>Good presentation by Ollie Visick presenting anecdotes related to 3 years
of
observations on 40 free-living colonies in Southern England related to his
research in this arena: 

 Not really sure that we learned much from this.

Similar work was done by Catherine Thompson for her PhD (November 2012).  I
was particularly interested because I was one of the beekeepers who found
feral colonies for her and assisted with taking samples from them.

A couple of quotes from her thesis:

'Feral colonies were suggested as a potential life raft of genetic diversity
(Kukielka et al
2008; Le Conte et al 2007), but were shown in this study to be genetically
similar to
local managed colonies.'

'The feral population of the UK was not found to be more native type (A. m.
mellifera)
than the managed population and was also highly introgressed.'

Ollie Visick seems to confirm that with his finding that 50% of feral
colonies do not survive the winter and that the sites are then re-populated
by swarms, probably from managed colonies (of which there are very large
numbers in the area which he is studying).

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

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