GBKA  Registered Charity Number : 1014600

Craft Fair

This is a really fun craft fair with the best craft people.

You can get all your Christmas presents early.

 And you can have a cup of tea/coffee/soup

with

 cake and sandwiches.

Are You Doing This?

Heft your hives to make sure they have sufficient stores, make a note of the lighter ones, they may need a top up in the spring.

Unless you are running your hives on open floors remove entrance blocks and fit mouse guards, they need good ventilation for the winter.

Weight the hives with rocks or tie them down against winter gales.

REMOVE APISTAN AND BAYVAROL STRIPS

Helpful hints

Another one from Janet:

Use mapping pins for attaching mouse guards. They are long and have large heads and anything that will prevent that fumbling with gloves and dropping drawing pins in the grass is an enormous benefit.           (Janet’s John says please remember to return the pliers, used last month, to the toolbox)

One from BKQ: to find a wasp nest dust some of the wasps with flour  at dusk and watch them fly home (they fly very slowly half the speed of a bee.)

June James Trophy

            This beautiful cut glass trophy is awarded each year at the AGM to the person who, in the opinion of the members of the GBKA, has done the most to enhance the art of beekeeping during the previous year.

            Please telephone Jill on 01873 880625, or Janet on 01291 690331 with your suggestion.  Their decision is final.

(They are both away at the moment but Janet should be back by the middle of the month.)

The Small Hive Beetle

          There is a rather long review about Aethina tumida, or the small hive beetle in the latest edition of Bee World.  The more I read about it the more likely it seems that we shall not escape its attention. The worrying thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a very satisfactory control method. In the USA they use  a 10% coumaphos plastic strip, it is only effective in warm weather and mustn’t be used with honey supers present. The main thing is to maintain strong, unstressed healthy colonies and hope they can defend themselves. In case some larvae have survived and pupated in the ground near the hives there is a case for treating the soil regularly to kill them (but this really is bolting the door after ….)

The size of the adult beetle is 5.7mm long by 3.2mm wide.  What looks most promising is to find a one-way beetle trap (entrance too small for bees) which is placed within the hive and can be charged with something attractive to beetles.        

Comment

Not always, but usually, I practice what I preach. So before I put in the Bayvarol to treat my bees I did monitor the natural mortality. Because there are not usually very many varroa present I have a method of picking them up as I find them and putting them on one side in a row, and then counting them when I can’t find any more. This year, maybe because there were more than I have ever had before, they kept either walking up the needle that I use to pick them up, or else walking out of line when I had put them down. It was very irritating. I had to make sure I put them on their backs, they don’t seem to be able to turn over, like some beetles. But this must make the count wrong because if I include these lively ones the total cannot be deemed ‘mort’, it can only be called ‘fallen’.

John Phipps, the editor of Beekeepers Quarterly, reports that it has been a bad season for honey in Greece and goes on to say that “whilst lack of moisture prevented us from getting a crop of honey here, in many parts of Europe and New Zealand too much rain has been the problem for beekeepers with bees in some cases having to be moved due to the risk of flooding. Now Australia and a large part of Africa are threatened with huge plagues of locusts—so much so that aerial spraying with insecticide will be needed to control them—with obvious dangers for the beekeeping industry.” I think that shows our poor honey year in a different light.

An article on Honeybee Poisoning in the same edition reports a case from Poland. Bees that had been caught in a farmer’s spray lost their distinctive hive aroma and were rejected by the house bees on their return home laden with pollen and nectar. The hive was weakened but the larvae were protected from poisoning.                     Bridget

Whilst the domains gbka.co.uk & gbka .org .uk are owned by G Cole.  The web pages under these domains are published for  the Gwent Beekeepers association and its members ,  in order to publicise our association's news, aims, activities, and the art of beekeeping.