GBKA  Registered Charity Number : 1014600

APIARY

Please note the days for the apiary meetings. We are trying to find a day that will suit most people so we need feedback about what you prefer.

The meeting days and times may be changed from those on the blue card. Please check with the newsletter each month.

Are You Doing This?

Get your equipment together and tidy so that you are ready for anything when the weather improves.

Make sure you have enough supers.

Change and clean the floors.

Check for food.

BIBBA

If you have been inspired to try breeding quieter or darker or less swarmy bees you might like to join BIBBA.

It stands for:   Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association.

Their aim is “the conservation, restoration, study, selection and improvement of our native honeybees of Britain and Ireland.”

The membership secretary is;

Brian Dennis,

50 Station Road,

Cogenhoe

Northants

NN7 1LU

Membership is £15 a year, and there is a quarterly magazine “Bee Improvement

Today’s Tip

Les once said to me, “swarming starts six weeks after the dandelions flower”.

Letter from Nicola

Bill Turnbull, BBC Breakfast Time presenter, will run the London Marathon on 17 April 2005, on behalf of Bees for Development Trust.

The purpose is to raise funds to support the continued work of Bees for Development Trust, providing information and advice to beekeepers in developing countries.

We are asking you to support this worthwhile appeal. Please sponsor Bill’s fund-raising marathon effort: 26 miles 385 yards (42.2 kilometres) is a long way to run!

All we ask you to do is go to the website: http://www.justgiving.com/beekeepers and watch the sponsorship progress. Sponsoring Bill via the website is fast, secure and simple. All donations - however large or small – will be much appreciated, and used to support bees and beekeepers in developing countries.

Thank you,

Dr Nicola Bradbear

Bees for Development Trust

Troy, Monmouth

NP25 4AB, UK

Tel +44 (0)16007 13648

Fax +44 (0)16007 16167

E mail trust@beesfordevelopment.org

Website www.beesfordevelopment.org

IPM Day

Looking forward to hearing how to tackle pyrethroid resistant varroa?

Comment

After a gap of a couple of years when I have been unable to get to the WBKA convention it was very nice to be there again this year. Nothing much seems to have changed but it warms the heart to realise how friendly other beekeepers are, and to get the chance to talk things over with old as well as completely new friends.

I get the impression that many beekeepers have already integrated  methods  of varroa control, other than pyrethroids, on their own initiative. The one that seems to be most popular is oxalic acid, although there are more than two ways of using it. Unfortunately it is illegal to use it for varroa control in the UK (according to the winter 2005 edition of BKQ). A letter in the same edition of BKQ said that wider spacing of the brood  controlled varroa, exactly 45mm apart. I am looking forward to learning more about it on April 9th. Meanwhile I have stocked up on frames, queen excluders etc to be prepared for whatever it is we are going to be advised to do.

If you missed the Welsh convention I expect it is because you are going to the British one on April 16th, you will actually know what you need by then. I find it a bit tiresome that there may be three traders selling the same products, and there will be three different prices. Be warned and look before you spend. (At Stoneleigh there may be six different traders selling the same things, it will be even more difficult, the quality varies as well.)

Bridget

Gordon Hartshorn at Goytre

Unfortunately Gordon could not come on our normal meeting evening and so this was a week earlier than usual. I think this meant that some people missed a very important talk. Gordon feels very strongly that we should breed our own queens from our most desirable colonies and destroy all queens who give rise to unsatisfactory colonies. He has kindly provided us with a written account of one of his methods for rearing queens. Here it is:

FOR THE BEEKEEPER WHO HAS DIFFICULTY IN FINDING THE QUEEN

It is often difficult for new beekeepers to find the queen and consequently they fail to develop the habit of raising new queens.

The system described was developed in the fifties by a Yorkshire beekeeper named Wilson.

QUEEN REARING USING THE WILSON BOARD

The Wilson Board is a sheet of exterior plywood, the same dimensions as the brood box, i.e. National 18 1/8” x 18 1/8”, into which a hole is cut to allow warmth and colony odour to pass between the boxes, but without allowing the bees tongue to tongue contact. To achieve this both sides of the hole are covered with perforated zinc or wire gauze with at least eight wires to the inch (1/8” gaps). A small entrance of about ¾—1” maximum is made in one of the sides [Whenever producing split boards or if I were making the Wilson board I would use at least 7/8” square timber for the framing as this allows for some of the comb that is always built along the bottom bars of the frame, even then it may be necessary to cut some of this comb off before use.]

A normal crown board can easily be adapted for the purpose by cutting the entrance on one side and covering both feed holes with the mesh—remember on both sides.

Use of the Board

In the spring, when drones are present, take from brood box A the following, having first shaken or brushed all the bees back into the brood box:

·             2 frames of eggs and unsealed brood

·             2 frames of sealed brood

·             2 frames of food and pollen

The removed frames are placed into an empty brood box B, and the spare spaces in both brood boxes are filled with preferably drawn comb, or alternatively frames of foundation.

Place queen excluder on top of brood box A and onto this put brood box B. Leave for two hours.       During this time the nurse bees from the lower box will pass through the queen excluder to continue to nurture the developing brood in brood box B

After two hours reverse the situation. That is place brood box B on the floor and A above but this time with the Wilson board between them, the entrance facing the opposite direction to the normal floor. The flying bees from brood box A leave from the entrance of the Wilson board but return to the original entrance below, now a queenless colony. This brood box will soon contain bees of all ages, the young to prepare and develop a young larva into a new queen and the older bees to continue to forage for the colony.

