Requeening another three colonies and I’ll be over the 70% A.m.m. drone percentage from 57% in June this year, to 63% in July and up the 68% in August. I’m now looking towards next season knowing I’ve moved the mean average of A.m.m. I prioritised half my apiary for re-queening this way this year.Īrmed with up-to-date morphology results each time I’ve been able to replace a low percentage drone producer, during the season, with a high percentage female bloodline. drone producers can be identified and immediately improved. The mother queen’s percentage being equal to the drones of the daughters, means that all the low percentage A.m.m. Complementing last year’s plots, done as part of the Bangor study, with a full set of my own plots on daughter queens this year, I’ve been able to assess my apiary’s native drone percentages. Learning to do your own wing plots means you can make informed breeding choice decisions in your apiary within the same season. On Amazon I was able to get one for around £80. I’ve now seen one of the most dramatic changes in my apiary and I’d put it down to just one of the pieces of equipment from the list above: the Epsom Perfection V370 Photo scanner. Whilst it was a wonderful opportunity -someone else doing the wing tests - I really needed to learn to do it myself. To get my bees analysed and to see the fruits of my labour, the timing of Bangor University’s wing morphology study in my area last year couldn’t have been better. A grafting tool, a bag of cell blocks, scanner, microscope slides, scissors to clip wings and a couple of mating hives and I was away. I was able to set myself up so that I could graft, incubate and test my own bees. The 50% match by BIBBA of what I was to put in, meant that I could think a little more seriously about the range of equipment needed, as I was able to spend a touch beyond what would have been my spending comfort range. Not wanting to return to beekeeping hell, I contacted BIBBA early this year about the A.m.m. ![]() Being a small apiary it was relatively easy to do but as we know, having native bees isn’t a fixed point. The effect was immediate, even before new virgins were mated. What, no gloves? No bee suit black with screaming bees? With hindsight and learning I can now see from the first abysmal wing plot Steve provided of my bees, that the problem I had was hybridisation between sub-species. It felt like the beekeeping equivalent of Jules Verne’s characters witnessing the existence of pre-historic creatures after journeying to the centre of the earth. ![]() Quite naturally, having succumb to the propaganda that it was game over for our native bee, it was a revelation to visit Steve Rose at his apiary in 2012 where there wasn’t just one native colony but over forty. The native dark bee in my youth were the stuff of legends one of the great environmental injustices, a subspecies of bee driven to extinction with a small band of bee hunters still in search of the holy grail docile native bees clinging on in a secluded location far from humanity’s reach. That day I was held at sting point in my suit by a thousand screaming bees for half an hour as I ran through bushes to shake them off my tail. My personal safety in my apiary and beyond in the wider community was in peril. A retired builder from over the road, who also happened to be North Wales’s former black belt karate champion, got stung along with his son. Hive inspection day would be accompanied by the sound of screaming neighbours who’d also get attacked. The law of averages meant that at least a gross of stings would get through the suit each time. Prising the crown board half an inch, bees would ferment over the sides like a badly poured beer, the air would darken and hundreds would enshroud my suit kamikaze-ing their way into every nook and crevice. I became a queenrearer in recent years through necessity, with my small apiary of five hives shifting from docile to completely insane within two seasons. ![]() Keeping bees since I was 15, now 30 years ago, I’d been quite content for most of that time producing a super of honey each season that was my beekeeping.
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