Hi Dee
> What are these traits you speak of for AMM for
> maintainance.
There area number of reasons, each of which has a benefit in maintaining
purity of race, but these features all seem to reinforce each other.
The ability to mate at later times in the day and lower temperatures
than other races, so that late flying drones mate with late flying
queens more often.
The use of queenright supersedure, where mother and daughter lay
alongside each other for prolonged periods, reduces the need for queens
to be mated on an urgent basis, if one dies then there is no need to
panic, they can raise a new queen in a time-scale to suit themselves.
Additionally, the raising and matings of these supersedure queens can
occur very late in the year after all other races have ceased breeding
and chucked out the drones, which along with low temperature
considerations, increases the chance of matings being within the same race.
These features, allow a higher degree of racial purity to be maintained,
when compared with Italian bees, without some of the risks of
inbreeding, because the AMM mating frequency is so much higher than the
Italians.
> the supplanting of AMM genes in US has happened 'against the
> grain'.
As it follows that in a free running system, the racial purity of AMM is
likely to be greater than Italian, the changes brought about by
beekeepers have happened, in spite of this and so I used the term
'against the grain'.
> Also, how would you compare AMM here, to
> caucasian types?
I can't make any sensible comparisons, as I have no direct experience of
Caucasian bees, and my knowledge of them is thus limited, however
Caucasians will forage at low temperatures in a similar way to AMM and
in less favourable weather conditions than Italian bees, but I don't
think they have the cool weather mating strategies of AMM. They readily
hybridise with Carnica and Ligustica, but if hybridised with AMM they
are 'bad tempered' and winter so poorly that they die out within a few
years in UK conditions.
Regards & Best 73s, Dave Cushman, G8MZY
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman or http://www.dave-cushman.net
Short FallBack M/c, Build 6.02/3.1 (stable)
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