The Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association (BIBBA) has the twin aims of stopping imports of honey bees into Britain, Ireland and associated islands, and of improving the quality of our honey bees. This aim is to provide a way forward to a stable and sustainable future for our beekeeping.

Imports of bees and, in particular, queens have been rising rapidly in the past decade. The Healthy Bees Plan, 2009 (England and Wales), and the Honey Bee Health Strategy, 2010 (Scotland), identified imports as a possible biosecurity risk to our bees, as does the Healthy Bees Plan 2030 (published November 2020). A reduction in the number of imports, and therefore in the risks facing our bees, can only be achieved if an alternative is provided, along with a good reason for choosing that alternative. Our aims are to make an alternative available as well as a reason for making that choice.

The Coloss Group’s experiment examined the survival qualities of imported bees as compared to local bees, around Europe, reported in the Journal of Apicultural Research, (2014, Volume 53 Issue 2) highlighted the benefits of using local bees rather than imported ones. It stated, “… the conservation of bee diversity and the support of local breeding activities must be prioritised in order to prevent colony losses, to optimize a sustainable productivity and to enable a continuous adaptation to environmental changes”. BIBBA focuses on just such an approach.