Karl Kehrle

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Karl Kehrle, also known as Brother Adam (born in Mittelbiberach, Germany 3 August 1898 – died in Buckfast, England 1 September 1996) was a Benedictine monk and an authority on bee breeding, developer of the Buckfast bee.

Due to health problems he was sent by his mother at age 11 to Buckfast Abbey, where he joined the order (becoming Brother Adam) and in 1915 started his beekeeping activity. Two years before, a parasite that originated in Wight had started to extend over the country devastating all the native bees, and in 1916 it reached the abbey killing 30 of the 46 bee colonies. Only the Apis mellifera carnica and Apis mellifera ligustica colonies survived. Brother Adam then travelled to Turkey to find substitutes for the native bees.

In 1917 he created the first Buckfast strain, a very productive bee resistant to the parasite. On 1 September 1919 Adam was put in charge of the abbey's apiary, after the retirement of Brother Columban.

In 1925 and after some studies on the disposition of the beehives he installed his famous breeding station in Dartmoor, an isolated model to obtain selected crossings, which still works nowadays. From 1950 and for more than a decade Adam continued his gradual improvement of the Buckfast bee by analysing and crossing bees from places all over Europe, the Near East and the north of Africa.

In 1964 he was elected member of the Board of the Bee Research Association, which later became the International Bee Research Association. He continued his studies of the Buckfast bee and his travels during the 1970s and received several prizes, like the Order of the British Empire (1973) and the German Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974).

On 2 October 1987 he was appointed Honorary doctor by the Faculty of Agriculture of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences^[1] while in search of a bee on the Kilimanjaro mountains in Tanzania and Kenya, which deeply moved him and he saw as the official recognition of the scientific nature of his research. Two years later he was appointed Honorary doctor by the Exeter University in England.

On 2 February 1992 he resigned his position as Abbey Bee Keeper. After this Adam spent some months in his home town Mittelbiberach with his niece Maria Kehrle. From 1993 on he lived a retired, isolated life back in the Buckfast Abbey, and became the oldest monk of the entire Benedictine community. In 1995 at the age of 97 he retired to a nearby old people's home; Peter Donovan, Adam's former assistant who was in charge of the Abbey's bee genetic bank, announced his death on 1 September 1996.