The Cult Of Local Bees

“Keep local bees.” Or, increasingly, “Keep locally adapted bees.”

It’s among the most repeated lines in UK beekeeping, usually delivered with the confidence of a law of physics. And to be fair, it often works as advice. Local queens can perform well, and local colonies can overwinter reliably. But the phrase “local bees” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The moment you try to define it biologically rather than culturally, you hit an awkward question:

How local is “local”, really, when a queen mates in the air with drones from who-knows-where, and a beekeeper can reset genetics with one purchased queen?

This post is an attempt to prod around at the idea of local bees being best – even to the extent that the British Beekeepers’ Association is actively lobbying the government to BAN imports of queens. That’s interesting, given that many of that organisation’s members happily buy imported queens, or queens derived from imported breeder queens.

What do we mean by local?

I believe that UK beekeepers mean one or more of these, when they say “local bees”:

Geographically close – within a few miles, or in the same county

Not imported – bred here in the UK

Locally proven – bees that do well in our area/conditions

Locally sourced – from a beekeeper nearby

None of these guarantee local adaptation in the evolutionary sense.

Local adaptation, from a biological perspective, means a population becomes better suited to its local environment through consistent selection across generations, such that those bees have higher fitness there than bees from elsewhere.

This means that (a) it takes time (over many generations), (b) there needs to be consistent selection pressure, and (c) the mating population must be controlled, otherwise gene flow might wash out adaptation.

Your local queen is a genetic mash-up

A honey bee queen does not mate neatly within the parish boundary. She mates in drone congregation areas (DCAs), and DCAs¹ draw drones from multiple colonies and multiple apiaries. I did a post a while ago on this; if you add together the distance flown by the queen plus the distance flown by the drones, for 90% of matings that distance is within 7.5 km. And queens are highly polyandrous. A typical queen mates with roughly 12–20 drones² (and sometimes more) depending on conditions.

In a typical UK setting with moderate to high apiary density, that often means your “local” queen’s mating is influenced by dozens of colonies you do not control. This does not make “local bees” meaningless. It does mean we should be careful about claiming that a single beekeeper can create a locally adapted line without some form of mating control or coordination.

It’s not all nonsense though

Even when strict genetic local adaptation is difficult to achieve, beekeepers regularly observe that locally sourced bees perform well, although often “perform” simply means “survives”. The first few years of beekeeping can be tricky, and keeping colonies alive is not something that necessarily comes easily at first.

Local conditioning

A large chunk of “performance” is not just genetics; it is gene expression and physiology shaped by nutrition, brood rearing conditions, stress, and so on. Honey bees are a textbook case for epigenetic mechanisms³: DNA methylation, histone modification, and regulatory RNAs (fancy stuff, eh?) are strongly involved in development and behavioural regulation. Epigenetic and developmental effects can appear quickly – it doesn’t take multiple generations – and can quickly disappear too, if conditions change.

Bees from a nearby breeder may well have been conditioned to your environment, so at least those bees are not unsuited to your area. The often quoted research by Buchler⁴ et al looking at survival of local versus ‘outsider’ bees showed that local bees survived longer on their own patch. They still died because no varroa treatment took place, but they lived a bit longer than non-locals.

How local is local?

Local queen– a queen reared locally can still mate with drones from a wide area (0ver 150 km²) and those drones are probably a genetic cocktail.

Local mating population– if you have control of the drones and queens in an area, with little ingress from elsewhere, then this becomes biologically meaningful. If selection takes place over generations within this isolated population, genetic adaptations may emerge, depending on the amount of selection pressure.

At a broad scale, honey bee populations across Europe show regional differentiation, consistent with historic lineages, geography, and selection. But the same body of work also shows that:

• Human movement of bees increases gene flow,

• Hybridisation and mixing blur boundaries,

• Without isolation it’s difficult to make changes stick

Local Adaptation – how do you know?

