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This happens every two years. Apimondia is a world-wide convention with beekeepers from
all over the world. There are lectures, some scientific and some less so,
workshops, posters, practical classes, over 100 international exhibitors and the
World Honey Show. It
will never be as close and accessible as this again. If
you don’t want to pay for the whole convention go to Dublin and go into
ApiExpo for the day. Worth
every penny! There
are a great many swarms around, make sure you are in a position to collect any
in your vicinity that could be a nuisance to people. If there is any rape in your supers get them off and extract them swiftly, it seems to be setting quicker than ever this year. There have been two apiary meetings this month, both on experimental days. The first one on Saturday the 14th coincided with the auction at Hartpury. Nevertheless enough people turned out for an interesting work through the colonies. One of them is fairly badtempered, so will no doubt be dealt with in time. We witnessed a queen being balled, and for those of you, who have read the book that says they suffocate by balling, this queen was definitely being stung by her wretched offspring. The Wednesday afternoon meeting was also fairly well attended. John had to collect a swarm when he arrived but there was no evidence to show that it had originated in any of the apiary colonies. The afternoon was warm the bees were well behaved (apart from the b-t colony) and the beekeepers enjoyed themselves. Please make a note of the two meetings for next month. One
is in the evening, a Wednesday, I’m sorry we couldn’t manage the Thursday.
It is the day after the longest day so there should be enough daylight. 1 What not to do when doing a shook swarm. Don’t leave the old frames lying around in the garage while you have a
cup of tea and wonder how to dispose of them. They are full of brood, most of
which is waiting for this window of opportunity to hatch out. 2 When melting the wax in your kitchen oven make sure that the thermostat
does not decide to stop working. Overheated wax will burn. Apart from these warnings Ken’s shook swarm is doing well. He has also
performed a pyrethroid resistance test that showed that all his varroa succumbed
to the treatment. Swarming is the focus
of my attention at the moment. Ken reports that he has had very few phone calls
reporting swarms. He thought the weather had been too bad. But I have heard
otherwise. It seems to me that the weather has been bad, but on the odd good day
every colony in the area has taken the opportunity to act, on the realisation
that it might not get another chance. Thinking about it we really don’t know
much do we. We can give them teenage monarchs and
all the space and ventilation, possible, but they will still want to
swarm, it’s such fun. And who are we to prevent them? How much damage do we do
interfering, moving things around, taking out special cells, introducing
unwanted cells, splitting them in half? The sound of a piping queen is
thrilling, but what are we upsetting just by being there? Are we preventing some
sort of control, are we actually initiating an unwanted reaction? There is no
control to the experiment. We do not know what would have happened if we
hadn’t been there at that time. Reading the latest BKQ there are reports of
swarm management from different countries. Most people seem to rely very heavily
on removing all queen cells and/or capturing all swarms. So what’s new? The sensible goal is
to have a variety of bee that is reluctant to swarm (apparently Carniolan bees
are known to be prone to swarming, and their hybrids even more so), so we are
back to what I am going to call selection rather than breeding queens. There is
a snag. It is very difficult to persuade non-swarming bees to make queen cells.
I speak from experience. Talking about BKQ I
hope you have all read the letters to the editor where our very own George
Kinman is in print on one of his favourite topics. Bridget Hartpury
2005 It
was as always a good day if not for the 'lots' then for the meeting of other
beekeepers. The weather was fine but with a cold wind and I took my top
coat just in case. As usual the
lots were lined up in the courtyard surrounded by out buildings providing
shelter from the wind and it proved to be very pleasant without a top coat. Karl
Showler, Arthur Taylor and Maisemore had trade stands and their comfort could
not have been so good seeing that they were sited in the arch way to the
courtyard and had little protection from the wind.
Their presence should have been advantageous to the bidders but still
some lots went for more than their prices. I
took advantage of the phone number in the last newsletter and rang Jeff Bee at
Hartpury college to reserve two lots for some wax I was taking.
Had I wanted to leave early it would have proved useful to be in the
first 150 lots and as they were among the earlier lots of wax they were well
placed to get a competitive bid. The
auction did not start until 12 o'clock so the usual lecture was ideal to fill in
until that time. The speaker was Peter Tomkins and he spoke of his beekeeping
career from a lad until today and his association with Rothamsted.
