> Around a third of honeybee hives were wiped out across the UK last year. Although no one knows why honeybees are dying in such huge numbers, pesticides, poor weather, parasites, disease and starvation have all been implicated. The native black honeybee, found only in a few remote parts of the country, could help reverse the dramatic decline in honeybees in Britain, say experts. > The Co-operative Group has today launched a fund to map locations of the rare, hardy British black variety and to develop a breeding programme to increase their numbers. In Britain, the native honeybee was practically wiped out a century ago by what is known as the Isle of Wight disease, named after the place it was first detected. Beekeepers replaced their empty hives with the Italian honeybees, a subspecies of the honeybees found in southern Europe and the Balkans. > Willie Robson, who owns Chain Bridge Honey Farm in Berwick-upon-Tweed, is probably the nation's largest black bee apiarist with 1,800 hives across Northumberland and the Scottish borders. While he says his bees only made half the usual crop of honey last year, he only lost about a fifth of his bees – far fewer than the majority of beekeepers with Italian stock. "Our bees are pretty hard and have total resistance to most diseases," he says. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/18/black-bee-co-op-population *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html