Dark bodied honey bee

[SgtMaj]

The past week or so I've been observing a very dark bodied honey bee visiting my lawn clover along with the normal looking honey bees.  I'm wondering if it's just a normal honey bee, or perhaps a wild honey bee, or some other bee (though it looks identical to a honey bee with the exception that it's darker (particularly the abdomen)).

[SgtMaj]

Nevermind... No sooner than I posted this, I ran across a site that gave all kinds of different strains of honeybees and I think I found it... I think it's an Apis mellifera mellifera

[bassman1977]

In the end, they are all mutts.   :-D  My carnolians are real dark and I have some italian hives which probably have queens which mated with the carni drones because they are dark too, but not as dark as the carni hive itself.

[SgtMaj]

Yeah I was going to say they also resemble the carnolians... and could and maybe even probably are those. 

Was doing some reading and they say the carnolians are even more dossile than the EHB, is that true? (since you have experience with both)

[bassman1977]

They do seem to be more relaxed than my italians.  My carnolian hive is my favorite hive.  When I go in them and don't bother smoking at times, they could care less if I'm there.  They seem to be slower to build up but I don't have another carni hive to compare to.  This hive has gone through trials and tribulations and made it  through to tell about it, which could explain the slowness.

[Cindi]

SgtMgr.  I have both Italian and Carniolan, they are all pretty calm.  Carniolan are a wonderful breed.  They overwinter in teeny tiny clusters, and build up really fast in the spring, really fast.  I have a queen from last year that was still so going strong I had to make a cut down split, that hive was 3 boxes full of bees, and now she is filling up another couple of boxes really fast.  The problem is that they can be swarmy, because of the fast building up.  Massive egg laying machine.  The Carniolan hives appear to be about the same temperament as the Italians, so I cannot agree 100% on if they are less aggressive.  Mine all all passive.  Beautiful and most wonderfully great and lovely day, love our Earth.  Cindi

[SgtMaj]

Hmm, well that doesn't help... one thing I'm terrified of is the bees swarming... if they don't ever swarm I'm sure the neighbors won't care if I keep bees, but if they do swarm, I think they will change their mind about it.  There's no HOA here, but I still like to keep on good terms with the neighbors.

[Pond Creek Farm]

Cindi, are your Carni's on deeps or mediums?  When you did the splits, are you putting in a new queen or allowing them to raise their own? 

[Brian D. Bray]

Apis M. m. are totally black with temperment more like AHB, Apis, M. s.

[Cindi]

Brian (PondCreek), I only have deeps, one day I will have a combination of deeps and mediums I am sure.  I just don't have the medium boxes.

When I did the "cut down split" and removed the queen and most of the uncapped brood and honey, I allowed that colony to raise their own queen.  I checked yesterday and the queen is just beginning to lay, so there was success with the queen rearing.  I had a queen failure in a queen (NWC) that I had given to a colony.  I let them raise their own queen from a frame of eggs, larvae that I had given to them.  With the check yesterday there was a capped queen cell on that frame.  She should be emerging any day.  My records said to check for queen cells on June 16, I was late in checking that colony because of bad weather, so yes, they raised a queen to replace that dead girl. 

Other nucs that I had made were all given queens that I had purchased (they were New World Carniolan from California).  They were all successful, except for one queen failure.  So that was two queen failures out of 10 that I had given to nucs.  Not bad odds, I guess.  Beautiful and most wonderful day, lovin' this life we live.  Cindi

[HAB]

Nevermind... No sooner than I posted this, I ran across a site that gave all kinds of different strains of honeybees and I think I found it... I think it's an Apis mellifera mellifera

Which site? URL or link.