 Brother Adam (born Karl Kehrle in 1898 in Germany, died in 1996) was put in charge of the Abbey's beekeeping in 1919, and began extensive breeding work creating the honeybee now known as the Buckfast bee.Brother Adam had to replenish the bee colonies as 30 of the monastery's 46 colonies had been wiped out by a disease known at the time as the Isle of Wight Disease, but later called "Acarine", all the bees that died were of the indigenous Old British Black bee (a now extinct British strain of the A. m. mellifera).The 16 hives that survived were of Italian Ligurian origin (A. m. ligustica).