English Honey Production

Image from Wikipedia

With all the trouble bees are having with colony collapse disorder, varroa mites, and the like,now we need to add climate change to the mix.

Varroa mite on honeybee. From Wikipedia

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA)  is reporting [pdf] that:

Britain’s beekeepers have endured a desperately difficult summer with average honey yields down to just eight pounds per hive, compared to a yearly average of 30 pounds, according to the results of the British
Beekeepers Association’s latest annual Honey Survey announced today, 30 October.

Honey bees produce honey as a food store. In a normal year this store should be sufficient to see them through the winter months. The nation’s honey bees now face an even more trying winter than usual with vastly depleted stores and even greater reliance than usual on the feeding skills of beekeepers to prevent mass starvation occurring through the dark winter months when honey bees would normally feed on honey produced over the previous summer.

Nearly nine in ten (88 per cent) of the 2,700 beekeepers who took part in the survey cited rain and cold weather as the main cause of depleted honey supplies this year, conditions which caused the BBKA to issue an unprecedented mid-summer warning to beekeepers to check the stores in their honey bee colonies and to feed them if they were inadequate to avoid starvation

The British over-winter drought broke this late spring with massive storms, leading into a wet and miserable summer. The summer was so bad that bees were unable to collect food enough to feed themselves. Makes me wonder how the British Black Bees that were found this year are doing.

apis mellifera mellifera

Yeah, I didn't get it either. "apis mellifera mellifera" is a breed of honeybee called the "British Black," long thought to be extinct.But such is not the case.

from The Daily Mail

The Daily Mail is reporting that the "extinct" bee has been discovered living in Whitfield’s Holy Trinity Church in Northumberland. The bee is one of the varieties that was native to the British Isles after the last ice age, but was thought, like 90% of bees in the UK, to have become extinct after being infected with Spanish flu in 1919.
Conservation officer for the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders’ Association Dorian Pritchard, was called in to help.

He said: ‘They are generally a lot darker than the European bee with pale thin strips across the abdomen. It takes a specialist bee keeper to recognise them. ‘These bees were the native bees in Britain after the Ice Age but in the 1830s we started to import foreign bees. ‘An epidemic wiped out 90 per cent of the population after the First World War.’

So, longish Daily Mail story short; bee, thought extinct, recognized by highly observant bee conservation officer Dorian Pritchard. Bees moved out of church and into hives. Prognosis good. World generally a better place.
Right. Just so I'm not always doom and gloom.