi DR,
Go to community at the top of the page then members click on P. Peter Edwards forum name is is Peter and you can send him an e-mail.
I have seen pictures of where they fry bee larvae in Africa. Fry until golden brown in a little butter and a bit of garlic. Personally I would use the drone larvae they are much bigger and you can get rid of your varroa at the same time

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> w0076ea7.jpg 
> 
> Hi DR,
> Go to community at the top of the page then members click on P. Peter Edwards forum name is is Peter and you can send him an e-mail.
> I have seen pictures of where they fry bee larvae in Africa. Fry until golden brown in a little butter and a bit of garlic. Personally I would use the drone larvae they are much bigger and you can get rid of your varroa at the same time


Thanks loads for that and the top recipe tips maybe a new thread "the Rosneath beekeepers cookbook"  :Smile:

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Is it the case that if Ruttner hadn't existed Dews and Milner would have had to invent him  ??

----------


## gavin

Hmmnn ... if Ruttner hadn't existed we might have had to wait for Harbo and Harris for some things relating to Varroa ... and for molecular biology to come to the fore to rediscover some of Ruttner's findings on bee races.

See the Ruttner and the Nature paper plots here:

http://www.sbai.org.uk/Breeding/

G.

----------


## Jon

Ruttner was not a dyed in the wool A.M.M man. He mostly worked with A.M. Carnica but did a huge amount of work on morphometric and behavioural differences between mellifera sub-species.
The biggest difficulty for Ruttner's morphometry musings the work done by Moritz (after Ruttner's death) which demonstrated that Carnica populations with 'perfect' Carnica wing patterns had in fact a condiderable amount of AMM genetic markers in their DNA.
Ruttner was an imparcial scientist and as far as I can see and did not have an agenda to push A.M.M. which could have led to him distorting conclusions from the data available to him.
The detractors of A.M.M. often criticise Beowulf Cooper's observations for this reason.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Often though good science is used selectively to support non scientific conclusions
Eugenics is the most glaring example

I have been watching the debates on some other forums and unlike this one the AMM not AMM debate is causing fractures in the beekeeping community sadly

----------


## Jon

> unlike this one the AMM not AMM debate is causing fractures in the beekeeping community sadly


I agree with that and I think it is best to avoid painting non amm beekeepers as the devil incarnate. The trick is to convince others that amm is the right bee for certain areas by demonstrating that they are better than the bees they have currently.

If you lived in Devon there would not be much point trying to keep AMM given the preponderance of Buckfast in the area. In the far north or out west I think things are different.

The two biggest issues with the beekeepers in my bka are swarmy bees and/or aggressive bees. Most of them seem to keep their bees in suburban gardens in Belfast and swarming and aggression are big problems with the neighbours.

I average about 15 colonies and I have had one swarm this year with a clipped queen and another 3 made queen cells which meant I had to split or remove the queen, yet I know guys who have had ten swarms from just two colonies. Obviously that is a management issue as well as a bee race issue but some of the folk I know have bees which are impossible to keep in the box.

----------


## gavin

> I have been watching the debates on some other forums and unlike this one the AMM not AMM debate is causing fractures in the beekeeping community sadly


For the good humour and tolerance I congratulate you all!

----------


## The Drone Ranger

agree with you Jon 
Good handling and behaviour are top of the list
For me mostly the main swarming risk is past they still need checking but there will not be a such strong drive to swarm
I have one old girl with frayed wings she is a stripey hybrid but she is also the exception to the rule.

although people buying bees and queens and queens to improve their stock has caused even more hybridisation I would not think of doing that myself anymore not everyone agrees 
Some years ago I was on a course at the SAC and at that time they were importing queens from Denmark I think

Looking through just the forum posts here though you can sense that people are now prepared to go a long long way to acquire 
AMM bees and queens which is essentially counter productive

Yet Dews and Milner in their book Breeding Better Bees state that there is no point in starting breeding with inferior hybrid stock and that serious bee breeders need to "acquire" suitable stock with the essential qualities

As I have mentioned before L E Snelgrove believed the bees sort themselves out and seperate into their respective races gradually with the passage of time.

I hope he was right but I have my doubts because its not just wings or colour or behaviour they are just the outward characteristics 
Do you say Phenotype ?
The hundreds of thousands of genes are all now mixed up in most of the UK bees and to say that we should be trying to untangle that and recreate AMM is just the same as taking a lost breed of chicken like the marsh daisy and re-creating it you get something that looks and acts the same but is in fact not the same at all.

