# Preparing for spring & package bee regression



## FlowerPlanter (Aug 3, 2011)

>I have come to the conclusion that small cell and treatment free is where I want to go.

*Then you don't want a package!* Packaged bees are inferior and will not survive without treatment. You might also be contaminating your area with inferior genes, disease and mites, making it imposable for feral bees to survive in your area.

PF100 is the fastest and easiest way to regress your bees. Once regressed you can use foundationless frame. There is no proof that small cell helps with mites and there might be studies that show it makes no difference. I prefer it (it's easy, cheaper, they draw it quicker) and I they make a lot of drones and a little less honey and spread their superior genes then it's a win win.

>drone comb or a foundationless frame to draw drone comb.

I would wait until you have 10 frames of drawn comb, if you give them foundationless they will make drone comb when ready. When they get to size and start to think about swarming.

>Also will this work with 11 frames in the brood box.

Yes, you will need to trim the frames down, I was thinking about it the big thing that turned me off is there will be no room in your box to pry the frames apart when the bees glue them down, and if you do foundationless you may need the extra room at times. 

>When it comes time to put on a honey super I will use standard 5.4 foundation in wood frames just cause I have some. Are you folks running 10 frames or 9 with a little more space in the supers ?

I would use small cell, drone or foundationless. Also using all the same frames works too. The queen could go up there and lay so you don't want 5.4, you might un-regress them back to large cell. 9 frames in a ten frame box has many benefits. Most start with 10 then when drawn or the next super checkerboard them to 9 per box. Otherwise 9 undrawn frames will have too much bees space and could cross comb it up.

As for your bees; 
*Do Not buy a package!* If watch this site in the spring you will see all the problems with packaged bees. Then summer to fall you will read all the disease with the packaged bees, EFB is a big one. Then as fall approaches all these package start failing cause of mites. Year after year it's the same thing.

Find someone in your area that is selling local treatment free "TF" bees. If you can't then find someone in your area selling bees and find out how they treat. you should also read from the TF forum on this site. 

Probably the best way to start TF is set swarm traps or swarm calls. I trap 20-30 hives a year and get calls for 10-15 more (put your name on swarm call lists). Its free and most >90% of what I catch are feral survivors that don't need treatment, and are already "natural" cell size (this is how I know they are wild).


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## True Beeliever (Feb 23, 2015)

Flower Planter,

Sorry to get back to you so late but thanks for your input.

As far as using the 5.4 wax foundation for my honey supers, my intent was to use a queen excluder to hold her down. But after thinking about it is probably better to keep 4.9 as the standard. I will move along what I have left of my 5.4

When it comes to package bees I don't have to many options . I have contacted a few guys locally that sell TF nucs but they want 2 to 3 times what a package costs. Too pricey for me. There is a fella in my bee club that likes to buy packages and then requeens them with a queen he likes. That may be an option.

I will try my hand at swarm catching but most people around me don't get very many at all. I have put my name on the bee removal list in my club. We will see how that goes.

Its all new to me but I am having fun.

TB


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

Why don't you keep a colony or two on the 5.4 foundation so that you can compare their progress with the 4.9? What you do to one, do to the other, and compare the results. The more colonies you have the more resources you have to work with.


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## True Beeliever (Feb 23, 2015)

>Why don't you keep a colony or two on the 5.4 foundation so that you can compare their progress with the 4.9? What you do to one, do to the other, and compare the results. The more colonies you have the more resources you have to work with.

I had something like that in mind. I have one colony left of two from last year. They currently reside in 3 deep boxes. I realized that I don't especially like the deeps so I decided to go all mediums this year as I can always cut down the deeps. I was thinking of making a horizontal hive so I wouldn't have to move the deeps around. If I leave them on the 5.4 deep frames then I won't regress them and we will see how they do. I could then use the 20 medium 5.4 frames in medium supers on top of that.

