Buckfast Bees; Their Traits & Benefits.
There is a short and longer version of this article. The short version provides the facts. The longer version provides the story of the development of the Buckfast bee which is inseparable from that of a man who, as a young German boy, was given up to the Benedictine monks and sent to Buckfast Abbey in Devon as part of a workforce to rebuild the monastery devastated four centuries before. The stories of the monastery, the monk and the honeybee are fascinating and intertwined.
The Short Version
The Buckfast bee is not a pure subspecies of bee, it is a cross-breed of a number of sub-species and was first developed at Buckfast Abbey in Devon by Karl Kehrle OSB OBE, known as Brother Adam.
The aims of the initial breeding process were to counter the devastating impact of the “Isle of Wight Disease” on the existing bee population and to produce a bee suitable for working the heather crop on Dartmoor.
The work of breeding the Buckfast bee continued at Buckfast led by Brother Adam until his retirement at the age of ninety-three in 1992.
During Brother Adam’s lifetime, breeder queens were sent from the UK to breeders in other countries who reared offspring queens which were then marketed internationally. After Brother Adam’s death breeding of the Buckfast bee has continued by bee breeders, many of who belong to the European Federation of Buckfast Beekeepers’ Association.
Given the long development of the Buckfast bee, the multiple crosses performed by Brother Adam and the wide geographic spread, the Buckfast bee can best be regarded as a trade-name for hybrid bees of varying ancestry that aim to replicate the behavioural characteristics sought by Brother Adam.
The benefits of the Buckfast bee are directly linked to its traits or qualities. These qualities tend to produce colonies that are highly productive, docile and easy to manage.
Buckfast breeder queens in the UK are generally sourced from German or Danish producers where the use of isolation apiaries has a long tradition or artificial insemination is practiced to high standards.
Buckfast crosses are supplied in the UK by a range of suppliers including Thorne https://www.thorne.co.uk/hives-and-bees/bees/british-bred-queen.html.
The Longer Version – The Monastery, the Monk and the Honeybee
This is a story of a grand Abbey that is laid waste and of its rebirth through the arrival of industrious immigrant monks. It is a story of the loss of the native Dark European honeybee and an innovative cross-breeding programme. It is also the story of a German man who arrived at the Abbey as a young, sickly boy and whose ambition became no less than the development of the perfect bee.
The Monastery
Predating the Norman conquest, Buckfast Abbey in Devon, the monasterial home to Benedictine monks since 1018 was laid waste, its monks dispersed during the dissolution of the English monasteries.
The last Abbot at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries surrendered the abbey on 25 February 1539 to the agent acting for King Henry VIII. At this time there were nine other monks in residence.
The site was granted to the King who later granted it to others and, over the course of nearly three hundred and fifty years, the abbey was laid to ruin with the site for some years being used as a stone quarry. In 1806 a Gothic style castellated mansion house was constructed on what was the abbey's former west cloister. The only pieces of the former abbey to escape demolition were some of the outer buildings, which were retained as farm buildings, and the tower from the former abbot's lodgings.
From 1806 and for the next eighty years the Buckfast site changed hands four times. In 1882 it was again up for sale.
Buckfast Abbey had been erased – almost – and the grounds, located at the centre of a picturesque valley on the edge of Dartmoor, could have forever been the property of landed gentry or now rich second home owners. However, and coincidentally, in 1880 the Abbaye Sainte-Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire in France was suppressed under a new French law and this led to the Benedictine order seeking a means of preserving their traditions. As a result, French monks purchased the whole site of the former Abbey in Devon for £4,700.
On 28 October 1882, six Benedictine monks arrived at Buckfast to begin the painstaking task of rebuilding the abbey. To realise their ambitions the French monks looked to Germany and for help from the Benedictines there. They recruited strong, capable and skilled stonemasons who came to rebuild the abbey stone by stone. Their initial reconstruction efforts focused on incorporating new monastic buildings into the remaining Gothic house.
Buckfast was formally reinstated as an abbey in 1902. Work on a new abbey church, which was constructed mostly on the footprint of the former Cistercian abbey, started in 1907. The church was completed in 1938..
From utter devastation, the Abbey was reborn and has more than regained its strength. Today it is a place of beauty, tranquillity and spiritual nourishment. It was also the home and workplace of Britain’s most famous beekeeper and the place of origin of the famous Buckfast bee.
The Monk
On the 18th March, 1910 a train arrived, with the usual swirl of cinders and steam, at Buckfastleigh station in Devon carrying a special cargo – a small bunch of weary children who had arrived in a strange land destined for the new and rigorous life as novice Benedictine monks. The intake included one Karl Kehrle. Like most of his peers, Karl had been recruited in southern Germany. His mother, a very religious person, had asked him whether he wanted to travel to Southern England and join the monks at Buckfast to build a great abbey in praise of God. His reply resulted in his arrival, as a boy of only eleven years old, at Buckfast Abbey where he was later renamed Brother Adam. It would be another thirteen years before the boy returned briefly to his home town.
The Benedictine Order of Black Monks that Brother Adam had joined was one of the strictest in Britain but the life of contemplation and prayer of a monk had to rub along with more temporal concerns. Whether Abbot or brother, the life was one of extreme physical toil focused on the rekindling of a monastery snuffed out four centuries earlier.
Brother Adam started as a stone mason but his health wasn’t up to it and he was switched to the lighter duties of assisting in the apiaries which were mostly filled with the tetchy black bee of England.
Some years before Brother Adam started in the apiary, many colonies of honeybees around England were killed by what was believed to be a new and devastating disease, termed the “Isle of Wight Disease”. In 1916 thirty of the forty-six bee colonies at the Abbey died.
