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Charity Number : 1014600
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GBKA Registered
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If
anyone would like a lovely part-time beekeeping job
please would you get in touch with John Verran.
a
part-time seasonal bee inspector to cover parts of Gwent during the season. It
is tremendous fun and very rewarding and you get paid for doing it !! 01656
724249
If
you have not yet paid your subscription then you will find another membership
renewal form included with this newsletter. If you do not wish to rejoin don’t
worry it will be the last you hear of us. Thank you to everyone who paid
promptly. Heft
your hives to make sure they have adequate stores. If they are light feed candy,
avoid syrup until any chance of frost
is past. Watch
out for storm/woodpecker/mouse or other damage in your apiary. I
had decided to try using oxalic acid as an alternative treatment for varroa.
Although it is not registered in this country for use as a treatment for varroa
(and is unlikely ever to be), its use is well documented and reliable recipes
abound. However when I did a check on the number of mites dropping out of the
cluster it was so low that I decided
to leave them alone. Any time now the queen will start laying again and the
window for this type of treatment will be closed. Also of course as soon as she
starts to lay the number of mites will increase. I do find this balancing act
very tricky. There is still a lot in the bee press about the problem of badly
mated queens. Now I read that it is due to the lack of sufficient numbers of
drones as we are all selectively culling the drone brood in our pest management
regime. It is important that when the time for queen mating comes we make sure
that there are LOTS of drones ready, especially ones from our favourite
colonies. (Unless of course that is the colony that you wish to raise queens
in). It
is worth doing a check on mite mortality for other reasons. When you remove the
screen to look for the mites you can also gather quite a lot more about the
state of the colony. For instance there were a number of mouse droppings on one
of mine, I looked at the front and found the entrance block had half come out. Bridget
It
is very nice that we have so many Associate Members, it means that although you
haven’t any bees you are interested in beekeeping, which is wonderful. Please
remember that as an Associate you are not covered by BDI disease insurance nor
the BBKA third party insurance. Hartpury
Beekeeping courses this year Introduction
to Beekeeping
2 day courses. Cost £90
From 1st April and from 10th
June Beekeeping
Improvers
2 day course. Cost £90
From 29th April Beekeeping
for All
5 day courses. Cost
£160 From
17th April and 17th July Queen
Rearing 1day
course Cost £40
20th May Some
price concessions are available. Other
courses are 6 one day modules of ‘Improving your honey yield’ to be
taught over two years and a one day course on Beeswax and candle making. No
dates are given for these yet. If
you are interested application forms are available
by contacting Hartpury College: Telephone 01452 702132 For
more detail go to their website
www.hartpury.ac.uk The
Stewarton Hive.
Will
Messenger at Goytre. In
1819 Robert Ker, a cabinet maker, designed the Stewarton and named it after the
town in which he lived. It consisted of tiers of octagonal boxes 14” wide and
7-8” deep with glass inspection windows opposite each other, and nine
removable top bars screwed down. Shallow octagonal boxes, only 4” deep were
added on top as the season progressed. They were widely used in Scotland until
1882. The original design is very like one done by Christopher Wren when he was
a student 100 years earlier, and that resembles the design of John Evelyn’s
observation hive mentioned by Samuel Pepys in 1665. Hodsock
Priory boasts a working Stewarton but when Will opened it he found that it has
been tampered with inside to enable it to take removable frames. The original
Stewarton, and the ones that Will Messenger has made and uses, have fixed
screwed down top bars, and windows in the supers front and back. The entrance is
in the bottom box not the side of the floor. Sliders of wood between the top
bars allow the access of the bees upwards to be restricted. If they can only
access the upper boxes at the edges of the octagon it restricts the queen to the
bottom boxes and the workers can store honey above. They build in the supers
from the edges inwards, so if you look through the windows you can see when to
add another super.