TB


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## AR Beekeeper (Sep 25, 2008)

If you don't like handling deeps use 2 mediums above one deep. Always leave the deep on the bottom of the stack and all you lift is mediums. Queens go down in mediums when they often won't in an upper deep.


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## True Beeliever (Feb 23, 2015)

Yes that is a possibility. But since I haven't gotten very far into this I thought now would be the best time to convert to all mediums on the stack hives. We will see spring is still a ways off.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

I second the thumbs down on the packages. I would get at least one tf nuc to get some of that potential tf hive ecology going as well. Its not just about bees. I wish I had a source with some history of tf from this area. 

I had some success the first year by bringing in some queens with some resistance to replace my hawaiian queen. After some mucking around I went into my first winter with 8 nucs, 6 that survived. The hawaiian queen and her daughter did not survive.


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## clint_napton (Jan 2, 2016)

Maybe you can educate me on why a package is inferior to a nuc? They get the bees from a hive and a nuc is a smaller version of a hive. Based on my very limited experience I guess I would assume the same relative genetics and survival potential. Is my assumption incorrect?


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

I have a co-worker who wanted to get into bees. A few years ago I sold him a package of bees from a load I trucked to New England from down south. He had some used equipment that was given to him and against my advise he used it. I went over how to do the install and he did it on his own. A couple of weeks later he calls and says he cant find the queen or eggs in the hive. So I go out and pull the cage to find the queen still inside. He poked a hole in the cork instead of the candy. No big deal, I just directly released her expecting that the package would fail because she was caged too long. I told him as much and he said he understood and would try again the next season.... the summer progressed and the package expanded into 2 deep boxes. Fall came around and I went over mite treatment and helped him get the hive ready for winter. We had a really bad winter and the hive was buried under snow most of the winter. Come spring though the bees were out flying. June rolled around and he had given them a couple of supers which they filled. He calls one day and says that the hive swarmed. I told him to catch the swarm and put it in a second hive which he had on hand.... He tried but wasn't successful at getting the swarm hived... several days later he states he has another swarm. I went over swarm control.. a few weeks later another one, and by the end of July it had swarmed 5 times. I told him not to expect too much honey because they spent all their resources swarming. Fall rolls around and he brings me in a quart of honey. I asked how much they made and he said 5 gallons...

That hive is still going strong to this day... I have told him to order replacement bees because there is no way they will make it into a 4th season..... I hope that southern package proves me wrong again.... 

There is an old saying that goes: The honey bee breaks the laws of avionics. It shouldn't be able to fly because it's wings are too small and its body too fat, but she flies anyway... she doesn't care what humans think.


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## lharder (Mar 21, 2015)

clint_napton said:


> Maybe you can educate me on why a package is inferior to a nuc? They get the bees from a hive and a nuc is a smaller version of a hive. Based on my very limited experience I guess I would assume the same relative genetics and survival potential. Is my assumption incorrect?


My take on it is genetics and hive ecology. If you get a local tf overwintered nuc you get bees that have a history of surviving varroa and your winter. You want those bee genetics. You will also get some mites along for the ride. Those mites didn't kill the nuc and hopefully the queenline it came from. You want those mite genetics. There are viruses that are associated with varroa. Those also didn't kill the nuc, so you want those viral genetics. There are symbionts and hangers on both on the bees and in the comb. They may or may not have a role in hive survival. You want those as well. As the tf nuc wasn't treated, the types of hangers on are likely to be different compare to where a hive was treated. So instead of building the winning formula from untested genetics from scratch, and likely failure, you much more likely to get a head start in the tf game. If you get a package, you may get lucky, but those bees are not selected for survival in your situation.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Package bees are inferior to nucs because of a neural synoptic defect in the brains of some beekeepers. 

I have studied this defect greatly in various parts of the country and it is more predominantly found among hobbyist beekeepers with excess disposable income in areas where there are bee sellers who are willing to help those beekeepers part with that disposable income. 

