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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