Stanton Fitzwarren

In 1992 a destructive blood-sucking mite from abroad, VARROA JACOBSONII  somehow managed to get into honeybee hives in Devon, England and in less than 10 years had infested almost every colony in Great Britain, including that of Feral Honeybees in trees, barns, and walls, etc. The Highlands of Scotland may have escaped the scourge. Bumblebees are not afflicted.

We have established that Varroa cannot be totally eradicated so beekeepers have tried to control its numbers to manageable levels with a man-made  pyrethroid, but without overmuch success. It costs several pounds per year to treat each colony.

It is estimated that more than two thirds of all Britain’s honeybees have been lost to Varroa, mostly in the south and the midlands. Many beekeepers gave up the craft in despair. Varroa has wiped out nearly every feral colony causing remote pollination to suffer greatly.

Bees swarm to multiply and if not recaptured and ‘hived’ by a beekeeper, may well colonise the now unused ‘nests’ of the feral bees, but their days are also numbered without treatment by man.

The only honeybees remaining are those kept by a much-reduced number of dedicated beekeepers whose hives are usually conveniently near accessible roads.

The feral bees’ habitat was mostly in the more inaccessible remote areas, like the new SHCG site in Stanton Park.

With feral bees gone so has the ‘remote’ pollination that helped provide most of the nuts, berries and seeds that sustained much of our wildlife, birds and mammals.Our project aims to make it possible for  honeybees to once again survive back in the wild.

Honeybee colonies during summer comprise of just one queen, a few hundred males (drones), but an amazing fifty thousand infertile females (workers), most of which are the true pollinators.

The younger workers perform many other duties within the hive for two or three weeks. One such duty is to turn nectar into honey for their winter larder. The beekeeper takes any surplus only if it has been a good season. Honeybees cannot store nectar, as it will ferment. Pure honey will not ferment.

The drones do not survive long after August. The rest do not hibernate but go through winter as a full colony, ready to carry out pollination from spring onwards worth £billions to farmers and the nation, the beekeeper gets very little. A few jars of honey are his reward.

Bumblebees differ. All will die in late autumn except the queen; she will survive winter by hibernating. She then starts a fresh colony in spring building up to 80-120 bees. They are not really great pollinators, though we do enjoy the varieties and colour changes created by their cross-pollination habit of flitting between plants. As the bumble family will all die out there is no need for them to collect nectar for a winter store. Pollination therefore is less.

The honeybee is similar in size and shape to a wasp but not similar in colour or habit. They are not perceived as a “pretty, furry insect with an orange behind”, so do not get the same degree of reverence as bumbles, though its importance to our economy and ecology must never be under estimated. They do not generally compete with Bumbles as is often thought.

Varroa is not a parasite of bumblebees, as the bumbles breeding cycle is not suitable to the breeding habits of Varroa. Mother varroa lays about 12 eggs on the honeybee pupae. The eggs hatch and will live on the blood of the pupae. They mate with a single brother and about 18 days later they exit the brood cell, only to later enter other cells and start over, 12 very quickly become 144. and so on.

Since 1992 the Varroa mite has been aptly renamed as VARROA DESTRUCTOR Most other parasites do not kill their host.

The aim of SHCG is to develop a strain of honeybee able to survive without treatment, despite Varroa. By studying bee behaviour and survival, without them having been subjected to ‘man-made’ treatment, we hope to ascertain which of our strains may be able to deal with the parasite, some through the natural ability to develop and then maintain, grooming techniques which it can pass on to future generations, others because they become resistant to the effects of the blood sucking mite that is the vector of Bee Paralysis and Cloudy Wing Virus.

Either will cause the collapse of the colony because when it becomes the workers’ turn to collect nectar & pollen for their ‘winter larder’, they are unable to fly. The colony then starves to death. 

When the honeybee queen takes her maiden flight, she mates about 50 feet in the air and several miles away.

