Preliminary results of Europe-wide research on honey bee diversity – INSIGNIA-EU Project
The posters below are from Norman Carreck, former Science Director of IBRA [International Bee Research Association]. This information was presented at the EurBee Conference in September 2024. The UK samples are part of a sampling programme already taken from 315 apiaries in 27 EU countries.
The information is detailed and of interest to anyone who wishes to know more about native or near native dark bees. From the pie-chart information on the distribution maps, it is clear that the native Northern European honey bee (Amm – Apis mellifera mellifera – the M-lineage, for example, our native or near native dark Welsh honey bee) is mainly restricted to the western areas of Europe, i.e. in Great Britain, the Iberian peninsula, and with a concentration in Ireland. In most of the other Western European countries C-lineage bees, native to Eastern and Southern Europe, have been introduced and largely replace Amm. Well-known C-lineage subspecies are Apis mellifera carnica (‘Carnies’) and Apis mellifera ligustica (‘yellow’ Italian bees). This detailed research highlights the significance and importance of locally adapted dark bees that we know are genetically very near to Apis mellifera mellifera.
Norman Carreck provides this summary of the preliminary results of the samples from Great Britain:
The overall averages for the 36 samples from Great Britain were: For DeepWings (ie wing morphometry): 65% M lineage and 35% C lineage; and for mitochondrial DNA: 42% M lineage, 50% C lineage and 8% A lineage. The A lineage results don’t mean that there is actually African material present, but probably represent Am iberiensis. A soon to be published paper will show that Irish Amm samples are much more closely related to Am iberiensis than samples from mainland Europe, which makes sense. In more detail, for Great Britain (it says UK on the poster, but the samples were all from Great Britain – samples from Northern Ireland were included in Ireland) were 50% Am mellifera, 17% Am iberiensis, 20% Am carnica and 13% Am ligustica. For comparison, the APHA Random Apiary Survey carried out all over the UK about 15 years ago showed an average of 42% Amm.
The results also show that Ireland has bees with the highest percentage of Amm in Europe.
Maternal origin of honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies from across Europe – EurBee-poster-285_lopes-et-al.pdf
Wing geometric morphometrics of European honey bee populations – EurBee-poster-289_costa-et-al.pdf
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