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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John B" data-source="post: 13764" data-attributes="member: 207">It's not that Carniolan bees aren't quiet, although the ones I've seen in Norway are a lot better for temperament. It's the fact that when they cross with any other bee you get an unpredictable and often nasty hybrid especially in the F2 cross. The importation of this bee has set back New Zealand Queen breeding by a generation. It used to be to suspected that our bees were a bit inbred but recent research has proven this to be completely untrue and the last thing we needed was an influx of bees not bred for our conditions. It's a pretty fair bet that deformed wing virus also came in with that semen.The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence, but it is not always so. Personally if I was going to import anything I would have brought in Danish Buckfast bees but then even that would have risked bringing in the paralysis virus. We had a closed border for good reasons and it was opened for very poor reasons. As others have said the carniolan  genes were already well represented in New Zealand's bee population.</blockquote>

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