Unfortunately for our program, she will mate with up to 20 males, probably none of them related to her or each other, and can come from colonies anywhere within 80 sq. miles. It is therefore obvious that we have no means of applying any degree of selection control upon this act what-so-ever.

What is more, when now studying a colony for selection, their qualities may change almost daily, due to the effects of the varying qualities derived from the ‘Sperm father’.

Therefore many generations must be bred and discarded as unsuitable queen donors (A generation means a new queen and her progeny). The drones are another matter – they have no father! They are created from an unfertilised egg laid by the queen so their characteristics are totally related to those of the queen, though they do have grandparents, the queen’s mum and dad.

We have sacrificed honey production as a priority and look to the colony’s health and ability to survive Varroa as prime factors. If a colony dies from the effects of Varroa so be it. Sad, time consuming, and costly, but not the bees we would wish to breed from in any case.

However, should a colony appear to be ‘a survivor’ it warrants further study. The colony that failed must be replaced to maintain the vast number of worker bees required to sustain our breeding program. The queens we breed must be set up singly in a new home containing several hundred workers.

All workers live only 5/6 weeks in summer so a separate breeding program for them must be retained to support the individual queen colony.

(About August there is a change and workers live until April!)  Queens may live for up to 5 years.

From our studies we select two compatible colonies. From one we breed a number of queens; from the other we must breed thousands of drones. This part of our program is far from easy but is child’s play compared to the next stage.

BEE INSTRUMENTAL INSEMINATION GROUP

( BIIG ...) www.biig.co.uk

Instrumental Insemination of queen honeybees is carried out under a microscope in clinical conditions. The queen is narcotised whilst this ‘micro-surgery’ takes place. 8-10µl of sperm has been obtained from as many drones as it takes, usually about 30, and then injected into a queen. She must then be kept captive in a nucleus hive until she commences laying or she may still take her ‘maiden flight’ having been asleep during the ‘man-made mating’. Once egg laying starts she may then be used to reign a normal colony where she will be studied and records kept.

To make a queen we use a technique called ‘grafting’. This entails selecting a frame of day-old pupae and carefully transferring individuals to specially made wax cups. These cups are then placed inverted into a previously prepared colony, which then works for the beekeeper by turning the grafts from workers   into queens, if we are lucky and if we prepared correctly.

Grafting and queen rearing will be carried out at the Stanton Park Apiary. Training courses will be carried out there to enable the spread of this work to which many beekeepers are unfamiliar at the moment. The program ahead has more than one facet. Primarily it is to overcome the problems we now face with Varroa but parallel to that our selection process takes into account other factors; docility, honey production, comb building, disease tolerance, ability to work in the cold, etc.

And there is another. Early last century many of the indigenous honeybees Apis meliffera meliffera (A.m.m) also known as The British Dark Bee, were overcome and died from a disease Acarine, before some became immune to it. Since then man has imported bees from all over the world and what we now have is a mixture of races. Some of these crosses can be very bad tempered, as in some crossbred dogs. The British Isles Bee Breeding Assn. (BIBBA), of which I am a member, was formed to re-establish A.m.m. as the indigenous pedigree honeybee, the one evolved to work in our climatical conditions. Certain select features can readily identify all races of honeybee; length of over hairs, wing pattern, tongue length and more. We can identify A.m.m.

As we are now in the computer age we have developed programs that help us in our selection process. We can now select from only those colonies that show true conformity.

My colleague, Ron Hill, (also a serious beekeeper & breeder), and I have another breeding apiary at Acorn Bridge where we are developing strains of The British Dark Bee.

By taking straws of semen from these we are able to do swaps with other like-minded breeders to widen the gene pool and prevent the problems associated with in-breeding.

This program cannot necessarily be confused with the Varroa program because at Acorn we can and do carry out some forms of treatment against the mite, but as our studies do run parallel we are ever watchful for ‘varroa tolerance’.

Top