In a message dated 20/11/2008 17:51:50 GMT Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
<<LOL..thank you VERY much...... I don't suppose the 2000+ I raise each
year, a lot of them for sale, as queens or heading new seasons nucleii,
counts. >>
Where do you advertise your queens? How many do you sell indvidually,
and how many end up heading nucs which you sell? If you compare the number of
ads for queens in the US beekeeping press with the number in the UK press,
you'll see what I mean! There's nobody visible enough to really be considered
'large-scale'. 2000+ may be a lot, but I don't have the impression that this is
the mainstay of your business! I may, of course, be wrong.
I need to do some morphometrics on my bees to see how close they really
are to the near-Amm I started with, but black bees are definitely the
exception round here, so if there was a significant amount of outcrossing, I'd
expect it to show over a few years. It's been very noticeable that my queen
raising efforts only succeed when I have plenty of drones available in my own
apiary, which again suggests that outcrossing isn't that big a factor. We have, of
course, had a couple of vile summers, which won't have encouraged queens to
fly far. But you're quite right, I need to look closely, and I've been
putting it off since I had a couple of colonies I bought in (not a good decision!)
and the presence of these bees would have skewed the results. It'll have to
wait till spring, by which time the last of thise bees will thankfully be long
gone.
Regards,
Robert Brenchley
Birmingham UK
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