Special Edition
SPECIAL Newsletter This is a special newsletter with a focus on encouraging EMBA members to either raise their own queens or BUY LOCAL. EMBA wants to encourage local queen rearing, buying and selling to reduce the risk of importing diseases and pests from Europe, especially. We want to encourage local small-scale queen breeders to advertise their queens and are recommending a price of £25 for a 2025 mated marked queen, which is much cheaper than elsewhere. Here is a note from EMBA member and expert apiarian, Matthew Richardson, regarding why local bees and queens are valuable.
Local Bees - Matthew Richardson
We often hear that ‘local bees are best’, but where does this claim come from? There have been studies that show that local bees have better survival and disease resistance than imported bees, regardless of which subspecies is the local one. Local effects can be seen over relatively small distances of a few hundred miles, so even English bees often underperform if taken north into Scotland, let alone those from southern Europe.¹
There are a variety of subspecies and hybrids which are imported to provide particular traits – for example, increased honey production or good temper. However imported bees will mate with local bees over time. The end result is that both these colonies, but also those in neighbouring apiaries, will become hybridised, meaning the only way to preserve these traits is to keep buying new queens in. A better long-term approach is to work with local bees, selecting and improving from the existing population. This has the advantage of both using existing local genetics, which have been selected for that locality, avoiding the associated risks of imports such as diseases, and usually spending much less money to do so!
In practice, it can be very difficult to get hold of local bees, and many beginners may turn to buying bees online in order to get started with their new hobby, undermining the local population. EMBA already encourages its members to buy local, but would also like to encourage members with good local bees to think about raising more queens and colonies for sale to make buying local easier. This could be as simple as increasing the number of times a colony is split (e.g. making 2 nucs instead of 1 hive), or more advanced queen rearing methods.
It is, of course, important that we don’t just make more bees, but that we make more good- quality bees. It is easy to raise new colonies through splits during the swarm season, but the downside of relying on swarms is that over time, the swarmyness of the overall population increases. The same is true of colonies which build up very strongly at the wrong time of year (making them easy to split from) but may need more feeding and inspection as a result. We also want to avoid breeding from colonies which are bad- tempered, or show signs of susceptibility to disease.
When selecting for good quality bees, it is generally more effective to apply ‘negative selection’ – removing the worst colonies, than to use ‘positive selection’ – trying to breed from the best. Removing the worst bees can rapidly improve the average, without reducing the biodiversity that can come with just breeding from a small number of colonies. It is important to remove colonies with bad traits from the breeding population as quickly as possible (by requeening and removing drone brood). This is true for all beekeepers - even if you are not looking to increase or sell bees. Putting up with bad bees not only makes beekeeping less enjoyable, but it also allows their genetics to spread into neighbouring hives, making it harder to get rid of bad traits later. This process can have a marked effect on the overall average across the population in a relatively small number of generations.
For those who are interested in more advanced techniques of queen rearing and selection, Carrie has asked me to run workshops at the EMBA apiary this summer, to allow our members to better implement many of the above suggestions (see below for details).
1. Ralph Büchler et al. (2014) The influence of genetic origin and its interaction with environmental effects on the survival of Apis mellifera L. colonies in Europe. Journal of Apicultural Research, 53:2, 205-214, https://doi.org/10.3896/ IBRA.1.53.2.03