He spoke fluently on his subject with no notes except whatever help from
his slides. From our point of view
the slide projection was spoiled by the lighting in the lecture room, even so he
battled on and it was quite an interesting talk. The
auction started promptly and the auctioneer never stopped till after 3.30
clearing some 400 odd lots. This
prompts me to comment on the principle, when there are several consecutive items
that are the same, then the last bidder has the option of taking all or part of
the following lots at the same price. When he declines the option the auctioneer
starts again and invariably the price reached will be lower, which tempts one
not to take the first lot and hope that the winner does not exercise his option. Of course this is not always so and today there were
instances where the second lot realized more than the first. For instance there
were two new National nucleus hives the first for £11 the second for £25, both
prices were good, Arthur Taylor's price was £45. The last bidder for my wax
took both lots at £2.45 per pound although I am not sure what commission I will
have to pay. There were several wax
lots that went at a similar price and the last bidder took all options. Several
uncapping trays went for £50, a small 'Easy Bees' made £100 where his larger
unit failed to meet the reserve. I
was speaking to a man who commented on the 'Easy Bees' tray he had tried one and
dropped it in favour of the Pratley He
said they were more difficult to empty and much heavier in handling. It sounded like the 'Easy Bees' unit was meant for a
permanent site and more regular use.
I thought the star buy was the nine frame stainless extractor, even
without its legs for £190. Live
bees were there, the college nucleus went for £95, two others were £75 but
five nuclei with caged queens did not reach a £95 reserve.
I could go on and on but I will finish with some comments on the variety
of new open mesh floors. The first
were adaptations to a standard floor, the last bidder took the lot, £13.
The second group were in pairs, a complete floor but no monitoring
drawer, first lot £22, the second £20. The
third group was complete in cedar including a drawer £24.
Finally a nicely built W.B.C. in cedar £40 What did I buy? In a moment of weakness I held up my hand for an antique smoker £4, you know the small one with a vertical conical smoke nozzle. Why did I buy it? To show the next beginners class what not to buy. George Kinman 3 book reviews taken from the Guardian—
interestingly different from those in the bee-press. Spirit of the
beehive Robbing the Bees:
A Biography of Honey -The Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World by Holley Bishop __Free
Press 324pp $24 13weetness &
Light: ~~_~.
~_ The Mysterious
History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis __Harmony
243pp $23 Letters From the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees,
Honey, and Humankind by_Stephen
Buchmann with Banning Repplier_Bantam_275pp
$24 Reviewed by Adrian Higgins That buzz on the horizon isn't a swarm of bees, it's a
swarm of books about bees. Holley Bishop's publicist describes her Robbing
the Bees as "the first comprehensive biography" of
honey and its creators. I suspect the assertion might be as welcome as a bear in
the beeyard to Hattie Ellis, author of Sweetness and Light, and Stephen Buchmann, author of Letters From the
Hive. This surfeit of spring titles may be a nightmare for
the competing authors. But for beekeepers or people who are simply wise enough
to recognise and love the honeybee, this attention is all
to the good. Apis
mellifera is in
need of a few champions. Misunderstood or even overlooked, the honeybee (along
with other insects) provides one‑third of our food supply through the
"powers of pollination", as Ellis reminds us. Bishop notes that the
California almond crop, which is three‑fourths of the world's supply, is
produced because growers rent more than a million hives at blossom time. In recent years new pests have decimated managed and
wild colonies, made beekeeping an onerous task and reduced the ranks of hobbyists
and small‑time commercial apiarists. Pests, chemical poisoning and loss of
habitat represent some of the alarms raised in each of the books. Moreover the
authors hope that celebrating the bee will lead more of us to seek to nurture
it. Buchmann, a bee scientist and erstwhile beekeeper, has
spent a lifetime around the insects. He still ponders the hexagonal cells of the
honeycomb. "How the geometric combs are constructed by the workers without
a supervisor, blueprints, rulers, or protractors remains a mystery" he
writes in Letters From the Hive. Beekeepers
and honey plunderers have been fascinated for thousands of years by the sight of
a returning worker bee dancing in the dark hive, but it was not until a few
decades ago that the Austrian scientist Karl von Frisch began to unlock the
secret of the dance. There are various accounts of this in each of the
books. The direction and vigour of the bee's movements serve as a roadmap
directing the other bees to a source of fresh nectar. From the bee's gyrations,
writes Hattie Ellis in Sweetness &
Light, co‑workers can discern the direction, distance, quality and
quantity of a nectar source: "not bad for ‘just' an insect." Indeed,
as Ellis notes, "the discovery that these tiny creatures could perform such
complex mental feats was a complete surprise to many, and opened human eyes to
the capabilities of the animal world." Ellis's
prose is welcoming even if her project ‑ seeking to tie together millennia
of human contact with the bee ‑ necessarily spreads like spilled honey.
