Jim Holland 2016-09-08 12:26:53
DELIVERED BY JIM HOLLAND ON THE 28TH JULY, 2016 AT THE FRANCISCAN COLLEGE GORMANSTON, IRELAND
It is a great honor for me to have been asked to give this lecture in memory of Brother Adam. I am only one of many beekeepers around the world who would come to praise him.
Brother Adam was one of the great bee masters of all time. He died on Sept. 1, 1996. He was 98. Born Karl Kehrle in Southern Germany on the 3rd of August 1898 and following the custom of the time, he was sent by his mother at the age of 12 in March 1910 to spend the major part of his lifetime as a monk at Buckfast Abbey, a Benedictine monastery situated on the river Dart at the edge of Dartmoor in South Devon, England. Far from the land of his birth and separated from his family at such an early age, Brother Adam was extremely lonely. The trace of his Germanic upbringing never left him, both his accent and Teutonic thoroughness, nor his early training in the Abbey, where as well as his devotional duties, it was compulsory for all the members of the monastic community to turn their hand to everything to do with their daily lives, whether building, carpentry or working in the kitchen.
A bird’s eye view of his beekeeping involvement sees him being chosen as the assistant of Brother Columban at Buckfast Abbey. The majority of the hives are populated by the dark bee of British stock in British Standard National hives. The County Bee Inspector predicts the total extermination of the bees by Isle of Wight disease, today known as acarine. Sixteen hives out of 46 hives survive. Adam makes the connection that the surviving hives are all crossed with A. m. carnica from Central Europe and A. m. ligustica from the pre- Alps area of Northern Italy. The bees of British origin are all dead. On 1st September 1922 Brother Adam is put in full charge of the Apiary of 100 hives. Following his inspiration from Prof Ambruster, he makes his first cross with A. m. cypria and begins his travels in search of the best strains of bee for incorporation into the Buckfast strain. In order to allow for the extreme prolificacy of his queen bees, he changes to a much larger brood chamber, the Dadant. But the crosses are made only after severe selection. The bees are mated at his unique mating station at Sherburton, high up on Dartmoor in each of four nuclei on half-frame Dadant frames, under a single roof . He collaborates with Dr Mackenson in the early days of instrumental insemination. To give his strain superb gentility, he incorporates A. m. cecropia from Greece.
In 1974 tests were made with the old Macedonian bee from Mount Athos, an isthmus that juts out just north of Athens and in 1987 further tests were begun with A. m. monticola. In a moment I will mention the queens brought back from the Sahara expedition.
It was, indeed, his unique insight into the breeding of the honey bee which was to bring Brother Adam recognition as one of the most important contributors to the practice of beekeeping in the 20th century. It is not that he particularly set out to create a perfect bee: he always insisted that there was no such creature. But at the time when he took over responsibility as the Head of the beekeeping department of the abbey, he saw the breeding of the honey bee as the only practical solution to what appeared to be an insoluble problem: the mass destruction of bees throughout the British Isles by acarine disease, originally called Isle of Wight disease. In his book “Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey” he notes:
“I am convinced that it is almost impossible for anyone who did not experience at first-hand the problems and disheartening losses when Acarine raged through the apiaries of the country, not to appreciate fully the immense strides made since 1920 in all practical and technical aspects of beekeeping.”
With the realization that it was only those colonies at his apiaries at Buckfast which had been crossed with a strain of bee from the Ligurian Alps in Northern Italy which had by their survival demonstrated that they had a resistance to the disease, he set out on a quest that was to last a lifetime in search of strains of bees which came up to his ideals and requirements. He realized that the task would have to be taken on before hybridization or the movement of hives from one area to another for commercial purposes would obliterate pure strains forever. Although he relied on the biometric morphological measurements of Professor Ruttner in Oberusel in Germany for identification of the strains he collected, he regarded these external characteristics as merely a tool to differentiate between the strains, not an end in themselves. In any case he was looking for 16 different characteristics, not 5 as is the custom with biometric tests. It was to be many years of course before James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin with their discoveries of the double Helix of DNA that we were able to produce techniques of inestimable value in this field.
Back home he was to subject the progeny of the queen bees he had collected to the most thorough evaluation never before devised in beekeeping. In order to eliminate irrelevant considerations, and a formation of hives facing in all four cardinal points to avoid drifting, he was to conduct his practical beekeeping under strictly scientific lines in order to test his colonies for the desired characteristics. He developed a bee that was to become known for its gentility and ability to gather honey in one of the most difficult climates in Europe.
