Honeybee Subspecies and Strains: Choosing Bees for the UK Climate

One species, many regional strains

Every honeybee kept anywhere in the world by beekeepers belongs to the same species, Apis mellifera, but that single species is divided into around thirty recognised geographic subspecies, each shaped by thousands of years of adaptation to a particular climate and forage pattern, long before humans began deliberately moving bees between regions. Beekeepers then layered further selective breeding on top of these natural subspecies, producing named strains bred for particular traits — the most consequential of these for a UK beekeeper being the difference between naturally adapted northern-European stock and imported Mediterranean strains bred under very different conditions.

Choosing a strain is not a cosmetic decision. Traits like when a colony starts brooding up in spring, how it responds to a sudden cold snap in an otherwise mild UK spring, and how prone it is to swarming, all differ meaningfully between strains, and a mismatch between a colony's genetic background and the local climate is one of the more common, avoidable causes of poor overwintering and frustrating early-season management.

The native dark bee (Apis mellifera mellifera)

The dark European honeybee, sometimes called the British black bee, is the subspecies naturally distributed across northern and western Europe including, historically, the whole of the British Isles before large-scale imports in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries diluted native populations through interbreeding. Dark bees are well adapted to cool, wet, changeable climates: they tend to build up more conservatively in spring, avoiding the boom-and-bust brood cycles that can leave a colony overextended when a late cold snap hits, and they generally overwinter on smaller stores than southern strains bred for longer growing seasons.

Pure or near-pure dark bee populations now survive mainly in isolated pockets — parts of Scotland, some Welsh valleys, a scattering of conservation apiaries and islands used deliberately for isolated mating — and there is active conservation interest in preserving this genetic line, on the grounds that a bee shaped by the actual UK climate over millennia may cope better with it than an imported strain, even if it is sometimes described (not always fairly) as more defensive than continental imports.

Italian bees (Apis mellifera ligustica)

Italian bees, native to the Italian peninsula, are probably the most widely distributed honeybee subspecies in commercial beekeeping worldwide, prized for their gentle temperament, strong honey production, and the ease with which their golden-orange colouring lets a beekeeper spot the queen. Their major drawback in a UK context is a brood-rearing pattern evolved for a longer, warmer Mediterranean season: Italian colonies tend to keep rearing brood later into autumn and start again earlier in spring than is strictly matched to UK forage availability, which can mean colonies consuming stores rapidly during periods with little incoming nectar, and needing closer feeding management through a UK winter than a native-adapted strain would.

Carniolan bees (Apis mellifera carnica)

Carniolan bees, originating from the Alpine and Balkan region, are often considered a strong middle-ground choice for UK beekeepers precisely because their native climate — cool, changeable, with a shorter growing season than Italy — more closely resembles UK conditions than the Mediterranean does. Carniolans are known for very rapid spring buildup timed closely to forage availability, excellent overwintering on modest stores, and a generally calm temperament, though they have a somewhat stronger tendency to swarm than Italian bees, which UK-based Carniolan keepers need to actively manage through swarm control during the buildup period.

Buckfast and other bred hybrid strains

Buckfast bees are a deliberately bred hybrid strain developed in England by Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey through decades of selective crossing, originally motivated by a search for stock resistant to acarine (tracheal mite) disease that devastated British bee populations in the early twentieth century. Buckfast breeding programmes selected for gentleness, productivity, disease resistance and reduced swarming tendency across multiple parent subspecies, and true Buckfast queens (as opposed to bees loosely marketed under the name) are typically produced through controlled or instrumental insemination to maintain the specific cross.

Beyond named strains, many UK colonies today are simply mongrel or "local mutt" bees — descendants of decades of uncontrolled crossing between imported strains and whatever native genetics remained — and a growing number of beekeepers deliberately favour locally raised, locally mated queens over any imported strain, on the reasoning that queens mated with local drones under local conditions, regardless of formal subspecies label, tend to produce colonies well matched to that specific area's climate and forage pattern.