I have seen plenty of Nucs with all sort of descriptors attached to them that were far inferior to many a good package of bees, I have seen the same with packaged bees.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

I have to moderately disagree with you on the package bees Bluegrass. In the deep south, we can easily start with packages, but the timing is wrong so the package hits the main flow at the time most of the bees from the package are dying and the young newly hatched bees are too young to forage. The package means giving up on making a crop of honey in the year the package is purchased. By comparison, a nuc will usually make a surplus because it starts with enough brood to have foragers at the right time. Further north and this would not be a concern since packages usually have about 2 months to build up before the main flow.


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## Oldtimer (Jul 4, 2010)

Good story Bluegrass. A good illustration of where dumb luck is a factor in beekeeping.

Your customer was definitely a schmuck who reasonably should have failed. But thanks to your bees, the little bit of advice he actually did listen too, and majorly some luck, he has been successful.


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## Michael Palmer (Dec 29, 2006)

bluegrass said:


> Package bees are inferior to nucs because of a neural synoptic defect in the brains of some beekeepers.
> 
> I have studied this defect greatly in various parts of the country and it is more predominantly found among hobbyist beekeepers with excess disposable income in areas where there are bee sellers who are willing to help those beekeepers part with that disposable income.


Are you back to selling packages again Bluegrass.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Michael Palmer said:


> Are you back to selling packages again Bluegrass.


No... Still done selling packages. I am just a realist. Not every producer of nucs does a good job just like not every producer of packages does a good job. Now days with places around here selling packages at 130.00 a pop, I would personally go for a nuc if it can be had for 145.00, but I am seeing a lot of nucs around listed in the 160s and 170s, in that case I would go for the package. 

If a new beek really wants to get their feet wet they should source both and do their own comparison.

They both have their uses, my bias towards packages is two fold. 1st you know exactly what you are getting. I like to buy bees from various sources to see what people are doing... I bought some 5 frame nucs a few years ago out of PA and when I picked them up found that they were 4 frames with an empty foundation frame. Most of the drawn frames were all busted up and at the end of their life cycle. I went through what the producer had available and took the best 10 I could find, but it was some pretty thin pickings. 2nd there are more cases of really lousy nucs out there like the one I outlined above than there are reputable producers.

I don't like the quasi-genetic arguments for local nucs... Brother Adam took 70 years of selective breeding to get to the buckfasts that he wanted. He wrote that for every trait he selected for it took 10 years of breeding to fix that trait. And that is with bees and god being the only thing on his mind... for the rest of us it would take much longer.
Nobody in the Nuc production business has been at it long enough to make a claim of superior genetics. An experienced beekeeper can buy package bees from New Zealand, hive them in Maine and have a reasonable amount of success with them.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion_power said:


> The package means giving up on making a crop of honey in the year the package is purchased.


For a first year beekeeper that might not be a bad thing... they can focus on keeping the bees.


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

Things are never as simple as package vs nuc. There are so many aspects to any decision. Nucs come on a particular size frame (typically deep) and in a particular cell size (typically 5.4mm). Those are disadvantages when you want them in a top bar hive, a Warre' hive or a medium depth Langstroth hive or you want small cell. Otherwise you are trying to work out how to get them onto a different sized frame and cell size and how to get the sizes you don't want back out. More trouble than most people want.

A local overwintered nuc on the frame size and cell size you want is the ideal. We seldom get the ideal. If you can't get a nuc on the frame size and cell size you want, a package may be a better bet, but it will probably do better if you requeen with a local queen (if you can).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214574515000930
http://umaine.edu/agriculture/progr...jects/profile-establishing-honeybee-colonies/
http://mysare.sare.org/mySARE/ProjectReport.aspx?do=viewRept&pn=FNE10-694&y=2010&t=0
http://pwrbeekeepers.com/sare/sare-final-report-2011.pdf
http://www.southernsare.org/News-an...Successful-in-Rearing-Local-Honeybee-Colonies


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> For a first year beekeeper that might not be a bad thing... they can focus on keeping the bees.


