East African mountain bee
| East African mountain bee | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Apis mellifera monticola | ||||||||||||
| Smith , 1961 |
The East African mountain bee ( Apis mellifera monticola Smith, 1849) is one of the breeds of the western honey bee . It is one of the bees of tropical Africa, which in the past was assigned to a single broad breed, which was called Apis mellifera adansonii . Later analyzes showed, however, that the African bees in this large region show greater differences among themselves, which can be differentiated from one another as races or subspecies.
Spread and behavior
Apis mellifera monticola lives in rainy mountain forests of East Africa at altitudes of 2400 to 3000 meters (including on Mount Meru , Kilimanjaro , Mount Kenya and Elgon in Uganda). Apis mellifera monticola is considered to be significantly more docile than the East African highland bee ( A. m. Scutellata ) and the Africanized honey bee , which have now spread largely uncontrollably in the warmer regions of the American continent.
Elgon bee
In the 1980s some beekeepers kept specimens of the A. m. monticola imported to Sweden and crossed with the Buckfast bee. In the 1990s this cross was stabilized and the breeders named it Elgonbiene . Since 2000, Erik Österlund, one of the original Swedish breeders, has also continued to breed the bees for operation with small brood cells. The name "Elgonbiene" is a registered trademark of Erik Österlunds.
literature
- Friedrich Ruttner : Natural history of honey bees . Franckh Kosmos Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-440-09125-2 .
- M. Meixner, F. Ruttner, N. Koeniger, G. Koeniger: The mountain bees of the Kilimanjaro region and their relation to neighboring bee populations. In: Apidology . Volume 20, No. 2 , 1989, pp. 165-174 , doi : 10.1051 / apido: 19890207 .
- Brother Adam : Africa's Bees - A Challenge for Advanced Breeding . tape 22 (8) . General German beekeeping newspaper ADIZ, 1988, p. 277-278 .
Web links
- Apis mellifera monticola . In: Atlas Hymenoptera , accessed November 29, 2018.
Individual evidence
- ^ H. Randall Hepburn, Sarah E. Radloff: Honeybees of Africa. Springer Verlag, 1998. ISBN 3-540-64221-8
- ↑ Report on beesource.com