Now if you start with what is essentially a slightly cross bred AMM bee as you are Jon I think its quite possible to maintain and perhaps improve that stock 
Possibly that might be making it closer to the AMM of the past.
If you are starting with my bees although you can scan the wings and come up with AMM results as I have recently I don't believe it is possible to breed the bees back to AMM
You can however select for black and wing type as well as behaviour and by that means arrive at a black bee with correct wing veins and reasonable manners 
Once that has been done though it doesn't mean you should consider you have AMM bees and that everyone else keeping bees in your area becomes a thret to your "superior" stock
Also its not a good thing to allow new beekeepers to be led into believing that the most important quality they should look for is colour ie black bees
The most important thing is temperament later that might become something else such as honey gathering as they progress

To aid selection of queens etc I would always be prepared to consider some simple check such as drone colour or type alongside the obvious ones of temper and queen colour but I can't see much likelyhood of convincing all Scottish Bee Keepers to scan wings or measure tongues etc

If a demand arises for AMM queens then supplies will appear but is that a good thing in the long run if bees start to travel all over the country again

I wan't everyone to enjoy keeping their bees without having the shadow of Dews and Milner taking the shine off their pride and joy leaving them with the feeling that somehow they are second class citizens of the beekeeping fraternity

"Peace and Love Peace and Love man" (Ringo Starr)

----------


## Trog

'Twas ever thus, droney.  Humans do tend to behave in a tribal manner, whether it's over 'pure' AMM or 'pure' Gaelic.  I've heard tales of Lewis Gaelic-speakers getting really hot and bothered about the versions spoken elsewhere - even on nearby islands - and vice-versa. Then there's the 'native speaker vs learner' hierarchy, the Gaelic/non Gaelic one and the 'incomer'/'native' one.   I've observed in my cross-bred hens (originally pure breeds but only one unrelated cockerel) that they tend to go around in single-colour groups from time to time (when not all together).  Cleopatra (aka psychopath) actually attempted to kill the one yellow chick in her brood of grey ones.  Perhaps the more AMM type queens tend to prefer similar type drones when they have the opportunity (or perhaps they're just happier to mate at lower temperatures than their foreign cousins?).

----------


## Jon

> although people buying bees and queens and queens to improve their stock has caused even more hybridisation I would not think of doing that myself anymore not everyone agrees


Bibba promotes bee improvement of what you have already got. I have never bought a queen in my life although I did swap one last year and would do so again.




> The hundreds of thousands of genes are all now mixed up in most of the UK bees and to say that we should be trying to untangle that and recreate AMM is just the same as taking a lost breed of chicken like the marsh daisy and re-creating it you get something that looks and acts the same but is in fact not the same at all.


If anyone is actually trying to do that they have got the wrong end of the stick as it is not going to work.
Some of us believe that there are relatively pure AMM stocks still in existence in certain parts of the UK and Ireland.

Colour is an unreliable indicator.
This colony:
Col44..jpg
is headed by a striped queen yet all the offspring are black and you are not likely to come across a better scattergram.
It is going well at the bottom of my garden. I also have a colony headed by a sister of this queen in the garden and 3/4 of the offspring are yellow. They mated a couple of weeks apart and must have encountered different drones. I checked the one with the yellow bees earlier this evening and it has 4 supers full of honey and a brood box half full of honey as well, I would say at least 90lbs. That's your heterosis for you. I took all the brood off it 3 weeks ago when it swarmed and it has 10 frames of brood again.  I had to give it a second brood as I have run out of supers. It is a wee bit more lively than it ought to be but workable with care. I checked it just using a water spray as I didn't have a smoker at home.

Look at the difference in scattergrams.
This is the sister of 44 which has mainly yellow offspring.
Nice to have the honey but I would not breed from this due to the unpredictibility.
And the funny thing is, this queen is black whereas her sister is banded.

col45.jpg

----------


## The Drone Ranger

> 'Twas ever thus, droney.  Humans do tend to behave in a tribal manner, whether it's over 'pure' AMM or 'pure' Gaelic.  I've heard tales of Lewis Gaelic-speakers getting really hot and bothered about the versions spoken elsewhere - even on nearby islands - and vice-versa. Then there's the 'native speaker vs learner' hierarchy, the Gaelic/non Gaelic one and the 'incomer'/'native' one.   I've observed in my cross-bred hens (originally pure breeds but only one unrelated cockerel) that they tend to go around in single-colour groups from time to time (when not all together).  Cleopatra (aka psychopath) actually attempted to kill the one yellow chick in her brood of grey ones.  Perhaps the more AMM type queens tend to prefer similar type drones when they have the opportunity (or perhaps they're just happier to mate at lower temperatures than their foreign cousins?).