Will brought with him an empty hive that we could inspect. It is indeed a
cabinet makers work of art. He says if you tried to price it, it would cost at
least £400 to make. Eight corners to each box make it extremely strong. He also
showed us some slides of a working hive. The shallow boxes used as supers were
stuffed with honey comb hanging down from the top bars which had been prime had
actually identified the ‘bee space’. In fact Will was a bit dismissive
about the Rev., he doesn’t think he found out any thing
new. The important fact about these combs is that they were
not attached to the sides of the box. Why not? He thinks it
could be because the top bars are screwed in place and are absolutely
rigid. This
is a photo of the Stewarton in the IBRA collection, I lifted it
from their virtual museum CD. My photo of Will’s doesn’t show
as many layers nor the fanciful landing block. John
Evelyn’s apparently had two entrances, there are bees depicted
coming out of an entrance in the roof like a chimney. I found
it all absolutely fascinating. Bridget Autumn Newsletter from John Verran Despite a dreadful start to the year, with many colonies lost last
winter, in the final analysis 2005 was a good year for bees and honey
production. In recent years Seasonal Bee Inspectors have started work a couple of
weeks earlier than was the custom, so in early April it quickly became evident
that serious colony losses had been experienced last winter. The NBU asked for an estimate of numbers. From my own experience, and
from talking with other beekeepers, I guessed that about 25% of colonies had
died out. However, as information built from inspections carried out, I was
forced to revise that figure to a 33% loss. Judging from my own losses the main problem seemed to be poorly mated and
failed queens and that appeared to be general. The high mortality could be
explained by the usual troubles with mice and starvation etc. with failing
queens added on top. The season got going rather slowly, not helped by poor weather early in
the year, but eventually the nectar started to flow, the bees produced queen
cells and either swarmed or enabled beekeepers to make up losses. Reports from around Wales indicate a good honey crop, mostly a light
honey that is probably from clover and bramble. The heather also proved productive this year and it seems that the season
has extended well into October. Many beekeepers have returned supers for
cleaning only to find the bees refilling them. SBIs have reported that queens have mated well during the summer and that
hives are heavy going into the winter. Lets hope these good signs prove to be true as there are forecasts of a
severe winter ahead. Synopsis of Foul Brood occurring in Wales during 2005.
For
the second year in succession foul brood diseases in Wales have been driven to
new lows. Total
cases of foul brood disease have been reduced to 22 cases of AFB affecting 13
beekeepers and 10 cases of EFB affecting 3 beekeepers. (see table 1) Table
1 - Foul Brood Statistics 2003 – 2005 2003
62 cases of AFB and 20 cases of EFB 2004 40
cases of AFB and 19 cases of EFB 2005 22 cases of AFB and 10 cases of EFB There
was a peak of 62 cases of AFB and 20 cases of EFB in 2003 and that, I hope, will
remain as a peak. An
interesting point in those figures is that whilst the number of colonies with
AFB is down to 22 the number of beekeepers affected is up to 13. This
can, in part, be explained by the fact that a few beekeepers experienced annual
recurrence of AFB in their colonies. A big effort in conjunction with the NBU
significantly improved their disease control in 2004 and they have recorded no
cases of AFB this year. This
year, foul brood is to be found in scattered locations with only one or two
colonies affected and no centres with large numbers of infected colonies.
Resistant mites have continued to spread to new areas and this is likely
to be an accelerating process. I have attached a map showing
the latest information but regular updates are made on the NBU website where you
will find interesting information on Foul Brood, Varroa and “Exotics”. Information from bee
inspectors in Devon and Cornwall, where resistant mites are universal, reveal
that winter losses were even more severe than in areas without resistant mites. I know it seems obvious but
there is no point in using Apistan or Bayvarol once resistant mites have arrived.
Further information can be gained from our website: Anyone wanting to get this newsletter on email please
send your email address to: John
Verran RBI
Wales Tel:-
01656 724249 Mob:-
07855 543851 e mail j.verran@csl.gov.uk Ken
has given me a cutting from the Guardian about this subject. Most flying insects
flap their wings with long sweeping strokes beating over a 165 degree arc at no
more than 200 times a second. However bees (I think bumble as well as honey)
flap their wings furiously up and down covering an arc of only 90 degrees at 240
times a second. However if you make the bees fly in a mixture of helium and
oxygen the bees switched their flight pattern to one resembling other insects
with a stroke covering an arc of a 140 degrees. They think that the unusual
style developed as a response to the different demands made of a flying bee,
when laden with nectar or pollen she can weigh twice as much as when she starts
to forage. (Actually the article said when laden with pollen or larvae but I am
not sure when bees fly about with larvae except to jettison them out of the
front door if they aren’t right). No explanation of the reversal in thin air,
nor why it should be advantageous to have the small arc. But it seems right that
if you flap harder you get more lift.
Bridget Solution
to Christmas Crossword This
year generated one correct solution to the crossword. It came from Brian Harris
who earns congratulations and a prize. Rattus
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