Getting a newbee's interest is one thing, getting them to fork out cash to get started as a beekeeper is a second, getting them to stay with it usually involves getting a reward. Honey is a reward. If they get some the first year, they are happy and come back again the next year. You might think getting a crop the first year is unimportant, but the beginners I've spoken to think otherwise.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion_power said:


> Getting a newbee's interest is one thing, getting them to fork out cash to get started as a beekeeper is a second, getting them to stay with it usually involves getting a reward. Honey is a reward. If they get some the first year, they are happy and come back again the next year. You might think getting a crop the first year is unimportant, but the beginners I've spoken to think otherwise.


Which may explain the high rates of failure among new beekeepers... Do new fishermen catch huge fish their first time out? Rookie race car drivers win the race the first time on the track? Mountaineers conquer every mountain they attempt on the first try? Did Evel Knievel set world records without breaking bones? 

Patience Grasshopper.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

Patience is indeed needed, but you are the man whose tagline says "Always question Conventional Wisdom". That doesn't mean conventional wisdom is wrong.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion_power said:


> Patience is indeed needed, but you are the man whose tagline says "Always question Conventional Wisdom". That doesn't mean conventional wisdom is wrong.


Where is the conventional wisdom here? Buying bees, learning to work them comfortably, Learning to know what you are looking at when you inspect a hive, learning to identify and intervene when problems arise, and expecting a honey crop the first season is an unrealistic set of goals for a single season.

A package offers advantages that a new beek will not get from a nuc.... Like what does a queen look like? I have had many new beekeepers see a drone and think it was a queen. With a package the new beekeeper can see the queen at install and know that they are looking at a queen. They can see the process of comb being drawn and see the stages of brood from egg to larva, to capped/emerging. In a nuc they get it all at once and it can be overwhelming. With a nuc they may not see their queen once the entire season. They are more likely to have to deal with a swarm the first season. they are certainly more likely to have to deal with a wider variety of disease the first season.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

And a nuc offers advantages a new beek can't get from a package.... Like a crop of honey the first season. Tell me someday how many packages you have started in the deep South and lets figure out if it works very well. Lets see, if I really get lucky, I can get a package April 2nd and the queen starts laying 2 days later on the 4th. Those bees hatch on the 25th of April just as the main flow starts. The bees from the package are getting old by then and dying in droves. For two weeks, the newly hatched bees are not yet ready to forage, then finally they hit the decks running and start collecting nectar after the main flow is half gone. The population builds for 2 more weeks before finally peaking with maybe 25,000 foragers just as the flow ends. If I'm lucky, I got all the combs drawn out in the brood area and maybe enough extra nectar to get the bees through the mid-summer dearth.

Do the same timeline with a nuc with 3 frames of sealed brood and I have continuous brood production right up to the time the main flow starts, the bees are physiologically young enough to make some honey, they build comb expeditiously, and at the end of the flow, I get some honey. Maybe if I'm lucky I get to put a little money in my pocket from selling that honey. Yep, I think this one can be answered pretty easy. Package? or Nuc?


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Why do you wait until April 2nd? If I could use packages in February I can get them in February... I get them in May because that is the best time to get them for this area, early enough to catch the dandelion and basswood, late enough that I don't have to worry about cold snaps or excessive feeding.

Your timeline is off on time of death for the original package bees. Packages when properly shook are shook from brood frames, most of the bees are young nurse bees that end up in the package. The newly established hive will not have much brood for them, but nurse bees have the longest life ahead of them and they can't fly which makes getting them in the package easier. So the bulk of the bees in the package are less than 10 days old. 

Because they don't have brood the focus on drawing comb, once the queen starts laying some will tend brood, some will continue to draw comb tend the hive and some will advance to foraging. Now two things impact their lifespan. Exposure to brood pheromone is directly correlated to worker bee mortality, that is why a worker who should only live about 6 weeks can live through a winter in the absence of brood. The new colony has very little brood so the mortality rate of the original package of bees is less. The package also doesn't need the resources of a full colony so the workers do not kill them selves collecting resources as quickly.

