]Charles Linder posted: So whats the criteria?  2 years?  5 years??  Proven heritage?  DNA testing?   Or an affidavit from the local bee ]wizard??  Therein is my quandary.  How do I  as a breeder  spot the locals?

My bee buddies and I have kicked this one around quite a bit and we have the sense that the search for "locally adapted" bees is more common among those who either need or want a hands-off beekeeping approach. 

In our local area, there is a river of newly imported Carniolans from New Zealand annually, such that your wild mated queens are going to find mostly drones from this year's imports as well as those from last year's overwintered imported queens. Our members south of the border are contending with drones from packages produced in the southern USA. 

Lacking the resources to do the ideal (set up genetically isolated apiaries in which to develop strains that do well in our locale, with control over drone and queen populations), we have decided to do what we can. We can still aspire to developing better than we can buy...at home, in our own beeyards, contenting ourselves with controlling what we can. 

Some progress, we decided, being better than none. 

So we are encouraging improvements to our local drone population by asking area beekeepers to place green drone comb frames in their best performing colony/colonies, to bump up the numbers of drones coming from superior performing colonies (after paying attention to mite levels). We are proofing as many well-raised queens as we can and evaluating them for their fecundity, their ability to successfully overwinter and bring a strong colony into spring that builds early and with vigour. These are important qualities in our short season-early nectar flow conditions up here on the 49th parallel. And then only the very best queens are used as breeding stock in the year following their nativity. Over time we should end up with improved/more reliable performance.

Underpinning this approach is the idea that the term "locally adapted" isn't as important as "using bee lines that flourish under your management practices"...after all, bees here need an informed and attentive beekeeper, they are not going to prosper long in our local wild (which lacks the "wild" component, as locally we are very developed and urbanized).

Bees do well across a variety of biozones because their beekeeper provides what the biozone does not. So we are working to create a "beekeeper adapted" line of bees.


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