If local adaptation is real in your area, you’d expect to see patterns like:

• Colonies consistently timing brood rearing to local flows (not building too early or too late).

• Better overwintering and spring build-up relative to other stocks under the same management.

• More stable performance across variable years (wet springs, poor summers).

But for this to persist, you generally need more than one beekeeper quietly “keeping local.” You need either:

1. Isolation (islands, remote valleys, controlled mating stations), or

2. Coordination (enough local beekeepers selecting similar traits and flooding DCAs with drones from that stock).

Research and breeding practice repeatedly show that mating control and coordinated selection make outcomes more reliable (which is why mating stations and controlled breeding programmes exist at all)⁵.

Practical Steps

It helps to define what you mean by “local”. It could be something like “mated within 10 km” or mated at a named apiary. Next, survival is not a great metric – we need a little more ambition than that. Examples of things to track (measure) and select for:

• spring build up & timing to local flows
• temperament
• swarming tendency
• honey yield
• over wintering success

If you want local adaptation, you have to control the drones and the queens. This likely means close coordination with ALL the other beekeepers in your designated area. Agree what traits you are selecting for, keep plenty of colonies of good stock to produce lots of drones, and eliminate genetic resets caused by ‘outside’ bees coming in. Not easy.

A population, not a postcode

Local bees can be excellent. They can also be mediocre. Imports can be brilliant, and also a nightmare. The meaningful question isn’t “are they local?” It’s “Are these bees (and the drones they mate with) being selected, year after year, under the conditions I actually keep them in?”

If the answer is yes, you’re moving toward genuine local adaptation. If the answer is no, “local” may still be sensible for biosecurity and practicality — but it’s not a genetic strategy, it’s just a preference.

Imports – the Contradiction

In most of England, queens are open-mated and drones come from unknown sources. The background population is already highly admixed⁶ (typically about 50% M lineage, 50% C lineage). Colonies celebrated as “local bees” most likely contain plenty of genetic material from imported Buckfasts, Carniolans, and the like.

We end up with the genetics being all mixed up (native plus imported bees), a lack of control of the breeding population, and a lack of honesty in acknowledging this. This typical situation is not creating local adaptation. It is unmanaged gene flow. Personally, I’m not unduly bothered by that; if I do my simple selection process and continually breed from my best and cull my worst, I find my bees are mostly pretty good. But it is hardly the environment in which to do serious bee breeding.

Elite European breeders

Which brings me to the elite honey bee breeding programmes that can be found in Denmark and Germany, for example. There is a reason why many commercial beekeepers in the UK buy in Buckfast queens each year from top breeders abroad. That reason, whether you like it or not, is that those bees perform better for the beekeeper interested in honey production than “locals”.

Elite Buckfast breeding programmes explicitly select for desirable traits across multiple environments, using instrumental or semi-controlled mating, large population sizes, ruthless culling, and decades of accumulated selection. When bee farmers claim that these bees perform better for them, it is not ideology speaking – they are talking about repeatable, measurable outcomes. If the local bees were better they would use them, and in some cases they do. I should also add that a large percentage of imported bees are sold to hobby beekeepers too – it’s certainly not just a commercial beekeeper thing.

Here are some things to think about:

1. no notifiable pest or disease has been demonstrably introduced into the UK via queen-only imports⁷ (and if people follow the rules, and source queens carefully, the risks are tiny)
2. many UK bee farmers⁸ routinely import Buckfast queens from elite breeders in Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere
3. those bees outperform local stocks on honey yield, swarm control, and overwintering under UK commercial management (this tends to be in the milder lowlands, rather than exposed areas with harsh weather).
   

The question then becomes, “What is the obsession with banning imported queens and using only local bees actually trying to solve? ” I think the disease/pest risk is legitimate – the risks are not zero despite the precautions and procedures in place. But there will always be rogues who smuggle queens in, regardless of the rules – banning imports won’t stop them, and it might even boost their business.