LOL!!

When I lived in London everyone was glad to see cycle lanes appear
The cyclists themselves were surprised when people wearing lycra and hemets designed for the tour de France appeared
Friction grew and then the eco warriors took up cycling as part of the war to save the planet
Slapping mirrors while blowing whistles at everyhing that moved became the norm
Now there was the them (saving the planet) and us (the enemy)
Luckily Boris brought cycling back to the masses with the bike hire program

I think everyone understands the dangers of dividing the community and it's both important to support local bee breeding groups where they exist and also realise that non participants are not neccessarily the enemy They are just beekeepers and might be won over 

Drone selective breeding is an interesting one I have read that given suitable conditions the queen will fly a considerable distance to mate This behaviour ir designed to reduce the possibility of breeding within the local related drone poulation.
Some other sources think that AMM bees will attempt mating in less favourable weather with shorter flights which would make local drones the most likely mate.
Strangely that would suggest poor weather is likely to favour localised breeding groups
That could apply to Scotland most of the year  :Smile:

----------


## Jon

Yiz need to read An Beal Bocht, to get a laugh about how people argue about the best form of Gaelic. I don't have a word so I have only read the English version.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Thanks for that Jon its odd that the wing morph and the queen colour dont match

That would be unusual though or so  I thought ??

I checked 14 hives today knackered with heat

Is it better to have the right wings ?  I thought the bee colour must be the main thing because of "British Black Bee"
Do the ones with the right wings breed true for colour and wings normally ?

I have bought plenty queens over the years but was amazed at the prices now £40 -£80 for 1 bee
Its like the dutch and the tulip bulbs  :Smile: 

If you have loads of hives you have lots of options but if you only have one or two then unless you are part of a breeding group I think buying a queen in is not really a bad sin.
I believe the commercial sector  buy hundreds anyway.

I like your breeding plan 
As you know I follow a much simpler management plan

"Grafting, Morphing, any way you like thing, its all rock and roll to me" (Billy Joel)

Lots of honey from your bees --what are they collecting from ?

----------


## Jon

> I have bought plenty queens over the years but was amazed at the prices now £40 -£80 for 1 bee
> Its like the dutch and the tulip bulbs


My mate Rab who grows daffs on his plot. is the Irish amateur daffodil champion and he has paid £120 for a single bulb!

The example I posted above looks odd in that the black queen has yellow offspring whereas the stripey queen has black offspring, but I think it is explained simply in terms of the drones they have mated with.

Both of them produce identical looking black drones, not a single yellow one.




> If you have loads of hives you have lots of options but if you only have one or two then unless you are part of a breeding group I think buying a queen in is not really a bad sin.
>  I believe the commercial sector buy hundreds anyway.


The commercial sector brings in thousands, some of them absolute crap.

Rather than whinge I have got a breeding group going this year and we have made a good start. Next year it will be onwards an upwards. About 60 mated queens so far and i reckon we are on course for 75-100.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Jon 
How many in the breeding group??

£120 where my spade lets get digging  :Smile:

----------


## Jon

Bout 20, although so far I am doing the breeding and they are bringing the apideas.
I am sussing out who can take more responsibility for next year. There are a few good candidates.

Re the honey in the garden hive, I think most of it is from bramble, balsam and rosebay willowherb, probably some from clover as well. I am in suburbia where people have biggish gardens full of flowering stuff. 5 weeks ago this colony needed feeding as we had 6 weeks of wind and rain from early May to mid June. A lot of the frames are well capped.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Your garden hive would make a great candidate for a snelgrove board you could get a record crop from that one without too much hive inspection either. It would limit drone production as well.
"the poor mouth"  can be had on Amazon used for £2.81 inc del.
I'm going to get a copy -- can't at the moment because I'm logged on using a live cd of Puppy linux (can never remember login stuff) 

Gavin is building a breeding group near where my mum used to live but that's a long way from me.
This year I now have 4 Italian type queens which are nice but unexpected as I mentioned 2005 was the last time one appeared.
They were produced this year from queens who were mated last year probably not my drones 
They have yellow and black bees good temper though so I like them and the queens are so easy to spot.
I would not cull them unless chalkbrood was a problem or the bees were nasty.

