The small, windswept island of Laso lies in the Kattegat, just off the Danish mainland. Moors, heather and meadows blanket its interior, and sand dunes hug its rugged coastline. A couple of thousand people inhabit the farms, villages and ports scattered along the shore. It is also the setting for an ambitious experiment to try to save northern Europe’s indigenous honeybee.
Since the early 20th century, humans have disrupted the natural geographical distribution of western honeybees across the world by breeding and importing two races: the gentle and productive Italian honeybee, Apis mellifera ligustica, also called the yellow bee because of its color; and from the Balkans, the Apis mellifera carnica, another prolific honey-maker. As a result, the black honeybee, Apis mellifera mellifera, which once spread from Spain up through France and Germany, and across Russia, Scandinavia and Britain, is endangered.
Newcomers are not so well suited to northern Europe’s long winters and unsettled weather, but black bees are typically better able to cope with cold climates. They wait until late spring, when temperatures have risen, before they expand their numbers, and their emphasis is on nectar collection from late-flowering plants to see them through the winter.
With one in five of the UK’s 270,000 honeybee colonies dying this winter as a result of disease and starvation and higher mortality rates across Europe, beekeepers are increasingly interested in trying to conserve the continent’s remaining black bees.
In Denmark, where beekeepers favored the Italian bee because it was better at pollinating red clover and produced copious amounts of honey, a few black bee colonies survived on Laso. A controlled breeding area was established on the island, and in 1989 bee imports were banned.
Not all the island’s beekeepers agreed with the conservation measures. Ditlev Bluhme took his grievance to the European Court of Justice, accusing the Danish government of restricting free trade by refusing to allow him to import Italian bees. In December 1998, the court ruled that it was legal to protect threatened subspecies under Article 36 of the EU treaty.
However, illegal colonies persisted on Laso as beekeepers continued to flout the law and threaten the conservation of 150 colonies of native bees. Since queen bees are polyandrous, mating with up to 20 different drones within a radius of 10km, conserving any subspecies requires the cooperation of beekeepers. In 2005, the import ban was limited to the eastern part of Laso.
Despite fears that this compromise would fail to keep Italian and black bees apart and would result in hybrid populations, a survey last year identified a total of 123 colonies of black bees, less than 1 percent of which had genes of another race.
“The protection areas have proved of value for the conservation of the Apis mellifera mellifera bees — not least due to the local acceptance and respect of the new regulation,” project leader Per Kryger said.
Additional islands are now being proposed as conservation areas.
Robin Moritz, coordinator of an EU research network on Beekeeping and Apis Biodiversity in Europe (Babe) from 2001 to 2003, says a bee adapted to colder climates may fare better at fighting off fungal infections that germinate when bees are confined to their hive for months at a time.
“If we create a pan-European bee, it will be difficult to get back to the original subspecies that had adapted to particular habitats and climates. Commercial selection is directly opposite to what natural selection would achieve,” he said.
By breeding a gentle, efficient honey-maker, he warns, we have made bees much more susceptible to disease than they would be if natural selection had played a role. Moritz believes the predominance of the Italian bee is a major reason why the varroa mite — a bloodsucking parasite that lives on western honeybees and spreads viruses — has proved so lethal across Europe.
“Without a doubt,” he said, “commercial selection has allowed the mite to flourish.”
In Britain, Italian immigrants filled the void after the native honeybee was practically wiped out by a virus first detected on the Isle of Wight 100 years ago.
The Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders’ Association (Bibba) started life in 1964 as the humble Village Bee Breeders’ Association when its founder, Beowulf Cooper, argued that pure race native bees were desirable both for biodiversity and producing hardier bees. Bibba is now an international movement with 3,000 members in the UK, Ireland, Belgium and Germany. In 1997, it began a project to conserve the black bee in the Peak District of Derbyshire.
Building on its work, a Babe-funded project aimed to establish whether the Hope Valley and adjacent valley of Edale are isolated enough to breed only black bees. The three-year study tracked six apiaries, each containing 12 hives, in different locations throughout the valley, which is surrounded by the glowering heights of Kinder Scout to the north and a long ridge of hills to the south.
Using DNA testing, it determined that 90 percent of matings occurred locally, making it a suitable location for long-term conservation.
Francis Ratnieks, former head of the bee lab at Sheffield University, led the study. Now professor of apiculture at Sussex University, he says of black bees: “They are the native British subspecies, so it makes sense to use them from a conservation point of view. They are probably better in the British climate than bees from southern Europe. I think this is especially the case in the north of England and Scotland.”
Although there are no figures for the number of surviving black bee colonies in Britain, Willie Robson, who owns Chainbridge Honey Farm in Berwick-upon-Tweed, is probably the largest black bee apiarist, with 1,800 hives across Northumberland and the Scottish borders. He has suffered average winter losses of just 10 percent to 15 percent this year — much lower than many beekeepers with Italian stock.
“Our bees cope very well with very bad weather and are resistant to lots of diseases,” he said.
The UK’s farming minister, Lord Rooker, has warned that honeybees, which provide pollination services worth £165 million (US$330 million) a year in orchards and fields across the country, could be extinct in Britain within 10 years if nothing is done to improve their health.
Tim Lovett, chief executive of the British BeeKeepers Association (BBKA), believes we need to look to native stock.
“The Italian bee was an attractive route to improve honey production and handling, but it has probably turned out to be a blind alley,” he said.
However, conservation efforts in Derbyshire and elsewhere have been hampered by lack of funding. The BBKA is calling on the government to fund bee breeding programs to improve the stock.
“If you are talking about the survival of bees, it is hard to avoid,” Lovett said.
Black bees are often considered inferior honey-makers and aggressive in nature. But Ratnieks says there are both good and bad black bees.
He would like the UK government to put funding into the selection and queen rearing of black bees to breed better ones.
“It is somewhat unusual, probably unique, to have an essentially wild animal used in agriculture,” he said. “By working with the native bee, but trying to encourage better stocks in hives, we can both conserve and improve.”
Alison Benjamin is coauthor of A World Without Bees along with Brian McCallum.
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