A lecture and some paperwork

This month I went to a Beverley Beekeeper's Association meeting. Local association meetings are actually useful resources for new beekeepers wanting to improve their knowledgebase, there's free lectures on bee related topics and a library of books and DVDs for members to borrow. You can also meet other beekeepers, if you like, and even ask them stuff if you want to.

I was a little late tho. The meetings used to be at Woodmansey Village Hall but now they're at Molescroft Pavillion. Lacking in signage and set at 90 degrees from the road and with the car park entrance apparently lost in a confusing little estate of cul-de-sacs it's not an easy place to find. For anyone trying to find the place Woodhall Way, Beverley, is an "L" shaped street with the Pavillion is just inside the right angle next to a kids play area. Actually I've just noticed the Beverley Beekeepers website is back online and has a map showing you exactly where the place is with a big orange dot, so no excuses of not being able to find the place again.

I wandered in about a half hour after the allotted start time catching the end of a raffle. Lucky for me the chap doing the lecture, a Regional Bee Inspector from the York area, had initially gone to the Association's old site delaying him long enough for me to find the place. The audience were generally older than myself. To be honest the stereotype of beekeeper's being older people does have some truth to it which is quite strange when you consider that it's a pursuit that involves working outside, lots of heavy lifting, keen visual observation and a lot of online resources. I guess today's kids are all too busy sitting about indoors courting obesity. Actually now I think about it I went running with my lightly built nineteen year old housemate and was surprised to find she couldn't keep up with me. I'm not even that good a runner. 8-/ Ah well a health timebomb waiting to happen for the nation there then.

Anyway back to the meeting. The lecture was called "Making A Good Start" and was all about treating bee pests such as the ubiquitous varroa mite, still the biggest threat to honeybees, a number of diseases and virii, and woodpeckers.

Regarding varroa thymol based treatments, such as Api Life Var which I use, can be 90-99% effective, I hadn't realised it was actually that good. Organic acids like Oxalyic Acid I applied last month are a good option too but only when the hive has no brood. Normally about 85% of the varroa mites in a hive will be tucked up safe and sound with the bee larvae they're feeding on so treatments like organic acids and dusting with icing sugar only affect the mites left they come into contact with which if there's brood is about 15%. Dusting with icing sugar only affects about 10% of the mites it comes into contact with so if there's a normal level of brood it only affects about 1.5% of the mites in the colony -unless of course there's no brood such as with a recently collected swarm, and it can be repeated a nuber of times

There's other biotechnical measure too such as  trapping mites but to me that looks a little labour intensive and means losing three weeks worth of eggs laid. There's a method I currently use which is sacrificial drone brood. Basically you encourage the bees to make drone comb, the queen then lays eggs in it. Drone cells and larvae being bigger the mites find them 10 to 12 times more attractive than worker cells and go into them. Once sealed the beekeeper comes along and cuts away the drone brood removing all the varroa mites in it. The weakness to that is there will be drone brood elsewhere in the hive containing some varroa and it leaves the 15% still on the bees -hence the need to use a number of techniques rather than just the one. Of course if you forget to cut out the drone comb you'll be boosting the number of mites in your colony significantly. Another method covered is the 'shook swarm' in which you shake your whole colony into another brood both with new frames and destroy the old comb and brood complete with mites -this should remove that 85% of mites sealed in the brood. However it does mean a high turnover of foundation and once again losing a lot of brood. For now I'll stick with the thymol, acid and open mesh floor and sacrificial drones.

There was some talk about diseases, complete with photos of infected brood and healthy brood too. The chap also briefly discussed woodpeckers. Not a problem for me at present but in a rural area they can devastate hives. To deter them beekeepers apply chicken wire to the outside of the hives. I'd always thought  this would mean making a sort of jacket around the hive stopping the bird being physically able to reach the wood but apparently if it's flush to the wood it still works as the woodpeckers don't like to land on it.

After the lecture there was an explanation of DEFRA's current open consultation Improving honey bee heath. Anyone involved or interested in bees, bee products, pollination or whatever can respond to the consultation. To read it just follow the link, if you want to respond the closing date is 9th March 2013.

Whilst discussing the consultation someone asked about bumble bees and solitary bees. I had no idea that green house fruit and veg growers regularly import foreign bumblebees to pollinate their crops. Apparently there's very little control over this but they are mean to destroy the imported bumble bee nests at the end of each season as a measure to stop them escaping into the wild and displacing our existing bumble bees and releasing exotic pests into the wild. The inspector said that one step often taken by foreign bumble bee exporters is to remove the queen and sell bumble bee colonies queenless to ensure they can't establish themselves over here. At present bumble and solitary bees which are also managed for use as pollinators don't fall within the remit of the same body as honeybees.

At the end of the meeting I was given my certificate for the BBKA Basic Assessment which I'd taken in the Summer. It's a rather attractive green print on white paper affair with an embossed gold bit in the bottom right. There's a lot going on in the green print with images of bees, olde worlde beehives, plants -probably plants we use and  bees pollinate, in the top there's the date the association was instiuted, 1874, and in the lower middle a union jack with an ancient looking beehive in the middle. To be honest it puts my various academic certificates to shame.

Examining Boards could learn from this.

Displayed on it is the name of the person who passed and two signatures from the BBKA as well as the beekeeper's town and date passed. I don't think I'd like some numpty to stick a scan of my signature on the internet so using the miracle of computing technology and software that was groundbreaking way back in the mid nineties, I've obscured the names and signatures but they're there on the original, honest. There was also a BBKA patch to go onto my beesuit. I probably shan't be using that because my sewing skills are a little rudimentary to put it mildly, that and I don't have a bee suit yet.

Retains it's colour in washes of 60 degrees Celcius!

Something I was also surprised to learn was that only about 50% of beekeepers in the country are actually in the BBKA. That's a little worrying given that one role of the associations is to promote standards in beekeeping. Whilst I don't currently make the most of the association's resources, lectures, library and whatnot I still feel it's worth being in the loop with the associations emails and the BBKA newsletter and I'd suggest it to anyone else too.