A strain of native Irish bee, (apis mellifera mellifera), has been rescued and improved by a group of Co Tipperary beekeepers, the World Congress of Beekeepers in Dublin has been told.
Four beekeepers from the Galtee/Vee valley were concerned at the loss of the native European black bee because of the importation of bees from other parts of the world.
The Galtee Bee-Breeding Group set up a programme to restore local strains of the Irish bee and eliminate from the locality "foreign" breeds.
The non-Irish breeds, a paper delivered by the group to the conference in the RDS in Ballsbridge, explained yesterday, had undesirable traits such as aggressiveness and an increased swarming tendency.
Local breeds were far less aggressive, they did not have a tendency to swarm and were better able to work in Irish climatic conditions.
The bee-breeding group identified potential queens and located them in isolated breeding apiaries on the slopes of the Galtee mountains where they were unlikely to meet imported bees.
The experiment, called the Dún Aonghusa system, was highly successful.
The purity of the queens was extended and now covers most of the east of the province of Munster.
The work was carried out under the supervision of Micheál Mac Giolla Coda.
He told the conference that the scheme has led to the development of a honey bee that according to morphometric and DNA studies, is a pure strain of apis mellifera mellifera.
"In addition, there has been continuous improvements in the desirable characteristics of these bees, including docility and swarming propensity, with no concomitant loss of honey productivity," the paper concluded.