Okay so back to your timeline using the 6 week rule.
If you get the package on April 2nd it was packed on April 1st. 
1. The oldest bees in the pack are 10 days old, but we have bees from 0-10 days old in the pack. 
2. So we can divide the amount of bees by 10 and using the 6 week rule the first 10% of the package is going to die on April 27th. (2 days after your first set of eggs start to hatch.)
You have a 2 day over lap from when your first 10% die and you loose 10% for 10 consecutive days after that. 
It doesn't take long for the queen to start to outlay the 10% loss per day.
Factor in the extended life span as I outlines above and you really have about a 7-10 days of overlap between emergence and the death of the original workers.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

Have you tried to purchase packages in early March? Especially packages with good established laying queens?

Get past the age of the brood and the age of the bees in the package and the days a worker lives. At the end of the day, which one will make a crop of honey and I don't mean just what the bees need to live over the summer. Which one makes surplus I can harvest?


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion_power said:


> Have you tried to purchase packages in early March? Especially packages with good established laying queens?
> 
> Get past the age of the brood and the age of the bees in the package and the days a worker lives. At the end of the day, which one will make a crop of honey and I don't mean just what the bees need to live over the summer. Which one makes surplus I can harvest?


As an experienced beekeeper with drawn comb, all other dependent variables aside, a package will make you a honey crop the first season. There are people up this way who kill there bees every fall and start over with packages the next spring. People who are only in it for the honey and find it cheaper to buy new bees than to leave them valuable honey and hope they survive the winter.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

Agreed that is completely viable up there, but I'm stating that it is not viable here in the deep south. This is the point I originally made that what works up there gives unacceptable results here.


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

bluegrass said:


> No... Still done selling packages. I am just a realist. Not every producer of nucs does a good job just like not every producer of packages does a good job. Now days with places around here selling packages at 130.00 a pop, I would personally go for a nuc if it can be had for 145.00, but I am seeing a lot of nucs around listed in the 160s and 170s, in that case I would go for the package.
> 
> If a new beek really wants to get their feet wet they should source both and do their own comparison.
> 
> ...


Do you think, though, a package from NZ to Maine would perform as well as a nuc made from bees that had been bred in Maine for say at least 10 years? Require more feed? Come out of winter with as healthy a population? I genuinely want to know what you think.

Also, a package may cost less than a nuc, but by the time you requeened it(as often recommended) that's another $30-35 and not too far from just getting a nuc.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

SRatcliff said:


> Do you think, though, a package from NZ to Maine would perform as well as a nuc made from bees that had been bred in Maine for say at least 10 years? Require more feed? Come out of winter with as healthy a population? I genuinely want to know what you think.
> 
> Also, a package may cost less than a nuc, but by the time you requeened it(as often recommended) that's another $30-35 and not too far from just getting a nuc.


It works for Canada, they have been doing it for 29 years.

I don't buy queens to requeen packs the first year. I do re-queen them though because there is a high rate of queen failure in packs within several months of hatch. Most often I send them into winter with their own daughters. I call it "rapid cycling" the queens.

Everybody who has "local stock" started from somewhere and more often than not it was not with local stock. Without the educational background to actually selectively breed (and AI equipment or isolated mating yards) we can't effectively select for anything. 

People frequently tout "acclimated" to a region as the best option. If reminds me of what Brother Adam said on the matter, and that was that bees can't be acclimated, if you brought them to an area and they lived, they did so because they were able too naturally, if they dies, you had nothing to breed from to create acclimated lines.

Langstroth brought the first Italian bees over into PA which is pretty harsh compared to the areas of Italy they came from... they did really well. More recently the USDA brought what we call "Russian" bees from Primorsky Kria and dropped them onto islands in Louisiana. They also did well.