Leave for ten days. Again reverse the boxes, adding over a queen excluder, a super if required to brood box A, then the Wilson board and brood box B.

There will be sealed queen cells in brood box B from which the new queen will emerge and mate.

After another fifteen days brood box B can be examined and a mated and laying queen should be present. For the beginner examination of this box should be easy as the majority of the older flying bees should be back in brood box A.

System as described by Gordon Hartshorn, Shropshire BKA

The Welsh Beekeepers Convention at Builth Wells

There were three lectures and much to be learnt from the exhibitors.

There did not appear to be as many people there as in previous years and I am told the suppliers did not sell as much as usual. The afternoon was very quiet—maybe it was something to do with that little ball game that everyone was getting excited about.

Here is a short resume of one of the lectures. I hope to have something about the history of varroa for next month.

Using the Welsh Native Bee - Albert Knight at Llanelwedd

Albert Knight’s talk was essentially a plea for common sense. He began by pointing out that Apis mellifera mellifera had received relatively little attention from bee breeders despite the fact that it is native to a large section of Europe extending from Scandinavia to the Pyrenees and from Ireland to the Ural Mountains. In contrast the subspecies carnica and ligustica had been cultivated and improved for many years so that today they are perceived to have attractive characteristics, thus prompting British beekeepers to import queens in the hope of improving local stock. The problem with this approach is that imported bees will never breed true, but will hybridise with local stock. Invariably, hybridisation leads to successive generations of bad tempered bees. It is now widely recognised that no matter how good the new breeds appear initially, they will invariably deteriorate with time because of this inevitable hybridisation process.

As a consequence, it is better to persevere with our native bees rather than look outside for improvement. Indeed, A mellifera mellifera has many positive attributes and can be readily selected for docility. There is thus an opportunity for improving our native bees. It is, of course, difficult for individuals to undertake ambitious selection routines and so there is an overriding case for beekeepers to work in small groups to create a platform for producing demonstrably better bees.

Albert recalled that he had visited Germany in the early 1980s and how he had been greatly impressed by the level of cooperation between beekeepers. It was here that he had been introduced to the concept of keeping breeding records, Indeed, the Germans had actually created a “stud book” recording the generations of their island queens.

This approach has been adopted by Albert and his Derbyshire colleagues. With 18 members, the group is relatively large. They meet every Sunday and devote significant effort to queen rearing. The most important asset is the mating site they have created which is populated by carefully selected drones. Though 75 miles distant, this site is sufficiently isolated to ensure that queens reared in their apiary and taken there will be mated by truly “native” bees. The site is carefully designed so that mated queens can find their way back to the right place and they do not have to run the gauntlet of flocks of migrating swallows. He drew attention to the fact that introducing new queens into an established colony was still considered hazardous, though the careful use of cages could minimise the risk to the new queen.

To distil more than 25 years experience in a single presentation is impossible. However, this talk provided us with more that just a little food for thought. It gave us a rationale for taking advantage of what we have and learning to bring out the best in our own bees rather than seeking improvement through importation.

Rattus

Major study issues damning verdict on GM crop                                 from The Guardian

The long-awaited final results of the GM trials for Britain’s biggest crop, winter oil seed rape, show that wildlife and the environment would suffer if the crop were grown—a verdict that in effect ends the biotech industry’s hopes of introducing GM varieties in the forseeable future.

The British government, which has been keen to introduce GM crops, now has the results of the world’s most comprehensive crop study, demonstrating that the GM varieties now on offer would be detrimental to the countryside. Bayer CropScience, the company that owns the patent on  the GM oil seed rape being tested, said afterwards that it would not go ahead with its application to grow the crop in Europe.

The trials, whose results were published on Monday by the Royal Society, began before the last election when the public backlash against the government’s plans to introduce GM crops stunned Downing Street.

Michael Meacher, the then environment minister, came up with a plan to get the government off the hook by running extensive trials of GM and non-GM crops to test their effects on bees, butterflies, bugs, weeds and other farmland wildlife in two farming regimes. Large fields were planted half with GM and half with conventional crops and the results compared. It was widely predicted that the GM regime, which uses fewer applications of herbicide than conventional crops, would benefit wildlife, but for three out of four crops tested the reverse was the case.

This week’s results were particularly significant because winter grown oil seed rape occupies 330,000 hectares of British fields and is the largest single crop, and the one from which farmers make most money.

The main finding was that broadleaf weeds such as chickweed, on which birds rely heavily for food, were far less numerous in GM fields than conventional fields.

The scientific results made it clear that it is not the GM crops that harm wildlife but the herbicide sprayed on them.

The European commission will this week reluctantly give the go ahead for other GM seeds and plants to be used commercially in Europe, and demand that Austria, Luxembourg, France, Germeny and Greece l lift national bans. Although aware that the decision will provoke a public backlash and be open to challenge, the 25 commissioners, according to documents seen by the Guardian, say that they have no alternative but to “fulfil their legal obligations” and force through a decision because a regulatory committee of national scientific experts and then ministers could not reach a majority decision.

Paul Brown and David Gow

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