Joined
·
444 Posts
Does anyone have any thoughts on the actual bees introduced here in the Southeastern United States being Spanish Black bees instead of German Black bees? Spanish Black bees are similar to German Black bees, having narrow rings of hair on their abdomens' making the bees look glossy/shinny black rather than being fury/fuzzy grey like the Carniolans and Caucasian bees. The Spaniards were here in Florida before the British. The descriptions of the "German Black bees" from the Southeast US back in the older days sound very much like Spanish Black bees (brood disease problems, hive boiling out with nervous bees, aggressive, bad overwintering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apis_mellifera_iberiensis). I am assuming that Spain has a dryer climate and so the Spanish black bees are not well adapted to going through wet winters, and so have brood diseases come up. In nature if an animal has sickness commonly, that is not good at all, and I believe it is not supposed to be that honey bees are weak and need us humans to keep them alive, but actually the problems of keeping bees are from bad beekeeping or a subspecies not well adapted to an area.