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Date: | Sun, 14 Mar 2021 19:41:52 -0400 |
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Tom Glenn visited Santa Cruz Island and worked with Wenner to secure honeybee stock that had been challenged with Varroa.
Tom Glenn's blog is still "alive" on the web and documents Glenn's effort to secure the Santa Cruz bees.
http://glennapiaries.blogspot.com/2009/01/desert-bee-hunting.html
Glenn wrote:
Many years ago I spent a week on Santa Cruz Island off the central California coast, learning how to hunt wild honeybees from a real expert. Dr. Adrian Wenner, Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara, was working with the Nature Conservancy to bring the island back to a more natural state by trying to eliminate non-native species. One real problem were the European honeybees pollinating imported European plants such as fennel, which was taking over the island. In the 1870's a few hives were taken to the island where they prospered, swarmed, and soon filled every niche on the island. Dr. Wenner's plan was to locate all the colonies so that he and his team of graduate students could systematically eliminate them. As a bee breeder I was interested in obtaining some of these survivors as breeding stock before they were eliminated, that's how I ended up spending a fascinating week learning the long lost art of bee hunting.
I further note that recent mitochondria analysis indicate that the bee stock on Catalina island represents an ancestral Northern European "black" bee lineage in comparison to Northern California "Italian" and LA Basin "AHB". The almost hysterical interest in A. m. m. stocks should consider the Catalina genetics a resource.
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