Brother Adam
The Buckfast Honeybee
When I first ventured into solo beekeeping I used the same bee breed as my mentor, the standard Italian. Don’t get me wrong the Italian is a nice bee which I will go over in another article but I wanted to experiment and see what other choices there were for me. After doing a little research I arrived upon the Buckfast honey bee.
The Buckfast honey bee was developed by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey in the early 1900’s. During that time honey bees were going through a crisis as the tracheal mite “acarapis woodi” was wiping out many of the colonies, then called the “Isle of Wight” disease. The tracheal mite is a very tiny mite, about 80 microns large, that settles into the tracheal tubes of the bees and feeds off of their blood while the female lays eggs. The honey bee colony will become weakened by this pest and become more susceptible to other diseases.
After travelling over 100,000 miles around the world, Brother Adam was able to collect pure strains of other honeybees and over several years combine them into a breed of honeybee now known as the Buckfast Bee. The Buckfast Bee is known for many of its good traits including:
If one were to list a downside to them it is that they like to use propolis around their hive liberally. Propolis is a tree resin that honey bees use to to seal up the interior of their hive. Sometimes it can make opening the hive very difficult. I have broken a few frames and hive entrance spacers because of all of the sticky goo they placed around the hive.
Despite this I found the Buckfast bee to be the most hardy of all of the breeds I have worked with. In eastern Virginia we often have cold wet winters and the bees actually did very well for having such a lousy climate to live in. This year I will probably order three packages of this honey bee breed and see how they fare in the mountainous area surrounding Charlottesville.
As a side note to their hardiness. One year that I had the bees, for some reason the Buckfast swarmed late into the season. At the time I only had about three spare boxes with frames so I captured the swarm and placed them into a fourth hive next to the others. I gave them as much honey I had on hand and also fed them some concentrated sugar water of a 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. This did not amount to much and I figured they were going to die out in the winter. Every month or so during the winter I would go out to the bee yard and check on their status. I would place my ear next to the hive and tap a few times on the wood with my hand. Every time I did that I would hear a faint buzz from within. Come early Spring they were still alive and I was able to build them up again into a full fledged hive.
On another positive note concerning the Buckfast Bee. Because they are naturally resistant to the tracheal mite, you do not have to buy Menthol to treat them. The use of Menthol can only be applied during the early and late season and not soon before a honey extraction. Honey containing Menthol is not fit for human consumption when in honey. Treating mites is another article we will talk about later.
Links to breeders of Buckfast Honey Bees:
