Hi all
As a follow up to my previous post, the idea that Italians are hygienic is bolstered by Brother Adam's observations. He is given a lot of bad press for declaring Amm extinct and importing ligustica en masse, but here implies that The Ministry of Agriculture was involved as well. Also this reminds us of the mass wipeouts at the time (he lost 2 out 3, others fared worse).


The County Bee Expert called early in October [1915] and confirmed our worst fears: in his view none of our colonies would be alive by next spring. All the other colonies in the neighbourhood did in fact perish that winter, probably 200 colonies within a few miles of Buckfast, and we were left with 16 out of the 46 we had in the autumn; the colonies that survived were either Italian or of Italian extraction. The spring of 1916 was fairly propitious, but from mid-May until the end of June the weather could not have been worse. However, the earlier good spell enabled us to build up our colonies to their original number, with the help of queens imported from Italy. 

From early July the weather became progressively more favourable and we finished the season with an excellent crop of honey and our former number of colonies. These wintered without loss, and in 1917 they were increased to a hundred. We intended to operate these for honey production, but owing to the call for bees from every part of the country we decided in the spring of 1918 to devote our entire resources to meet this need. Many hundred nuclei were sent from our apiary to different parts of the country in 1918 and 1919. The Ministry of Agriculture initiated its own restocking scheme within a few months of the conclusion of the war. 

Among the Italian queens raised by us at that time there was one, a first-cross, of outstanding performance, and she became the foundation of our present strain. By now it was widely accepted that the Italian bee displayed a measure of resistance to acarine disease, and indeed the Ministry of Agriculture's restocking scheme was based on this assumption. 

Brother Adam (1968) “Isle of Wight” or Acarine Disease: its Historical and Practical Aspects, Bee World, 49:1, 6-18, DOI: 10.1080/0005772X.1968.11097180

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