To indicate the difficulties Brother Adam faced in the breeding of the honey bee, in passing here I should say that I personally visited the island of Ios in the Aegean and later to see the effects of varroa before it came here, I went to the research station of Nea Moudania in Greece not far from Mount Athos. The Greek bee and the Macedonian which populated, respectively, both these areas were if anything as nasty a bee as one could meet. When I mentioned this to Brother Adam, he reminded me that of the 60 queens brought back from Greece, only one came up to his requirements.
Largely by car, but often on foot or by mule or donkey when he scaled the slopes of steep mountainsides, he was to search Europe, Asia Minor the Sahara desert and the Balkan Peninsula in order to bring back strains that had been largely in situ since the moment in geological time when the ice sheet of Northern Europe retreated at the end of the last ice-age. What is often not realized is that the decision to incorporate the strains into the Buckfast line was reached only after exhaustive tests in cross-breeding and trials in the field which resulted in rigorous culling and selection. Often excellent queens were rejected because their progeny were predisposed to swarm, too aggressive, or not easily handled during manipulation. The bee from the Sahara, which was able to eke out an existence in the most arduous conditions is an example of one such bee which, although a superb honey gatherer when crossed to the Buckfast strain, was never incorporated into the main line because it failed to come up to his criterion of gentility.
While he did not underestimate the value of breeding the honey bee down a particular line, known as “line breeding”, as a result of studying the work of Mendel through the applications made by Professor Armbruster, he saw that the real potential of the honey bee could be achieved only through the crossing of particular strains of bee to release the potential that lies in hybrid vigor.
There were many beekeepers from around the world who came to Buckfast to work with Brother Adam and to see for themselves. I was fortunate to be one of that throng and visited him with my wife and family in 1974. From then on I was a regular visitor and was privy to much of his findings, including the pedigree of his strains right back as far as 1928. In addition, I obtained two breeder queens from him every year, one for the queen lines and another for the drones. He would also correspond with me and I frequently passed such information on in articles to The Irish Beekeeper and to the American Bee Journal. As I produced a few Buckfast queens for sale, I was required to have my bees tested at the Entomology department at Newforge lane in Belfast. Not once over a number of years was acarine discovered.
Mention should be made too of Brother Adam’s faithful assistant Peter Donovan, who joined Brother Adam just after Peter left school at the age of fourteen. As well as being a knowledgeable beekeeper in his own right, he brought a measure of levity and humor to what was mostly a very serious and intensely concentrated business.
One anecdote comes to mind.. To have been invited to go up to Sherburton to the mating station just beside the river Dart on Dartmoor was one of the most idyllic experiences of my life. It had been used by Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey since the beginning of last century. As a treat after the work all morning, we would be treated to a bottle of champagne mead, which was placed in the Dart in order to keep it cool. Now it may not be known generally, but the army has a firing range up on Dartmoor, and it was noticed on one occasion that a group of soldiers were hovering round the place where the champagne mead had been placed. At lunchtime, when his assistant Peter Donovan went to collect the mead, it had disappeared. Asked if any of the soldiers had seen a bottle in the river, nobody had seen any bottle. “Well, “ said Peter, “we were using what was in that bottle to make the drones impotent so that they couldn’t mate with our queens. If anybody was to drink that stuff, it could have very serious consequences. So if you find it let us know.”
That evening Brother Adam had a telephone call from the adjutant to ask if there was any antidote to the liquid they were using up on Dartmoor.
His achievements in beekeeping became recognized throughout the world, and on display in his office were many copies of his books which had been translated into most of the major European languages. Brother Adam wrote Beekeeping at Buckfast Abbey, In Search of the Best Strains of Bees and Breeding the Honeybee.
His first honor came in the form of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) which he received from the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Then in 1988 at the age of 90, after an exhaustive ascent of the slopes of Kilimanjaro in search of the monticola bee, he went on to Sweden where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science by the University of Uppsala. He was also later awarded a Dsc. By the University of Exeter in Devon, England.
While beekeeping organizations all over the world clamored to honor him, he was particularly proud of a medal which he was given by a small French village in Haute- Savoy where almost all the inhabitants of Saint-Julien-en-Vercors turned out to honour him. The medal is a fitting tribute to Brother Adam, who by birth we must remind ourselves was German. It was somewhat of a paradox that this same village was where during the German invasion of the second world war the Nazis had taken out the men of the village and executed them in public. Members of the resistance had a hospital close by with doctors patients and nurses housed in a cave, La Grotte de la Luire. The Nazis shot the patients and sent the doctors and nurses to concentration camps or shot them on the spot. So here were the French now presenting a German with a medal. It depicted a dove with an olive branch, symbols of peace with the inscription: L’art venge la vie (Art redeems life).
