Beekeeping with mission

Jorma Taipaleenmäki and black bees of Finland

Jorma Taipaleenmäki has been a beekeeper since 1990. He did his main carrier as a railroad engineer (locomotive driver) during 1973-2007.  After that he has been a part time truck driver to a local transportation company.

Jorma has 23 hives, 15 of them are pure Apis mellifera mellifera bees. Nobody in Finland has more genetically pure black bees in Finland. His bee’s “pureness” has been verified by a DNA study.  Bee samples were taken 2021 by the Finnish Beekeepers Association (SML). In this study lots of DNA samples were collected all over Finland, representing three races found in Finland. The results were interesting: Black bees and Carnica bees were found either pure or almost pure (90-100%), while most of Italian bee samples were found to be mixed, some were even found to be more Carnica bees than Italian…

Jorma has got black bee genetics from various sources. The biggest input in his bees’ genetics has made the so called “Väinö Mäki” stock, which is the only more or less pure original Finnish black bee stock ever found in Finland after their almost total extinction in late 20th century.

However, in the last 20 years most of the black bees sold in Finland have their origin in Sweden. The Swedish Nordbi -project, dating back to year 1990, financed among others by WWF, managed to find and rescue many different black bee stocks. Many of them were found in very remote places in Northern Sweden. Year 2020 Jorma got some originally Swedish black bees too from Markku Pöyhönen, who is the chairman of the Finnish Black Bee Association.

Jorma lives in Kempele near Oulu, but his bees are scattered around in Kempele, Tyrnävä, Vaala and Siikalatva municipalities. In Kestilä he has his mating station, in a village surrounded by vast swamp areas.  He uses mainly Kirchain and Apidea mating nucs in his queen rearing, but he also has some Langstroth boxes, divided into four, as mating hives. As varroa treatment he uses formic and oxalic acid.

It was a cold morning in Kestilä, temperature was below +10 C. The bees were flying modestly. When Jorma opened the first hive I could easily see the size difference to my bees, the black bees surely are massive! We searched for drone brood, to take some DNA samples. It went well, I worked all the time without gloves, part time also without veil. Then we drove to another site and took more samples. Jorma showed where his mating station is located. During the one hour drove there and one hour back we had lots of time to refresh our memories, what has happened during the past decades.

We met for the first time over 30 years ago 1992 when I was lecturing beekeeping in Koivikko Agricultural School in Muhos. Was is a beginners course or what, my notes do not tell.  Then 5 years later in June 1997 I made a trip to a meeting in Muhos where the challenges of saving the Finnish black bee were discussed and future work was planned. From this trip a comb piece of young larvae was taken from a hive belonging to Väinö Mäki.  

The search of black bees continued in June 1998. After advertising my effort to find original black bees in my leaflet to queen customers I got a phone call from one of them, who said he knows a place where are only old school bee houses and black bees. Stanislav Honko, now living in his homeland Poland, who worked those days in the SML bee breeding station, came with me and together we went to this search expedition into Southern Bothnia.  We met several old school beekeepers, and saw beehives I had never in my life seen before…

“Kiviniemi bees” in Teuva were considered the most interesting one, actually they were the only mostly black bees we found, and larvae comb was taken from there too. I raised queens from them.  Kiviniemi bees wing indexes were studied by the Nordbi project with a DaWiDo method originally developed in Czechoslovakia.  Unfortunately, although very black, the Kiviniemi bees were found to be highly hybridized. In Eigil Holm book “Queen breeding and genetics” page 81 the hive “Ruovesi35” is from Väinö Mäki bees and “Teuva40” is Kiviniemi bees. Both samples are from my hives, Swedish Nordbi project participants Ingvar Arvidsson and Ingvar Petterson visited me and got the bee samples.

After the visit of Ingvars I got the Nordbi project Magazine NORDBI for several years (decades) for free…Reading their magazine I learned how calm the original black bees actually are.

Sometime around these years I lectured in Turku. The subject of my presentation was bee races.  One of the listeners was Aimo Nurminen. For some unknown reason I said: “Black bee is the Rolls Royce of bee races.” This one sentence woke up the curiosity of Aimo Nurminen, and he contacted Ingvar Arvidsson in Sweden to get pure black bees. Rest is history. The Finnish Black Bee Association was formed, and Aimo founded a black bee mating station on an island near Turku. Numerous times, before his sudden death, Aimo called me and told this story, the power of few words… Aimo is in my thoughts many times. He was a great man.

The black bees disappeared from Finland because the hybrids between Italian bees and black bees became very nasty. The Italian bees were mass imported to Finland since 1950s´ and their drones were flying in every corner of Finland by 1970s´.  A paradox:  Italian bees got better because of the black bee genetics made them overwinter better. This was the final death sentence to black bees. Nobody wanted the black hybrids. The original black bee of Finland had transformed from a beautiful local race to nasty bastards, which everybody hated.  

Beekeeping is a mystery. Whether a hobby or profession it is physically tough and mostly unprofitable, yet thousands of beekeepers enjoy it, and would not change it for anything. Many of us keep bees because we feel it is somehow important. You can boost your motivation by emphasizing the importance of pollination or honey as healthy food. Some beekeepers, and Jorma is one of them, feel that their mission is protecting an old historical and geological bee race.    

When we talk about black bees, we must remember, that they are our oldest bee race, not originally Finnish bees, because we have no indigenous honeybees in Finland, they were all imported from Sweden and Estonia during late 18th century.

The future of original black bees in Finland is far from secured. Luckily the Finnish authorities have woken. Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luonnonvarakeskus Luke in Finnish) has started a project to preserve the genetics of Finnish black bees. Together with Jorma we grafted small drone larvae into small tubes with conservation liquid.  They take part of this early-stage study and mapping of our resources.

 Hopefully LuKe people know the history of black bees well enough to concentrate in what really is ours.

Juhani Lundén