About our bees

Honeybees are said to be in decline. In fact it had been thought that our native or Dark English bee was wiped out by Isle of Wight disease (Acarine) by the latter half of the twentieth century. Recent research has discovered that there are no known wild or feral honeybee colonies remaining in the UK and that, although a few ancient feral bee sites do remain, the bees populating them actually reflect the types of bees being kept by the local bee keepers. At Kings Orchard apiaries we have kept many of the different types of European honeybee, including the Italian yellow honeybee (Apis mellifera ligusta), the dark Carnolian honeybee (A m carnica), the little Greek honeybee (A m cecropia) and even the so-called “Buckfast” hybrid honeybee. This last has to be re-queened annually, often with imported queens, just to keep its temper!

We now keep New Zealand Italian honeybees, line bred for the last decade in our own Orchard and Meadow apiaries, which we have selected for productivity, good temper and disease resistance. The New Zealand Italian honeybee was taken to New Zealand by European settlers around 1860 and was re-imported to the UK about a century later. This gave the sub-species time to adapt to the South Island climate, said to be as variable as our weather here in the Tamar valley in Cornwall. We brought ours with us from the South Hams in Devon in 2010 and they have really flourished.

We also keep the rare Cornish Black honeybee, claimed by some to be extinct, but found very much alive in west Cornwall and on the Rame peninsula in east Cornwall. Breeding colonies have been sourced from bee keepers via the Bee Improvement Programme for Cornwall (BIPCo) and WCBBA and are now thriving in our isolated Deep Valley apiary on the banks of the river Lynher, where we are carrying out an extensive breeding programme. The Cornish Black honeybee is a dime of the European black bee Apis mellifera mellifera, that has survived along the whole of the west of the British Isles, Cornwall, west Wales, the Isle of Man and Ireland. The Northumbrian area has the biggest commercial bee keeper using only the black honeybee in the whole of the UK. Scotland has the only protected black honeybee population in Colonsey and to date this is Varroa free.

The Isle of Man, with its very own black honeybee, has a strict policy banning the importation of honeybees and is one of the very few places that has not been infested with the horrible pest Varroa (which was first discovered in 1992 in Cockington, just a short distance from Buckfast Abbey).

The Scilly Isles also do not have Varroa as it was populated with Hawaiian Italian honeybees prior to 1992.