I also think that if you are in a particularly isolated location and can coordinate with others to create an isolated breeding population, then you would be right to be against ‘outsider bees’ coming into your area.

By the way, there are some excellent UK bee breeders too, using instrumental insemination and drone flooding of mating areas. I tend to get breeder queens from these UK-based folks, but I’m less interested in the genetic purity of the queen, and more interested in profiting from the selection work done by the breeder.

Reframing local vs. imported

Instead of arguing about local vs imported, a more honest framing would be:

“What level of selection intensity, mating control, and performance measurement is being applied? ”

On that basis elite Buckfast breeders score very highly, and most “local bee” claims score pretty low. Local provenance without selection is not adaptation. It’s nostalgia with a postcode.

Local bees have become a proxy for virtue in UK beekeeping. But biology does not reward virtue — it rewards selection. Where imported bees outperform local stocks under the same conditions, the question is not why people import them, but why we pretend locality is a substitute for breeding. Even though properly bred UK bees may perform as well as imported Buckfasts, this rather implies that the imports are not raised in vastly different conditions. Yes, they may need feeding at certain times, but that’s called “beekeeping”.

And finally

Don’t get me wrong; I am not trying to persuade anybody to buy imported queens. I get enormous pleasure from raising queen bees in my part of Cheshire, in the UK. Despite the high apiary density, open mating, lack of an isolated breeding population, and all the rest of it, I’m happy to make and use my queens. I have nuc customers who think they are great.

When I did a straight test between Paul Horton’s Danish Buckfast queens and mine, his made significantly more honey under the same conditions. I found this very irritating, but, on reflection, it’s not a surprise. I’m not an elite breeder, and my local conditions are quite mild, so highly prolific bees usually do well. But, the pleasure I get is from trying to improve. I know where my queens came from, and I have followed them from new larvae to mature queens. It’s a good feeling. It doesn’t mean I have the right to tell other beekeepers how they carry out their beekeeping.

Anyone can make queens, even good ones, so give it a try in the seasons to come.

References

1. Galindo-Cardona A, Monmany AC, Moreno-Jackson R, Rivera-Rivera C, Huertas-Dones C, Caicedo-Quiroga L, Giray T. Landscape analysis of drone congregation areas of the honey bee, Apis mellifera. J Insect Sci. 2012;12:122. doi: 10.1673/031.012.12201. PMID: 23451901; PMCID: PMC3635128.
2. Metz BN, Tarpy DR. Reproductive Senescence in Drones of the Honey Bee (Apis mellifera). Insects. 2019 Jan 8;10(1):11. doi: 10.3390/insects10010011. PMID: 30626026; PMCID: PMC6358831.
3. Benjamin P. Oldroyd, Boris Yagound; The role of epigenetics, particularly DNA methylation, in the evolution of caste in insect societies. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 7 June 2021; 376 (1826): 20200115. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0115
4. Büchler, R., Costa, C., Hatjina, F., Andonov, S., Meixner, M. D., Conte, Y. L., … Wilde, J. (2014). The influence of genetic origin and its interaction with environmental effects on the survival of Apis mellifera L. colonies in Europe. Journal of Apicultural Research, 53(2), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.3896/IBRA.1.53.2.03
5. Arch. Anim. Breed., 68, 507–516, 2025 https://doi.org/10.5194/aab-68-507-2025
6. Buswell, V., Huml, J., Ellis, J., Brown, A., & Knight, M. (2024) ‘Whole genome analyses of introgression in British and Irish Apis mellifera mellifera’, Journal of Apicultural Research, . Available at: 10.1080/00218839.2024.2411483.
7. But once small hive beetles were found on a queen imported by Portugal (from the USA). da Silva, M. J. V. (2014). The First Report Of Aethina tumida In The European Union, Portugal, 2004. Bee World, 91(4), 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/0005772X.2014.11417619
8. An example being Paul Horton, my co-author of the book Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives (Northern Bee Books).