Not least of the tributes paid to Brother Adam was one from Prof. Ruttner who called the bee from Crete, realizing that it was a different strain as a result of the measurements he had made, Apis mellifera adami in recognition of the work Brother Adam had done in collecting the different strains of bees.
What has been seldom mentioned, however, is the quality of Brother Adam’s writings which come up to the very highest standards of English Literature. His book In Search of the Best Strains of Bees is in itself a masterpiece and would qualify for the poet Coleridge’s definition of good writing being, “The best words in the best order”. It is little wonder when I first received a copy of In Search I lay down on a beach in Devon and could not finish until I had read it cover to cover, so fascinating is the account of the journeys which leads up to the climax of the evaluations of each race in the best traditions of a good detective novel. Even more fascinating is his account of the journeys themselves, to the island of Ios for example:
“The Aegean is in many respects a veritable fairyland, but a voyage to the islands can, except on luxury tourist boats, prove a most unpleasant experience. The small steamers that ply between the islands carrying freight and passengers are often loaded with cattle, domestic animals, fish and human beings to the point of suffocation. When, as is often the case, the treacherous currents in the narrow straights contribute their part to the discomfort of the passengers, the result defies description.” Later, however, he is to be rewarded:
“We had to set out from our hostel by the quay-side before daybreak. The party comprised nine persons, and most of the way we had to ride in single file along a treacherous track. As dawn broke I observed at first a great variety of subtropical vegetation. Then at higher altitudes I saw more and more heather. Though Erica verticillata was most common, I could observe other varieties previously unknown to me ...”
It has to be said that recognition by the scientific world came late to him, possibly because he had not published his work in scientific journals. However, Brother Adam was able to live long enough to have the satisfaction of public recognition of his work as a result of research undertaken in the USA by three universities, and published in the American Bee Journal in November 1991 by the Department of Entomology, Washington State University, Department of Environmental Biology, University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada, and The Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, Texas University under the authorship of Charles Mine Jr., Gard Otis, Frank Eischen and Jan Dormater. It gave Brother Adam extreme pleasure to see the following appear in print:
“Queens of possibly tracheal mite resistant lines from Texas and California were introduced into colonies with mites to determine the resistance of these stocks. The stock from texas, the Buckfast line of Weaver Apiaries, had significantly lower mite prevalence and mite load than colonies with queens from the California source. Five of the six colonies with the Buckfast queens displayed economic thresholds for 7 months without chemical treatments. This mite-resistant line should greatly reduce chemical treatments, colony losses and unproductive colonies. Colonies of this line should have larger populations for pollination and honey production, and would be suitable for further selection and the study of mite resistance.”
There is no doubt that Brother Adam gained the respect of everybody who came in contact with him and gained the lifelong loyalty of a group of friends, some of whom would hardly have come into contact with one another otherwise. To keep friendly with them all, especially when there were conflicting needs within the group, required the diplomatic skills that were as finely balanced as that of a juggler keeping tennis balls suspended in the air. This Brother Adam did with impeccable skill, requiring tact and sometimes tinged with unwavering frankness, but always with a courtesy of both tone and manner. This did not prevent him, however, if he thought someone was being an utter fool, letting it be known that he thought so!
In the citation delivered on the occasion of Brother Adam receiving his doctorate at Exeter University, the official speaker, Prof. Swanston, stressed the reasons which made the pre-conditions for breeding combinations successful and possible.
“Few scientists have pursued a single objective goal over so many years. Breeding combinations require long periods of time. It must, nevertheless, be stressed that only a few enjoy the environmental conditions which an undertaking of this nature demands. The life of a monk is best suited for such an undertaking. From the same cell Brother Adam was able to pursue his special tasks over a period of 70 years. With the most limited means he carried out scientific research in a sphere in which no laboratory would have been suitable to discover the required practical findings considering the actual environmental conditions. Years of intensive research into suitable bee races and breeding material required traveling to almost every part of Europe, as well as to the countries surrounding the Mediterranean. It must also be mentioned, however, that he, as is the case with every scientific enterprise, was not spared disappointment which had demanded much work and on which many of his hopes had been based.”
When visitors would make excessive demands on his time and energy Brother Adam, as he did when relaxing over a glass of mead, would say “tongue in cheek” that people forgot that he, too, was entitled to his eternal rest. Now that he has obtained it, who could say that it was not well earned.
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