What Are Locally Adapted Bees?

Introduction

What sort of bees do you have? I have locally adapted local bees. They are all fairly dark with a few yellow-striped ones in one colony. One colony is 96% Apis mellifera mellifera, Amm,. I got them tested by https://beebytes.org last year. This colony was removed from a church roof in April 2025 having been there for many years apparently. Someone remembers honey dripping on their heads on Sundays some forty years ago.

I’ve only bought two queen bees during my beekeeping ‘career’, of over twenty years, and both were mistakes. This was long before I knew any better, or very much at all in fact. I fancied having a yellow queen so I bought one from a local supplier thinking that they had been bred locally but they had been imported from Greece. The supplier didn’t know a huge amount about introducing queens to colonies either. She knew that I was introducing a yellow queen into a dark colony yet she advised me to break the tab on the cage so that the queen would be released as soon as the bees had eaten all the fondant which could happen in a couple of hours.  This queen needed a very slow release over several days for any chance of survival in a dark colony.

Perhaps just as well the yellow queen was killed as soon as she left the cage. Then I figured it might be better to have dark bees after all so I bought an Amm queen and wondered why her offspring were not all dark. I called the seller and discovered that she had been open mated with all sorts of drones and not pure bred as I understood from the advert.

Beekeepers have preferences for different subspecies and colours of bees and my point here is purely to illustrate how difficult it can sometimes be buying bees; especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. When I studied the queen rearing and bee breeding module for an exam the penny dropped about subspecies, introducing queens etc. It was some later that I understood the significance of keeping locally adapted bees. And now I rear queens from the best stock I have, and sometimes get hold of free-living colonies that I know have managed to live without management for many years and are also disease-free.

Guest Blog

This week, Bartek Maleta author of Beekeeping in Harmony with Nature is kindly sharing the first of a two-part guest blog on locally adapted bees and varroa resistance. You will be able to read more detail in his book https://www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/products/beekeeping-in-harmony-with-nature-maleta
Thank you, Bartek, for an insightful and thought-provoking post.

Why ‘Local’ is Important

Why “local” might be more important than “native” when breeding for mite resistance?

By the term “local bees”, I understand this as a population which is well adapted to the local conditions and environment. They are bees that can cope with most of the local factors, and here below are some examples of the many features of local bees:

• wintering —they “know” when winter comes; they prepare themselves correctly with food storage, and early enough winter bee raising; they shut down queen laying eggs early enough; they don’t raise brood in winter; they wait for the “real” spring to come before starting to raise brood again;
• local dearth periods —so they shut down (or at least slow down) queen laying and brood raising for the time of poor forage, which allows keeping the storage, not eating them up – this may save them from starvation even in summer;
• local climate and weather conditions —they can quickly change their behaviour if needed when the weather changes. So, they are more like a small boat than a big oil-tanker before hitting the iceberg;
• they tolerate local food sources and are adapted to them —they can process the food, e.g. some bees do not tolerate honeydew well if they are not local/native to the regions where it appears. In summer it’s not the issue. In winter however it may cause diarrhoea which can lead to nervousness of the colony and in long term even to its death;
• they tolerate local microflora and most important local pathogens —some bacteria or fungi may be perfectly tolerated by local bees, but they might be even pathogenic for bees that are not adapted—this may lead to weakening of the hive or even death while other colonies may be perfectly well tolerating them. Bees’ immune systems adapt to the pathogens during some years/generations and so they may survive well what would kill other foreign genetics;
• And others!

‘Native’

By term “native” however, I understand subspecies of bees that are – let’s call it: historically local. Bees that came to your locality thousands of years – if not more – ago, with the natural movement of groups of organisms i.e. spread of the species. There are different subspecies of Apis mellifera in different localities that were historically local in those regions. So, the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is native to Europe, Africa, and the western part of Asia. In different regions, you have different native subspecies; e.g. in central, northern and eastern Europe Apis mellifera mellifera (the black bee) was and is native.

Within the subspecies you have ecotypes – ecotypes are even better adapted to local conditions of the smaller regions than the whole of subspecies. Sometimes within a country there are at least few local ecotypes of the same native subspecies. Local conditions of the environment bred those bees for hundreds and thousands of years for local adaptation.

So, as you see, native should be locally adapted and, in 90+% cases, it is locally adapted. In general, native is also local, but not every local is native. Besides, there might be examples of organisms of native subspecies which are not local ecotypes. In those cases, some local but not native bees might be better adapted and equipped by nature or breeders to cope with local conditions.

For example, in some places you can breed for many generations a bee which is not native and it will be almost perfectly adapted to local conditions. On the other hand, you may introduce native subspecies from few hundreds (or even thousands) kilometres away to some locality where there was another ecotype (e.g. You can bring Apis mellifera mellifera from England to Poland – so it will be the same native subspecies, but different ecotype which may not be best locally adapted to the locality where it is introduced).

In most countries now you have a mixture of different subspecies or ecotypes of bees, but they are not “nature bred” in those regions, they are brought there and mixed by beekeepers. Sometimes they escape from apiaries, and become feral; native or not, then, in a few generations the survivors become best adapted to local conditions. In many parts of the world, you don’t have and will never have native Western Honey Bees, as they were never there before the introduction by humans. E.g. in North and South America and Australia they were introduced by immigrants from Europe a few hundred years ago. They will never be native – not one subspecies will be as far as the definition of “native” goes, but they may be, and in some cases are, perfectly adapted to local conditions. For example, Africanized honey bees are perfectly adapted to big parts of South America and a big part of the southern edge of North America.

On the other hand, in Europe there are at least a few native subspecies (native to different regions of the continent), but in specific localities they are mixed with others. There are only a few small parts of Europe where native bees are more less pure subspecies and are also perfectly locally adapted.