She and the other authors help remind us how dependent we are on the bee, not
just for pollination but to provide comforts we now take for granted ‑
illumination, by way of the candle, and sweetness. Ellis does not profess to be
a beekeeper and yet does a creditable job of explaining the bee and what this
little striped wonder has done for us and
our ancestors. I am struck by Ellis's account of three men. In
17th‑century Holland San Swammerdam made his mark looking at bees under
the newly discovered microscope and recorded them in anatomical drawings that
remain scientifically valuable. The second figure is a Philadelphia clergyman,
Lorenzo Langstroth, the father of modern beekeeping who in the 1840s discovered
that the bee always kept a space of 3/8ths of an inch at various points to allow
the free flow of the hive's inhabitants. This led to the invention, little
changed today, of a hive of neatly hanging frames with bee spaces ‑ a hive
that keepers can readily enlarge and dismantle in order to harvest honey and examine
the colony without destroying it. Then there is Brother Adam (1898‑1996),
who spent most of his life at the Benedictine Buckfast Abbey in England raising
new and stronger strains of queen bees and in doing so helped repopulate
sickened hives. Apis
mellifera is the
most efficient and productive species of bee, but other bees have been
harvested for years. Buchmann begins Letters
From the Hive with a gripping account of his forays in Malaysia with ethnic
Malays, hunting honey from a huge, beautiful but menacing bee called Apis
dorsata. The hunts have changed little in centuries and require assent from
the sultan, prayers to the forest spirits and a great deal of courage. At night
harvesters climb trees to plunder colossal hives that hang like inverted
rainbows beneath the branches. The bees themselves form a protective cover of
the comb, larvae, pollen and honey. To dislodge them, the hunter uses a torch to
generate sparks, which the bees chase to the jungle floor, leaving the hive
unguarded. Buchmann's book, written with Banning Repplier, brings
a more scientific insight to the subject than the others do. But the accounts of
bee‑hunting rituals at the beginning of the book are so spellbinding that
the subsequent chapters about bee history fall flat. Still, plough through the
recipes and you get to appendices where Buchmann's scientific knowledge once
more engages the reader. In her introduction to Robbing the Bees Holley Bishop tells of fleeing New York for a farm
in Connecticut where she meets a beekeeper, takes a swig of honey, and has her
bee epiphany. This formula of nature rescuing the crisis‑ridden rat racer
is as old as the hills. Luckily Bishop quickly jettisons the genre and gets down
to writing about bees in a highly entertaining way. She does this by weaving
together the by‑now obligatory story of the bee in human history with her
own hobby of beekeeping and the story of a small‑town commercial
beekeeper in the Florida Panhandle. These are all commendable books. I started out thinking
Bishop's would be a drone, but it turned out to be the queen. The RAF Museum,
Hendon 20th, 21st, and 22nd
October 2005 Please support the show. We need entries, we need visitors and we need members. · £10 membership will give you free admission on all three days of the Show, and no entry fee for exhibits. · Very simple to get to the Show, easy access from the M1 and M25, nearest underground station is only a short walk away. · Ample free parking onsite. · Excellent Lecture Convention in a superb auditorium. · Northern Bee Books and EH Thorne will transport entries to and from the Show. · An improved arrangement for booking in entries. Membership forms can be acquired from: The Revd HF Capener. 1 Baldric Road, Folkestone, Kent CT20 2NR Telephone: 01303 254579 Email: showsec@zbee.com |
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.
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