Geert Van Eizenga
>That is a very harsh judgment on a person that dedicated his life to the
honeybee. An judgement that is not supported by historical facts: he never
discredited the native English honeybee.

'She was very bad tempered and very susceptible to brood diseases and would 
in any case not have been able to produce the crops we have secured since 
her demise.'
'The great majority of the different sub-varieties of the western European 
race group ... we found that none of them would meet our present-day 
requirements.'
'Their undesirable traits far outweigh their good points.'
Brother Adam - Bee-keeping at Buckfast Abbey.

>We should not forget that also the so called pure-race
>beekeeping, including bee wing venation practice, is based only on an
>assumption, not on facts.

Not sure that I understand your point here - are you suggesting that 
morphometry is of no value?

>Equally I would like to recommend to read Brother
>Adams book "Breeding the honeybee".

I have it in my library.  Here in his section 'The Essential Characteristics 
of the Races of Bees', he covers ligustica, carnica, cecropia, caucasica, 
anatolica, fasciata, syriaca, cypria,  adami, intermissa, sahariensis and 
some of the sub-groups - yet he ignores A.m.m. completely!

However he later submits a table 'Results of the Evaluations in Relation to 
the Buckfast Strain' in which he lists 'Western European Races'.  Whether by 
this he meant A.m.m. I do not know, but as there is no other reference to 
the native bee of this area so I must assume so.  If that is correct then 
this bee is, by his own results, better than the Buckfast other than in 
resistance to disease (I know of no independent studies that confirm this - 
in fact I believe that the opposite may be true) and temper/calmness. 
Certainly we know that A.m.m. can display bad temper when crossed with some 
other races - but Brother Adam also states that the same is true of the 
Buckfast.  We also know that pure A.m m. can be very calm and gentle - we 
have seen this in our own bees, but a visit to Micheal Mac Gillacoda's 
apiary at Galtee, Tipperary which has some of the purest A.m.m. available 
would quickly convince even the most hardened sceptic.  Many saw this as the 
apiary was included as one of the Apimondia 2005 tours; as far as I know 
there was not a single sting despite colonies being opened with little smoke 
and no veils.  We repeated the experience last September during the BIBBA 
conference.

I note that in this book he also says of biometrics: '...these biometric 
data provide us with points of reference which provide an integral part of 
modern breeding.'

Best wishes

Peter 

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