Episode 10 of the podcast is up! This week, I'm talking honey bee races. What are they? And why might they be of interest to you? You can tune in over on my Podbean channel!
Sources used this week:
Honey Bee Biology & Beekeeping, by Dewey M. Carron, & Lawrence John Connor
The Backyard Beekeeper, by Kim Flottum
The Beekeeper’s Bible, by Richard Jones, & Sharon Sweeney-Lynch
*
A few homestead updates:
Bobby, my Easter Egger, is the last to shed her feathers, and is looking awfully raggedy. Thankfully, she is eating as usual and seems pretty happy in herself. Meanwhile, Cracker is back to almost full plumage and looking good!
I've been increasingly anxious about the bees, which appears to be manifesting as bad dreams about the hives being destroyed or just vanishing. I went out with my stethoscope to see if I could hear the clusters but didn't have any luck. There was too much outside noise and even the smallest brush of my hand against the hive wraps caused a lot of ambient noise. Will have to try again another time!
*
Onto the main topic! I briefly mentioned a few different races of honey bees last episode when I was discussing the Saskatraz honey bee. I thought it might be fun to look into these bees a little closer, and I was surprised at the wealth of info I found.
So what do I mean when I say a ‘race’ of honey bees?
Bees4life.org sums it up quite neatly: “A group possessing certain characteristic is called a race”.
Wikipedia is more technical and thus a little more confusing:
“A honey bee race would be an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy, below the level of subspecies”.
Some beekeepers will refer to the various races of honey bees as ‘lines’, and you might also stumble across the term ‘strain’. However, in beekeeping, a strain is often used to describe minor differences within a race of bees.
It’s a little confusing but what you really need to know is that all the different bee races I am going to discuss today have been created from, or evolved naturally from, apis mellifera; the European/Western honey bee.
For those races that developed naturally, geographic isolation seems to have played a large part. Basically, as apis mellifera (European/Western honey bee) adjusted to a specific area and environment (everything from arid locations to the tropics), certain characteristics began to predominate as natural selection weeded out the survivors. Over enough time, this characteristics became distinct enough from the parent species (apis mellifera) to be identifiable as a unique race or line.
These characteristics include things such as body size, size of specific anatomical features, hair coverage, body colour, body pattern, wing differences, and behaviours.
Conversely, some honey bee races have been created by careful breeding and management by people. I’ll be discussing both types.
What are the honey bee races?
There are a number of them but I’m going to stick to the most well-known and/or accessible races.
Italian (apis mellifera ligustica)
Carniolan (apis mellifera carnica)
Caucasian (apis mellifera caucasica)
German/Black (apis mellifera mellifera)
African and its hybrids (apis mellifera scutellata)
We also have some well-known hybrids (2+races combined)
Buckfast (apis mellifera Buckfast)
Russians (apis mellifera/European honey bee)
Cordovan (apis mellifera ligustica/Italian)
And then we have:
Feral/Wild Bees that are made up of escaped swarms or unmanaged hives, and are therefore found in the wild. This group of bees is genetically diverse and well acclimated to their area. Hence why it’s always a fun experiment to catch a swarm or two!
And what I fondly call ‘mutt bees’ that are a big genetic muddle of various races and feral bees. These are what I have.
Italian Honey Bee (apis mellifera ligustica)
Originally from the Apennine Peninsula in Italy. This area is set apart from the rest of Europe by the Alps and is almost entirely surrounded by sea, which kept this race separate from other races/lines, and allowed them to develop characteristics most suited to their environment.
They were first introduced to America in 1859, and quickly replaced the German Black Bee, which is the first bee brought over by colonists.
The Italian honey bee is now the dominant/most popular honey bee race in North America and Europe.
A quick note on appearance: when researching this topic, I found that all articles give an example of the common appearance/colouring for each race. However, I often can’t tell the difference between them! So I don’t know how useful some of these descriptions really are. I’m including them, however, since it’s considered part of their key differentiating details, and perhaps y’all have keener eyes then me.
The Italian’s appearance is said to be yellow-brown, lightly coloured, with black bands ranging in number from 3-5. Some breeders have selected for queens of red-gold colouration (called Golden Italians).
Pros:
gentle/not overly defensive
Overwinters relatively well
Strong foragers
Low tendency to swarm
Good honey production
Tends to cap honey with white wax, which is considered highly attractive to buyers
Less propolis use than some races/lines
Cons:
Do not tend to cluster as tightly in winter so consume more food
Weaker defenses than other races/lines
Extended brood rearing means more honey being used up in the Fall, which can trigger swarming.
