The government of Egypt has lifted a ban imposed on exporting Egyptian honey bees to Saudi Arabia.
Agriculture Minister El Sayed el Qusair confirmed the report and said the two countries discussed lifting the ban after head of the agricultural quarantine authority Ahmed el Attar promised that Egypt is ready to meet all the Saudi conditions on the Egyptian honey bees.
Saudi’s Minister of Environment, Water and Agriculture Abdul Rahman Al-Fadli acted against threats that imported bees pose to the local strain. In speculations on the evolution of honeybee races, the Egyptian honeybee (Apis mellifera lamarckii) plays an important role. It is regarded as a ‘primary race,’ from which all yellow honeybee races of Africa, the Orient and also A. m. ligustica (the Italian honeybee) are derived.
Egyptian honeybee
It is a very small bee, with an extreme slenderness characteristic of a sub-Saharan race. It is also short-tongued, short-winged and short-legged. The drones are smaller than in any other race examined, thus differing from the relative position of the workers.
The Egyptian honeybee is not well adapted to winter in temperate zones. From drawings dated from 2600 BC, it is known that this was the first bee managed by men, using a technique that is still practiced in Egypt today.
It has a long history in apiculture, since colonies of this bee were shipped to Germany, England, and North America as early as the 1860s. In Berlin, an ‘acclimatization association’ was founded in 1864 with the special aim of importing bees from Egypt.
The reason for this zeal in the apicultural world was the conspicuous color pattern of this bee: shining white, ‘silvery’ hair on the thorax and abdomen stripes and bright copper-yellow bands with shining black margins on the abdomen. This race is both beautifully colored and considered to have good behavior for apiculture.