Lots of people are like me so it would be a weird and wonderful breeding group that could accommodate the likes of me.
I have one nuc with a completely black quite slim queen who's bees are all black but she was not one of mine 
I found a cast low on the weeds near one of my hives and although she was marked there were not that many bees.
Of course what I recognise as a cast from my bees could be a full size AMM swarm  :Smile: 

The results of my scanning are encouraging 

Kitchen window - 2 bees - 4 wings -amm 
Extracting room -4 bees -8 wings -amm
dropped super frame 18 bees - all left wings -amm

Haven't plotted them  :Smile:  
don't have the prog. wonder if there is a Libre Office version ?

----------


## Jon

If you want drawwing and morph plot PM me an e-mail address and I send you them as file attachments. The programmes are not that big and install in 2 minutes.

The type of breeding group you describe is what the likes of Roger Patterson is doing in Sussex. The population in the south of Ingerland  is pure mongrel, I mean the bee population of course, don't want to offend those in Bristol or Norfolk, and there is no chance of maintaining any pure strain with open mating. He has got a group together to work with local stock to improve it and try and establish something which breeds true. No imports allowed and the group has made good progress by all accounts. I have seen his presentation on the work a couple of times.

----------


## The Drone Ranger

Are they doing it without AI Jon or is that a necessary evil ?

Thanks for the offer of morphplot I already have drawwing 

Have PM'd email

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## Jon

I don't think they use AI. Roger always advocates ruthless culling of bad stock.

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## The Drone Ranger

> I don't think they use AI. Roger always advocates ruthless culling of bad stock.


Thats good to know all that drone squashing seems wrong to me and makes my eyes water

I think more needs to be known about where the queen goes and the drone congregation areas
It would do no good to flood an area with drones only to find the virgins avoid the area and fly off to somewhere miles away

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## Jon

> It would do no good to flood an area with drones only to find the virgins avoid the area and fly off to somewhere miles away


I worry about that sometimes as well but have been encouraged by the queen mating taking place over my own apiary. No idea if that is the norm or just a few isolated events.

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## Trog

We've seen it happen here this year.  I now wonder if the AMM swarm I picked up a couple of years ago was a mating swarm that came over to us from the other side of the bay (certain that's where they started from) then found the pile of junk just beyond the carefully set  up bait hive and thought it would make a nice home.  I've two newly-mated queens in nucs from that lot this year so it'll be interesting to see how much mongrel blood they've picked up, if any.

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon & Trog

Can you remember the weather conditions

It's all anecdotal I think but the argument goes that native bees are more likely to grab a chance to mate when the weather is poor and that would favour mating close to home.

If the weather is fine and settled temp and wind they would take a longer mating flight

The Internet is full of rubbish though so I don't place too much confidence in that being sound but it might make some sense.

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## Trog

IIRC, Droney, it was the first decent sunny day (and pretty hot) after a long spell of bad weather.  We'd just opened the first hive.  Think it was June and can find date when I've a moment.

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## Jon

> Can you remember the weather conditions
> 
> It's all anecdotal I think but the argument goes that native bees are more likely to grab a chance to mate when the weather is poor and that would favour mating close to home.


I have read that argument as well but in this case the weather has been perfect  each time, blue skies, totally calm and temperature over 20c. It could just be that I have a drone congregation area over my apiary.
A lot of what you read is complete tosh. Queens are supposed to mate flying high chased by the fastest drone but the events I saw were about 10 feet off the ground with all the bees swirling around. The cluster I collected at the weekend and tipped into an apidea had eggs within 48 hours.

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## gavin

Any observations on the time of day of flights?  There is a figure in a book I was reading (Rinderer's book on bee genetics and breeding) showing that the three Asian species (_A. florea_, _cerana_ and _dorsata_) have drone flights at different times of day.  I wonder if the _A. mellifera_ races might do things differently time-wise too, as something seems to help keep the genetics as stiff porridge rather than watery dyes.  AVM might be part of it, but is there more?  I know that you are about to tell me that the drones and the queens just fly when they have the right temperature.

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## Jon

> Any observations on the time of day of flights?


