Richard Bache
New Bee
Confident assertion considering the climatic changes and expanding and contracting range of apis mellifera over the past 50 million years.
Finland is a country of huge forests and heathlands and bees have certainly thrived there before and since the arrival of man.
Early Finish poems and folklore are littered with mention of bees, honey and mead which seems strange for a country only introduced to bees since the advent of modern appiculture ( according to Richard Bache !)
Case dissmissed
Confident assertion...
Do you have any evidence of how early the Finnish poems and folklore that mention bees are?
It is not my thoughts that the Honeybee is not native to Finland, but those of people who should know more than me about the subject:
Koivulehto, K. Beekeeping in Finland. in Beekeeping in Cold Climate Zones. Apimmondia Publishing House, 1974 pp70-72The first record show that the earliest bee in Finland were black bees (Apis mellifera mellifera). It is called here the Scandinavian bee. They were imported from Esthonia and Sweden in the 18th Century. The Italian bee was introduced in 1866 and the following year the first frame hive
Vidano C. The Italian Bee in Finland. in Beekeeping in Cold Climate Zones. Apimmondia Publishing House, 1974 pp 45-8.Beekeeping Started in Finland in the XVIIIth century, when the balck bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) was imported from Estonia and Sweden
Hartikka A. Queen Breeding in Finland. in Beekeeping in Cold Climate Zones. Apimmondia Publishing House, 1974 pp 101-2Some people suggested that only bee races which had adapted themselves to the conditions in this country - during hundreds of years - should be kept for sucessful beekeeping. They considered it useless to adapt southern bees to the far northern regions. This also meant that only northern bees living in Northern Europe since immemorial times could be used for queen breeding. In the area which is now Finland, wild bees never existed, which means the Northern bee must have been imported
Crane, E. The World History of beekeeping and Honey Hunting. London: Duckworth. 1999. pp236-7.Beekeeping is not known to have existed until the bees were brought by sea from Sweden and Estonia...The first book on bees and beekeeping, published in Swedish, was by Winter (1818): he said that 'the useful bees have not been known or used [by Finnish people] until now..
Ruttner Milner and Dews' The Dark European Honey Bee also mentions this, but cites the fact that Archaeological specimens from Norway prove that AMM existed previously in Scandanavia, but then retreated. Look also at the natural distribution range of honeybees on their map and also compare it with that in Eva Cranes 'bees and beekeeping, science, practice and world resources' and of Gould and Gould's 'The Honey bee'. I can find no definitive proof, or even tentative suggestion, that bees existed in Finland before humans brought them there.