As some of you know, I recently caught my first swarm and am having the hardest time identifying their race. They look nothing like my Italians and I've never owned any other subspecies and have nothing to compare them to. SO I was thinkin...
Anyone have a chart, images, links, something that could help ID a race of our european honeybees?
Thanks!
Sean Kelly
I highly doubt you will be able to identify them visually. Chances are high that they are a mix of 2 or more races. I imagine the only way to accurately identify what they are, is through scientific testing. I have "Italians" that are as dark as my "Carnolians".
There's gota be someway other than DNA testing. I mean, how does one tell for sure that they got Italians vs Russians when they pick up their 3# package? How does the supplier know which one they're breeding?
When the difference between my current italians and this new swarm is so big, there's gota be something that can give us clues.
Sean Kelly
I think I agree with Bassman unless you are absolutely sure only one race exist in a specific area chances are they will mate with drones of different species. so more than likely you have some type of mutt bee
You can look for specific traits of specific bees. I saw somewhere on Wikipedia a list of various honey bees and their traits (including color). I stumbled on to the page at one time but have had no luck finding it again. Maybe you'd have better luck.
As far as suppliers, they are probably using a breeder stock of queens or buying from a supplier who breeds the queens from breeder stock so that they know they are carnolian, italian, whatever. I don't know a whole lot about it, but from what I read, they have pretty tight controls on how these queens are brought up from the egg through queen stage, ensuring they are exactly what they say they are. They are artificially inseminated and hand selected for desired traits.
Once these queens get out in the wild, they are going to mate with whatever race is out there.
http://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q?search=Apoidea