The only bees to survive the disease at Buckfast were crossbreeds, the progeny of the Italian variety Apis mellifera ligustica, relatively recently introduced into the Abbey’s apiaries after their import to Britain in 1859, and the native dark European honey bees Apis mellifera mellifera.
Some years later the tracheal mite Acarapis woodi was discovered in bees thought to be suffering from the Isle of Wight disease, and was rapidly assumed to have been the causative organism. Work by Dr Leslie Bailey at Rothamsted Experimental Station in the 1960s suggested, however, that the cause had in fact been chronic bee paralysis virus, unknown at the time.
From very early on in his beekeeping career Brother Adam came to believe that cross breeding offered many benefits when it came to producing long-lived, healthy colonies that were easy to manage and were productive. He believed that nature never breeds a perfect bee – at least one which would answer all the demands of a modern beekeeper whose principle focus is on the production of honey. In his own words, ‘the realisation of this ideal has been left by Nature to the progressive, purposeful breeder of today.’
In order to realise his ambitions of breeding the perfect bee, Bother Adam immersed himself in study. He wanted to know the principles of selection whether artificial or natural.
Through his studies, Brother Adam found out why Gregor Mendel, the Czech monk who had first described the principles of heredity couldn’t get them to work with the honey bee. He understood that there are a host of problems in bee breeding which are unknown in other spheres of animal and plant breeding. For instance, the breeder in the case of the honey bee is confronted not with isolated individuals but with a society or, to put it another way, a superorganism. It is a superorganism with a mother and an indeterminate number of fathers. As such a colony has an indeterminate number of groups of half-sisters with diverse hereditary characteristics.
Brother Adam understood that, apart from the fact that the average beekeeper has, at best, only limited control of the mating of queens, it is the fact that drones experience a ‘virgin’ birth which poses the most significant difficulty for breeders of honey bees. Drones are derived from an unfertilised egg and therefore a drone has no father but only a mother. Whilst this could have been useful in the breeding process it is the unfortunate fate of the drone to die in the act of mating and so ceases to be of service for the purpose of further breeding.
It was clear to Brother Adam that breeding bees was never going to be as easy as breeding dogs or cultivating different varieties of sweet peas.
It struck Brother Adam how he could succeed where Mendel’s bee breeding efforts had failed.
The answer was the development of rigorous selection criteria and to establish a breeding station up on Dartmoor totally isolated from other honey bees. It was 1925 when a breeding station was established and marked the start of a breeding programme that was to reshape the honey bee. To make sure the queens mated with stock of his choice, Brother Adam put selected drone colonies in the isolation apiary. These drones would be the only mates the queen would find on Dartmoor. At last, the breeder rather than nature was in charge.
From 1950 onwards Brother Adam undertook extensive travels to continue his gradual improvement of the Buckfast bee. Through these travels, he analysed and crossbred bees from all over Europe the Near East and North Africa. For his analysis he used his own sixteen-point classification. The classification identified five primary qualities of performance, twelve secondary characteristics that include longevity and keen sense of smell and seven qualities that influence management, including good temper and calm behaviour.
In 1964 Brother Adam was elected a member of the Board of the Bee Research Association and in recognition of his work he received several awards, including appointment as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1973.
Brother Adam retired from his role at the Abbey aged ninety-three. He spent several months in his home town Mittelbiberach, Germany before returning to Buckfast Abbey where he died at the age of ninety-seven.
The Honey bee
From its modest beginnings, Brother Adam’s breeding process focused on developing in the Buckfast bee the primary essential qualities or traits identified by him for maximising productive performance, namely: disease resistance, fecundity (that the ability to generate plenty of offspring), a propensity for hard work (or foraging zeal) and a disinclination to swarm. As well as secondary qualities, such as hardiness and keen sense of smell, Brother Adam identified qualities which influence management such as good temper and calm behaviour and worked on breeding these traits into his bees.
From its unpromising start, being virtually wiped out by disease, the bees he started with were transformed. The old master found and developed the qualities of the Buckfast bee from a genetic cocktail with more ingredients than Heinz. In so doing he turned a monastic side line into a world-wide enterprise.
Given that the Buckfast bee is a cross-breed with many inputs and is now selected by breeders in various parts of the world, under very different local conditions, some argue that the Buckfast bee is now simply a marketing brand name for hybrid bees of variable characteristics that are unlikely to share a common ancestry. The fact that the queen bees especially vary in size and colour lends credence to the argument. However, on this latter point, the Buckfast bee was never developed for consistency of size and colour. As such, these features can vary markedly between Buckfast bees.
As for sharing a genetic blueprint as passed on from common ancestry, does this really matter? Maybe in a story that intertwines a monastery, a monk and honey bee it is relevant to reference Matthew 7:20, where Jesus is quoted as saying, ‘by their fruits you will know them.’ A Benedictine monk coming from France and one coming from Germany do not share the same genetic blueprint but both are Benedictine monks because they behave like one. In the same way a Buckfast bee coming from Devon or Germany or Denmark are all Buckfasts if they behave like one as specified by Brother Adam.
In conclusion, the fall and rise of the Buckfast bee in some way reflects the history of the Abbey itself. It also has parallels with Brother Adam’s life story. Starting as a sickly being, he rose to become Britain’s most famous beekeeper. From its unpromising start, the Buckfast bee also came to be famous the world over.
Did Brother Adam create the perfect bee? For many beekeepers the answer is ‘yes’. However, current research would suggest that the idea that we can produce a single strain of bee suitable for all conditions has probably passed.
Russell Connor
References:
Breeding the Honeybee. Brother Adam.
In Search of the Best Strains of Bees. Brother Adam.
For the Love of Bees: The story of Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey.
Buckfast Abbey website.
BBC Horizon Documentary; The Monk and the Honeybee.
Acknowledgements:
Norman Carreck helpfully commented on and edited the article.