Then think of all the migrators who run bees all over this country. Their bees certainly are not getting acclimated to any one place because they are always on the move. Yes they have problems, but look at the stresses they expose those bees too... Drastic changes in environment, altitude, food sources, weather, humidity....


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

I think that just because they lived, doesn't mean they are optimized for the area. It sounds like you're saying that bees can't adapt, and I mean that in the evolutionary sense.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

SRatcliff said:


> I think that just because they lived, doesn't mean they are optimized for the area. It sounds like you're saying that bees can't adapt, and I mean that in the evolutionary sense.


They are not optimized for here to begin with.... wipe out the introduced plant species that came here the same way the honey bee did and you end beekeeping in North America. They only succeeded because we also brought dandelion, alfalfa, clover, apples, citrus, almonds and the 100s of other introduced plants from areas with native honey bee populations. Very few of the plants our bees depend on where here before the bee.


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

bluegrass said:


> They are not optimized for here to begin with.... wipe out the introduced plant species that came here the same way the honey bee did and you end beekeeping in North America. They only succeeded because we also brought dandelion, alfalfa, clover, apples, citrus, almonds and the 100s of other introduced plants from areas with native honey bee populations. Very few of the plants our bees depend on where here before the bee.


But they can become optimized, through natural selection, can't they? If characteristics like brooding patterns or clustering are somewhat fixed at a genetic level, then doesn't it make sense that some bees may do better in different climates? Take the apple tree for example; if my history is right(if not please correct me) most of the grafted apple trees brought to North America died when they tried planting them. It was through the seeds(due to their high genetic variability) that they were able to grow more fit apple trees over time.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> Very few of the plants our bees depend on were here before the bee.


Like maybe Basswood, Sourwood, Black Locust, tupelo, a few hundred species of clover, vetch, and other legumes, various thistles, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, brambles, etc.

Langstroth was not the first to import Italians to the U.S. though he did popularize using them by writing about their desirable traits. I have seen a report that Italians were imported to the U.S. as described in a 1622 ships manifest that listed over 100 hives of bees brought from Italy.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion
Many you mention are introduced or co-originates
Basswood, locust and the maples as well as many of the others you mentioned including Vetch were native to the Americas, but also native to Europe and Asia as well. Tupelo is a dogwood and those are also native to both sides of the pond. Blackberries are from both sides of the pond... Raspberries came from Asia... Blueberries are native to North America and bees hate them.... 

SRatcliff: Natural selection takes a lot more time than the history of bees in American has been. Yes traits can be set... obviously bees that winter with smaller clusters consume less food and are at a less risk of starvation.

To challenge your way of thinking. What other agricultural practices can you think of where something can be made to prosper regionally through selective breeding? Do all the selection you want on an orange tree you will never get a grove of them to grow in Boston... You can select for sugar content, color, citric acid content etc.... 

Any other livestock we can think of where buying local gets the best results? In the dairy industry every few years we would bring in stock from as far away as we could find it to diversify the genetic pool. 

I personally do not think that local genetics in bees results in high enough winter survivalbility to theorize that they can be adapted to a geographic region in as short of a period of years that we are talking about. The best beekeepers with the most inbred local stock still loose 20-30-40% a year.

I often wonder if many of the issues we have with bees are directly correlated with queen quality? Lousy queen reduces moral in the colony and bees who previously tolerated mites well suddenly succumb to them.


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

bluegrass said:


> Fusion
> Many you mention are introduced or co-originates
> Basswood, locust and the maples as well as many of the others you mentioned including Vetch were native to the Americas, but also native to Europe and Asia as well. Tupelo is a dogwood and those are also native to both sides of the pond. Blackberries are from both sides of the pond... Raspberries came from Asia... Blueberries are native to North America and bees hate them....
> 
> ...