Robbers!
Carniolan (apis mellifera carnica)
This honey bee is native to an isolated region high in the Austrian Alps and Danube Valley, and is found across Eastern Europe including Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegonia.
Bees4life.org says “there seems to exist different races of Carniolan bees (Banats, Dalmation, and other bees that resemble Carniolans), which may be hybrids of the true Carniolan race”. According to my Bee Biology book, there are some who consider this a variant of the Italian honey bee, and not its own unique race.
Appearance: dark grey and dark brown to nearly black with brown spots or bands on the abdomen, and are slightly smaller than other honey bees.
Pros:
Very docile
Good honey production
Explosive Spring build up
Excellent foragers
Excellent overwintering (tend to overwinter in small numbers and so conserve food stores)
Fewer disease problems than other races
Excellent wax builders
Low tendency to rob
Very little propolis production
Growing interest in this race due to their disease resistance
Cons:
Known to swarm readily (though some are trying to breed against this)
Introduced to the US in the 1800s but genetic ‘purity’ has decreased rapidly so current race is not necessarily identical to the original.
Caucasian (apis mellifera caucasia)
Quick note: many books have this bee listed as apis mellifera caucasica but this is a misspelling. The official scientific name is caucasia.
Originating in the high valleys of the Caucasus mountains between the Black and Caspian Seas, this honey bee is also found in Eastern Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. It was introduced to the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s but no pure stock exists here today.
Appearance: dark in colour with grey body hairs.
Pros:
Gentle and calm
Cons:
Prone to colony drift and robbing behaviour
Overwinter poorly
Slow build up in Spring
Create a LOT of propolis
Prone to Nosema (according to bees.caes.uga.edu)
German/Black (apis mellifera mellifera)
Originally from Northern Europe, this is the very first honey bee brought to North America in the early 1600s by Virginia and Massachusetts settlers. They were so popular with the growing number of immigrant settlers that they were called ‘the white man’s fly’ by Native Americans. Sadly, they are susceptible to European Foul Brood (EFP) and so when this nasty bacterial disease spread rapidly throughout the US in the early 1900s, many colonies were wiped out. Not long after this, as the Italian honey bee grew in popularity, the German bee was quickly replaced by their Italian cousins. The German bee is not common today and it is unlikely to exist in its original genetic form.
German bees were known to be defensive and nervous so it’s not entirely surprising that they were replaced by the friendly and hardier Italian honey bee.
African bee (apis mellifera scutellata) & its hybrids
This infamous honey bee is native to Eastern Africa, and found across the region from Ethiopia to South Africa. It ended up in the US through a roundabout way. In the 1950s, biologist Warwick E. Kerr, was attempting to breed the African bee to the European Honey bee in an attempt to make a more hardy and productive honey bee. Sadly, in 1957, 26 swarms escaped from quarantine, vanishing into the Brazilian wild with their pure African queens. They quickly spread throughout the region. Populations of African/ized bees were discovered in Paraguay in 1964, Northern Argentina in 1965, and Bolivia in 1967. This means the populations were spreading at a speed of about 150-250 miles per year.
It was hoped that the Amazon Basin would slow down their spread but it was confirmed that they had crossed this region in 1971. By 1975-1980, they had spread to Venezuala, and the first confirmed Africanized bee swarm was found in Panama in 1982, Mexico in 1986, and the US in 1990. There was a swarm found in the San Joaquin Valley of California in 1985 but it was determined that it had likely hitched a ride in oil drilling pipes that were brought in from South America.
In 2005, they reached Florida. As of 2013, they occupy all southern border states apart from Alabama. It was hoped that, due to the limited number of African queen bees originally released in Brazil, this bee would reach a ‘genetic bottleneck’ in the US, leading to their eventual decline. However, they are still going strong, in part because of how readily they hybridize with other apis mellifera.
Africanized bees are known for being as aggressive as their pure African ancestors. They will patrol a perimeter around their hives and attack anything that enters this area. They’re known to sting more readily and frequently than other honey bees, will chase you up to ¼ mile (400m), and have killed approximately 1000 humans to date.
There’s another African bee that I wanted to mention briefly. It’s the Cape Honey Bee (apis mellifera capensis). This bee is super neat because it’s the only honey bee that has workers able to lay fertile eggs! They’re also parasitical in nature; the queens will enter Scutellata nests and cuckoo-parasitize the colonies by laying their own eggs in the cells. Very cool!
