In terms of honey production, the Australian native bee does not even come close to the European honeybee. While you can get anywhere up to 225kg from a single hive of European bees, most native hives only produce a kilogram of honey a year. The only reason so far I have heard for keeping native bees is as pollinators for the native flora.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
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Can you have a hybrid colony, in that you have both Australian and European bees in the one hive?
ReplyDeleteI don't think the bees would accept one another and the European bees would probably kill the native bees. Different bee colonies have different scents to distinguish them - for instance even though the bees in both my hive are exactly the same type, if one of them flew into the other hive it would probably get stung to death. There's a technique for joining two different beehives together but that involves laying newspaper between the hives so that the bees get used to each other's scent as they chew through the paper to get to each other and won't fight.
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