BBKA Basic Assessment

Barring the odd martial arts contest over the past few years my Sunday mornings have been spent sleeping in after making the most of a Saturday night. This Sunday after an evening of pubbing, clubbing and a night of not really enough sleep I awoke to the noise of my phone bleeping an alarm which was swiftly followed by my cat jumping on the bed to investigate this rare Sunday morning occurance. Pretty as she is she's a bit prone to mood swings which regularly result in someone bleeding (me, guests, vets, passers by, housemates, basically anyone she can reach..) so her arrival was an extra incentive to get up despite my banging head and a hankering for sleep.

Shortly afterwards with a hangover and a Ramones CD for company I set off for a village out near Doncaster where I was going to take the BBKA Basic Assessment. It's basically a practical and oral examination of beekeeping skills and knowledge. The syllabus for the assessment is pretty huge but it's all stuff anyone who's successfully kept bees for a year should know really. It covers everything from hive hardware, bee life cycle, behaviour and diseases to honey extraction and labelling. You can take the assessment after you've kept bees for at least 12 months. You can keep bees all your life and never actually take it but it does give you a little credibility as a beekeeper and is often a condition to be met if you ever want to keep bees on an allotment (assuming you're lucky enough to have an allotment association who will actually let you). I chose to do it after an email from the Beverley Beekeepers Association mentioned that time was running out for people wanting to take it. After a phone call, a few emails and a cheque for fifteen quid -yep an actual cheque, an olde worlde money transfer! I was down to go meet an assessor at 11am on the Sunday. Two other people would be doing the assessment at the same time. After a brief email conversation with the assessor he kindly lent me a bee suit to use for the occasion. I don't use one at home opting for either a cheap thin smock from fleabay or a hood and veil over a fleece and some old jeans. There are pros and cons to using a bee suit, a major pro is there's less chance of bees getting into it or stinging you through it as it goes over your clothing, a major con is they cost about £170 and if you go for a white one you look like your playing astronauts in your back garden. Despite having discovered fairly early on that bees are able to sting through denim and that skinny jeans means there's enough of a gap for a bee to drop into your welly I've held off buying one so far.

Guided by voices, well the voice of my satnav, I reached the village. Having found the street I had a little trouble finding the house till I spotted the Honey For Sale sign and an old WBC hive in the garden. Once the other two candidates arrived, one from Bradford and one from somewhere in the countryside we got back into our vehicles and followed the assessor to his apiary. He had 14 hives tucked away in a very hidden location invisible from the road -it's a good idea to have your apiary hidden these days because there are people out there who'll happily steal your bees, equipment and honey. The assessor had 8 different assessments and we picked them at random without knowing what was on each.

We did the assessment one at a time so I waited in the car till it was my turn. Whilst Joey Ramone sang Bonzo Goes to Bitburg I was gemming up on the life cycles of the three bee castes. At one point I looked out of the window and saw the biggest dragonfly I've ever seen. According to a few online resources the biggest dragonflies we have are 80mm long but I'm sure this thing's long green body exceeded that -perhaps it was particularly large owing to a diet of my assessor's honeybees.

When it was my turn to do the practical portion I put my phone onto silent and turned off vibrate -an urgent buzzing sensation from your pocket isn't really what you need when you have an open hive in front of you, I popped on the borrowed suit, my wellies and some latex gloves then had to light my smoker. The assessor gave me some hessian for this, I've never used that before but after a false start it lit and smoked as expected. We had a short walk from our vehicles to the bees and when we got there I was surprised to find the whole place carpeted. OK it was a slightly muddy collection of carpet pieces but it was an effective weed barrier which I'm guessing was probably it's purpose.

Having lit my smoker the next part of the assessment was to identify the hive parts. Starting from the ground up I pointed out the stand, hive floor with small landing board, reduced entrance, brood box, queen excluder, super, roof and added that there was probably a crown board under the roof. The next thing to do was open the hive and see what was in the brood box -spoiler alert: it was bees. After a little smoke near the entrance and the roof I removed the roof and laid it on the floor. Sure enough there was a crown board on the super. We weren't going into the super tho so I removed that and put it on the inverted roof. This was a National hive which has a brood box internally smaller than my own Commercial which meant the frames were smaller and lighter than I'm used to working with. The normal way to examine a frame of bees is to lift it by the lugs at either end and manipulate it by these, however a commercial has very short lugs making this a bit impractical so I tend to use a tool called a frame grip to manipulate them. This was actually the first time I did a manipulation without the grip since attending the course in 2010.

I went to remove the first frame opting, as I always do, for the one furthest from me which as I was standing at the back of the hive was the one nearest the entrance. However the assessor stopped me and said that whilst there was nothing wrong with doing that it was actually easier to start from the back of the hive as the older flying bees returning to the hive would initially go onto those first few frames and if they weren't there would be more likely to start buzzing about and it was the older bees who'd be more aggressive. So I started at the back of the hive instead. The first thing I noticed was these bees were far better behaved than mine. The assessor bred his own queens and seems to have done a pretty good job of getting very placid bees.

Working through the hive whilst answering questions I pointed out workers, capped brood, uncapped brood, pollen, uncapped honey, capped honey and something looking a little like a grain of cat litter. This was actually chalk brood, a virus that affects uncapped brood effectively mummifying them. I didn't see the queen but that wasn't a surprise, I also had trouble finding any eggs, think I managed to see two in the whole hive. The assessor said he reckoned the queen would be slowing down laying towards the end of the season -although having just checked my colonies all three still have plenty of new eggs, perhaps it's down to environmental differences after all mine are fairly protected from wind and in a city which will be slightly warmer than the out apiary in the countryside.

After closing up the hive we drove back to the assessors house for the next two parts of the assessment, assembling a frame and the question and answer session. A couple of weeks ago I'd emptied my burnt out smoker fuel into a bucket to discover five minutes later it'd re ignited and melted my bucket (note to self: buy a metal bucket) so when we got to his house I decided not to leave the smoker in the car as I had visions of it relighting and returning to find my vehicle a charred molten mess. I pulled the smoker out and left it out of sight on the tarmac of the road where it couldn't do too much damage.

I was first to assemble a frame, basically knocking five bits of wood, a sheet of wax and 11 gimp pins together. Being a hot day the foundation was quite soft which didn't really help but I managed to put a serviceable frame together. The last questions were mainly about diseases, viruses and other pests particularly American Foulbrood and European Foulbrood both of which if found a beekeeper is required by law to notify the local bee inspector about. If your hive is found to have AFB the bees and boxes need destroying by fire to stop it affecting other colonies, if your hive has EFB it may be treatable in the early stages - any beekeepers in a local association will have insurance against this. Other things we legally have to contact the local Bee Inspector about are the discovery Small Hive Beetle and Tropilaelaps mites -at present it's believed neither are in the UK but they'll arrive at some point.

I won't get the assessment result for about 6 weeks so don't really know if I've passed or not yet but the assessor said he didn't see that any of us had had any problems with it so fingers crossed. I then drove the fifty odd miles back home with my car windows open because the smell of a recently used smoker isn't something you want to be sharing a car with, especially if you're feelig a little fragile from a heavy night out.

It was actually a fairly useful experience in that as well as being tested we got to discuss things which meant a learning opportunity. The assessor said he didn't usually use smoke on his bees but kept it handy in case it was needed. When I did my hive inspections today I used very smoke at all and began my inspection from the back and found all three colonies far easier to work with than they usually were so it was worth doing just for that really :)

4/8/2012 Edit: I passed. Found out a lot earlier than expected. Haven't told the bees yet but they should be relieved to hear I apparently know what I'm doing.