Native Bees

>Are there really any native bees left anymore or are feral hives these days just remnant swarms from apiaries and crossbred queens from various drones.

The reason "wild" honey bees are generally refered to as "feral" is that the prevailing theory is that honey bees are not native, hence the term "feral" for something that used to be domestic but is now escaped to the wild as opposed to something that was always in the wild.

> I want to believe there are still survivor stocks surviving in the wild but i find it difficult to believe that they haven't been infiltrated by other various genetics from surrounding apiaries.

But if they are indeed feral, then they are originally from the genetics of the domestic bees.

> If such a feral stock does exist do you think they are superior breeds or just overall swarmy and mean.

Some are very nice and productive. Some are swarmy and mean... Nature only selects for survival...

>Would there be any way to tell if the bees were from around the area or not. I ask all this because ive had some bad luck with commercial bought queens and was thinking about rearing some queens from feral hives.

Size is a pretty good indicator since most domestic bees are on enlarged cells. The ones that are swarms of swarms of swarms are much smaller than a recent swarm from a domestic hive.

> I know Michael Bush says the F1 hybrids(first offspring) from commercial queens can have bad temperment. I think that's what i'm experiencing.

I think the F1 are usually the worst temperament. But some of the feral bees are not so nice either. Some are, though. Some of the domestic stock aren't so nice either... I've had some pretty hot MN Hygienics and some nice ones as well...

I had ferals living in my upstate NY barns for two decades before the winter of 2012-2013. My neighbors also have some in their barns. And other neighbors have them living in bee trees.

Now, I suspect that at least some of these long-standing colonies are not completely continuous, but are actually sequential swarms re-occupying the haunts of former bees.

But there are a surprising number of free-living colonies in my area.

Last spring after after the loss of all the feral colonies in my barns during the previous late winter (I have no idea what happened, they just vanished) three more separate swarms arrived in early June. All three were hived. One, at least, has almost no problem with varroa - and I monitor them more or less constantly. They are all in the same yard, indeed they spent the winter, and still are, slap up against each other. The low-varroa colony has distinct some behavioral differences, too, particularly relating to their unusual activity level in cold weather.

Of course, this is also the hive that two weeks ago I let fall down out of its brood box. Luckily, after an anxious wait, I do see open brood that can only have been laid after I scraped them all back up off my sneakers and reassembled them.

They may, or may not, be "survivor bees" in the common meaning of that term. But they definitely qualify as "survivor bees" simply because they somehow manage to survive their beekeeper's clumsy "care".

Enj.

peterloringborst said:

Honey bees, however, are not actually domesticated. Despite the fact that they live in our boxes, they remain essentially wild.

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This is where we have to start refining the terms in order to improve our ability to conceive and communicate.

There is a good argument for the position that bees that are dependent on humans are to a qualifying extent 'domesticated'. The outstanding example is treatment dependent bees, but any colonies or 'strains' that are unable to thrive in the locality untouched would fall into this category.

Randy Oliver made good use of this approach in a recent article about keeping bees treatment free.

peterloringborst said:

Nor do they change their behavior by living in a tree.

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They may. Freedom to build the sort of comb they want rather than have a uniform cell size forced upon them might make a difference. There may be other critical or minor but contributory factors.

But there is a larger point here. If we think about our bees in terms of the local breeding population, rather than in terms of individual colonies, we can see that over several generations there might be deeply significant changes in behaviours.

We have to think about the fluid flow of genes (and the capacities they govern). In domesticated apiaries we govern that. In feral populations natural selection for the fittest strains governs it. There is something, or things, the ferals are doing better than us, and if we can undersand what that is we can copy it.

All this is true whether they are true natives, or hybrid/mongrel feral populations, or combinations thereof not already covered by those terms.

Mike (UK)