Queens never fly early, ie before about 12.30, even if the temperature is in the 20s,  and I have never seen any fly much later than 5.00 pm.

I have seen 6-8 of these mating swarms over my apiary  yet I have 60+ queens mated so for all I know many of them are flying miles away to drone congregation areas.
Strange as it may seem, I do not spend every afternoon at the apiary so it does seem to me that seeing 6-8 of these mating swarms is quite a lot if it is not a habitual event.

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## gavin

You don't?!  

OK, there is hard data in Mortiz' chapter.  It came from Koeniger and Wijayagunasekera (1976).

Drone flights per 15 min, expressed as a % of the total:

A. florea - 12:00 - 14:30 local time (when they did the experiment of course)
A. cerana - 16:15 - 17:45
A. dorsata - 17:30 - 18:45

Almost zero overlap, no doubt driven by selection as cross-species matings will be sterile so the bees could do without that.  Cross-honeybee race matings might also be unfit in the long run (avert your eyes DL!) so might they do this too?

Where is Dave Cushman when you need him.  He would have known.

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## Jon

I see my drones flying earlier and flying later than queens would be flying with peak activity in mid afternoon.
Some colonies have hundreds of drones at the entrance.

I wonder are drones drawn to a virgin queen when she leaves the colony or is the virgin drawn to the drones when they are out in numbers.

An apidea which has a virgin in it often has drones inside and hanging around the entrance whereas an apidea with a mated queen is generally ignored by the drones. 

And how much of the process is controlled by the mating swarm of workers which accompanies the virgin.

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## The Drone Ranger

Funny enough Breeding Better Bees covers this so presumably Ruttner must have done some work on it.  :Smile: 
Page 16 and 17

There is some drone wing measurements in there as well

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## The Drone Ranger

Jon

What % of grafts taken do you estimate end up with a fully functioning queen
The reason I ask is that an article in Beecraft pointed out that Rothampstead between 1961 and1993 achieved as high as 78% and as low as 20%
The latter 10years it was between 39% and 20%
If you are substantially higher you might be in a very advantageous site regards matings.
Or it also might be the strain of bee of course (or a good year)

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## Jimbo

Hi DR,

That's a bit low. Last year I had 70% success from larvae to full queens cell with 50% overall success from larvae to mated queen. This year it was again 70% success from larvae to full queen cells with 60% fully mated queen so up slightly this year on mating success. This may be due to a few more colonies being in the isolated mating site than last year or the weather being a bit more settled for mating

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## The Drone Ranger

> Hi DR,
> 
> That's a bit low. Last year I had 70% success from larvae to full queens cell with 50% overall success from larvae to mated queen. This year it was again 70% success from larvae to full queen cells with 60% fully mated queen so up slightly this year on mating success. This may be due to a few more colonies being in the isolated mating site than last year or the weather being a bit more settled for mating


I was quite surprised myself. 
I suppose there is a lot of adverse weather and stuff in those stats.

Swarming danger is pretty much over for me now.
When would you call it a day on the grafting for this year.?
I figured you need about 1 month to hatch and mate plus another couple of weeks in the apidea ?

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## Jon

I am still grafting. I did 22 on Wednesday and got 19 started.
4 days earlier I grafted 22 into a different colony and they started two.
Getting the colony right to accept grafts is the key factor rather than the dexterity of the grafter.

I hope to continue for a few weeks yet.

I would say that this year once I have a virgin queen in an apidea I am getting about 75% mated. I think a lot of the losses are mating swarms gone wrong where the queen lands short and the bees from the apidea settle around her. I have rescued several of these clusters so far this year.

With the grafting, you can get a few cells torn down at any stage especially if the weather takes a turn for the worse.

Some losses are due to human error. If cells go in to apideas too early they often get chilled and don't hatch. 1 day before hatching is ideal but 3 days is too long.

Some batches are really good. I put 10 cells in to apideas last Sunday and when I checked the following evening every one had hatched. These ones should fly and mate this week if we get a sunny blink.

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## The Drone Ranger

There is a very good explanation of the issues surrounding selective breeding here.
Very simple to follow and very clear

http://www.beesource.com/resources/u...imal-breeding/
http://www.beesource.com/resources/u...and-variation/
http://www.beesource.com/resources/u...-bee-breeding/
http://www.beesource.com/resources/u...d-hybrid-bees/
http://www.beesource.com/resources/u...hybrid-queens/

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