Sure some species of organisms seem to have more biological limitations than others, but fortunately Apis Mellifera has evolved subspecies that have adapted to a wide range of environments, from northern Europe to South Africa. The several subspecies that were imported to North America luckily were suited enough to get established, and probably even more so when they mixed and mated with each other. Had it been only a south African subspecies, we probably wouldn't have honey bees in the upper half of the States.

I do think because of how polyandrous honeybees are, their high recombination rate, and the different mix of subspecies we have, that expressions of traits can change relatively quickly.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

SRatcliff said:


> I do think because of how polyandrous honeybees are, their high recombination rate, and the different mix of subspecies we have, that expressions of traits can change relatively quickly.


I agree, but I think the timeline is 1000s of years instead of 100s of 1000s. As humans we can only select for what we can physically identify. That is what BA did with the buckfasts and it took 70 years of non-stop completely controlled selective breeding. We don't have the luxury of that and with absolute control of 50% it isn't something happening effectively in the amateur apiaries in America.

The other point to consider is that if such adaptation was being accomplished we would be able to identify changes in the bees phenotype. 

Consider the history of bees in America. Doolittle was in up State NY, Langstroth in PA etc... the people who did it and did it successfully often did it in northern climates. They didn't report huge winter losses and a need to bring bees in from the south. That didn't come along until diseases where being identified as the culprits. 

I think the same is true today, in the absence of disease any European honey bee can do well and prosper anywhere in the lower 48.


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## SRatcliff (Mar 19, 2011)

bluegrass said:


> I agree, but I think the timeline is 1000s of years instead of 100s of 1000s. As humans we can only select for what we can physically identify. That is what BA did with the buckfasts and it took 70 years of non-stop completely controlled selective breeding. We don't have the luxury of that and with absolute control of 50% it isn't something happening effectively in the amateur apiaries in America.
> 
> The other point to consider is that if such adaptation was being accomplished we would be able to identify changes in the bees phenotype.
> 
> ...


Interesting perspective, thanks. One last thing I might add is how long it took Capensis(and other African and africanized bees) to become very tolerant to mites. Something like 5-10 years in some cases? Of course, that's regarding defensive mechanism and those bees were somehow "primed" to become tolerant faster, but I don't see why that wouldn't apply to their sister subspecies in regards to adapting to climate. If you have a healthy population and enough diverse gene pool.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

> I agree, but I think the timeline is 1000s of years instead of 100s of 1000s.


Not even thousands are required for bees to adapt to a region or area. The last ice age is just 10,000 years in the past. Since then, western honeybees spread through Europe and large parts of Asia adapting to regions as far north as Finland. Honeybees in the U.S. have the genetic diversity of about 20 geographical races from Caucasica, Ligustica, Carnica, Lamarckii, Scutellata, and others. Regionally adapted bees are out there as ferals already. Stating that there are no regionally adapted bees in the U.S. is highly biased toward commercial beekeeping which uses breeds that are not adapted to any specific climate, rather have been selected for adaptation to commercial beekeeping.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

There actually has been quite a bit of scientific research on the subject. Two studies that come to mind is one from 2013 in Canada were they evaluated DNA differences in mitochondria of bees guts. They did find variation, but it was in samples from vastly different geographic areas, like Australia and NZ compared to California.

A second study was done in Poland in 2008 which found phenotype differences between commercially bee operations and wild populations. (I say wild because they were referring to native honeybees which we do not have here in North America) 

There has been some research within the USA which did not come to the same conclusions, the population isn't as genetically diverse as one might think due to closed borders and massive die offs. And commercial operators frequently depend on purchased queens from specific geographic areas which has farther degraded the diversity of the stock.


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## bluegrass (Aug 30, 2006)

Fusion_power said:


> Not even thousands are required for bees to adapt to a region or area. The last ice age is just 10,000 years in the past. Since then, western honeybees spread through Europe and large parts of Asia adapting to regions as far north as Finland.


A good argument of climate change, not so much for environmental adaptation of the species.


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