General Information

Last year, I did several splits including splits of all my favourite breeder colonies in mid-August. It was a slight gamble where I live in Cheshire but the weather was fair and the outlook very similar. Roger mentioned that I was out of action from last September (2 months to get walking, a year to pass a medical to get my driving licence back and lots of mobility issues in between). The rivers around me flooded while I was in hospital and many of my bees and colonies were literally swept away. read more ...

The article below is based on a lecture given by Philip Denwood to the SICAMM Conference in Landquart, Switzerland, on 1st September 2012 Articles by Dr. Dorian Pritchard,1 and by Norman Carreck2 of the Laboratory of Social Insects at Sussex, have presented the evidence, convincing in my opinion, for the immigration of the honey bee into mainland Britain across the land bridge from Europe at least 9000 years ago, and its continued existence here ever since. This bee would have been the ancestor of the Apis mellifera mellifera or Dark European subspecies and geographical race, as would any later ...

Margie Ramsay reports on a project reintroducing A.m.m. to a reserve in Scotland. Update July 2015 In 1905, just before the First World War there was a 20 year long bee plague called Isle of Wight disease which was considered by many, including bee breeder Brother Adam, to have eradicated the native subspecies of dark European honeybee Apis mellifera mellifera from our Isles ...

The SMARTBEES project is focused on identification, breeding and propagation of locally adapted honey bees with high performance and resistance traits to Varroa destructor ...

TWO remote Hebridean islands have become the UK’s first reserve for native honey bees after a landmark ruling by Scottish ministers ...

In order to compensate the dramatic losses of honeybee colonies that we see globally for many years now, beekeepers try to restore their apiaries by importing colonies or queens in the hopes that those survive better than their previous bees. Such imports increase the level of introgression with local honeybee populations in which genetic variability is geographically highly structured ...

It is fairly certain that the Dark European Honey Bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, has been native to mainland Britain since before the closing of the Channel Landbridge, when sea levels rose following the last Ice Age. They became isolated and adapted to the different conditions they found themselves in ...

There is a tendency amongst some beekeepers to believe that the “grass is greener on the other side of the fence”, that imported bees are superior to the indigenous bee ...

What are honey bees, anyway? Bees of all kinds belong to the order of insects known as Hymenoptera, literally "membrane wings". This order, comprising some 100,000 species, ...