Popular Hybrid Bees:
The Buckfast
This race/line was created by Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey in Southwest England. In the 1920s, honey bee colonies across the UK were falling foul of ‘accarine disease’, which is now suspected to have been tracheal mites. Brother Adams was charged with finding a hardier honey bee, and traveled Europe to speak with many different beekeepers. He ended up combining many races of honey bee to come up with the Buckfast. There is a lot of information available online about the specific methods he used, if that’s of interest to you.
The Buckfast bee he produced is docile and gentle, making it easy to work with. They do well in the cooler and wetter summers of England, over winter well, and have good survival rates when afflicted with tracheal mites.
Appearance: yellow to brown, and almost indistinguishable from the European/Western honey bee.
There are active breeding programs based in Canada, and it is possible to buy Buckfast queens in the US, even though they’re not as common as other lines.
Russian
This hybrid is a mix of apis mellifera caucasia, ligustica, and carnica. It originated in the far eastern Primorsky region of Russia, and appears to have a natural tolerance to varroa and tracheal mites, possibly because it evolved side by side with these parasites and so has had longer to adapt to their threat.
Russian bees were brought to the US in 1997 by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in an attempt to research their mite resistance, and ultimately breed this trait into current US honey bee stock. There are now dedicated Russian bee breeders with a certification process, guaranteeing the genetics of their bees.
Appearance: dark brown to black with paler yellow colour on abdomen.
Pros:
Resistant to parasites, including varroa
Overwinter extremely well
Weather sensitive; will reduce brood production as needed in response to climate, thereby conserving food stores/resources
Less likely to be robbed as good guard bees
Hygienic behaviour
Cons:
Tend to have queen cells all the time, which is off putting to many keepers.
Swarming is very common
Brood rearing depends on available forage
Can be susceptible to Nosema fungus
More aggressive than other races but known to ‘head butt’ instead of sting
Cordovan
Considered a subset of the Italian bee that is known more for its lighter colouration. It’s not entirely clear what caused this hybrid to separate from Italian bees into their own identifiable line.
Appearance: very yellow compared to other honey bees with brown-purple heads and legs (instead of black or dark brown).
Pros:
Even more docile than Italians
Excellent comb builders
Good in warm weather (for hot regions)
Their traits can be bred into any race of honey bee (dominant?)
Their pale queens are easier to spot when doing an inspection
Cons:
Eat a LOT over winter so run through stores faster
Not as hard in cold/wet climates
More prone to robbing behaviour than Italians
Survivor Bees
This is sort of a bonus section that I wanted to include because you’re likely to come across some of these bees.
I got the term ‘survivor bee’ from Kim Flottum, who talks about them briefly in his book ‘The Backyard Beekeeper’. These are basically bees that have been bred for their ability to survive varroa mites. The goal is to produce productive, gentle bees that demonstrate extremely hygienic behaviour that is favourable in surviving varroa infestations. These behaviours include leg biting, which is when the bees will bite the legs from varroa mites, preventing them from spreading, as well as detecting the mites in the cells and quickly removing them.
Two popular ‘survivor bee’ lines are the Varroa Sensitive Hygiene (VSH) bees, originally developed by Dr John Harbor of the USDA Baton Rouge Bee Lab, and the Minnesota Hygienic bee, developed by Dr Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota.
Currently, there are no certification programs in place for these lines like with the Russian bee, which means that the unscrupulous or uninformed could sell you bees that they claim to have these traits with no proof of such. As a result, be cautious when purchasing queens and don’t be afraid to ask the breeder questions about their stock and/or selection process. It is hoped that a certification process will soon be available, however, as several universities are working on this, as is the USDA.
And there you have it! I hope this was of interest to you and, as always, I encourage you to go forth and do your own reading on the subject, as it’s quite interesting and there’s a fair amount of information available (on and off line).
*
If you’d like to be in touch, you can find me at homesteadhensandhoney on Instagram and Facebook; HomesteadHens on Twitter and Tumblr; and homesteadhensandhoney@gmail.com
Feel free to reach out anytime!
My next episode will be sometime in the new year, probably a little later than usual, but I will get a January episode up. Since I didn’t get around to quail this week, I think that’s likely to be the main topic, as well as the usual homestead updates and all my holiday news.
I hope everyone listening has a very happy holiday season, Merry Christmas, happy giftmas, blessed Solstice, festive Yule, and Happy Hannukah! Here’s to creating some happy memories with our friends and family (be them of the human, feathered, scaled, wooly, or furred variety!).
Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you in the new year!
And, as always, hug your hens, and then wash your hands.
