This is May so swarm prevention should be started.

Provide supers as required, the first should be on by now. Check your super frames. If they are dirty they will provide second rate honey.

Replace old brood frames with new, in positions 2 and 10, not on the outside.

If room consider a brood box with foundation to be drawn for next year.

BEEKEEPING IS ALL ABOUT FORWARD PLANNING

The Sunday meetings are going ahead but if you would like to go to them please would you phone Eric first to confirm that it is OK and what precautions you need take.

01633 412617

A long article on the mason bee, osmia rufa, in one of the papers. Supposed to be very good for pollination.

It showed a nest box, or should it be called a hive, a big tube with a number of smaller cardboard tubes, obtainable from the Oxford Bee Company at £9.95 on 01509 261654. It is not clear how you attract this bee in the first place.

From the illustration it looked like a big plastic tube, 4in soil pipe, about 8 inches long with a number of small rolled up paper/ cardboard tubes inside, exact dimensions of these not clear.

I find it difficult to give much credit to their claim that "the polypropylene tube is environmentally friendly'. The actual tube may or may not be, but the production of the raw material certainly is not, an oil based product with significant use of energy and water in its production. It all depends on how one views it, as a finished product or by going back to fundamentals.

I see that Hurrans have some of these nests in their garden centre at Catsash, together with the booklet about the bee.

I picked up at the second hand bookshop in Monmouth "Bees & Wasps" by Jiri Zakradnik, one of number of Field Guides published by Silverdale Books from an original published in Prague, in English I hasten to add.

This to me is a very useful and factual book with 280 full colour illustrations of the order Hymenoptera, covering bees, wasps, ants, and various flies, first published in 1991 with English translation in 2000 (ISBN 1‑85605‑441‑1).

The text gives a useful short description of the insect with an indication whether it is found in the UK whilst the illustrations usually show males, females, workers and in many show their nests, wasps and ants, or perhaps the galls of the gall wasps. The section on bees is quite comprehensive. Even at £7.99 I think it is a bargain, and mine was discounted to £3.99, probably because it looks a little factual and the illustrations would be unattractive to some people. I would strongly recommend it for the library.

I wonder if all the troubles in the countryside culminating in the foot and mouth outbreaks, will modify the peoples ideal for retirement of a cottage in the country with roses round the door, or will the peasant in us all, especially strong in beekeepers I suspect, overcome the qualms.

Dick Sadler,

25/4/01,

There was a fine day in the midst of the rain we suffered most of last month and I went to see my bees. They were flying happily, bringing in bright yellow pollen and generally looking fit and well. However on going through them there was hardly a cell of stores - good all that solid rape has been eaten up - but there were loads of larvae needing to be fed and quite a lot of emerging brood. The next day I went back and gave them all some syrup. It then rained again for a few more days so I felt it had been justified. Now I can see rape from my windows so as soon as I’ve finished this newsletter I shall be out there giving them foundation to draw out.

I should like to make an interesting point about solar wax extractors. My mark (about) four Kinman extractor got up to 61^o C in the rather spasmodic sun last Sunday when I was sitting outside cleaning old frames and fitting them with new foundation. The old wax came streaming out. It is a wonderful way of dealing with rather rubbishy wax that otherwise would probably be consigned to the dustbin.

Bridget

If you have not yet paid for your membership but wish to remain a member of the GBKA please fill in the form and return to Allison.

The names of  those have not paid by the end of this month will be removed from the mailing list.

The Central Science Laboratory would like help in a survey they are doing on the presence of hygienic behaviour in bees.

Volunteers would be required to remove a small section of comb, containing about 100 cells, put it in the deep freeze overnight, replace it in the original frame, and then check it after 48 hours. All the necessary equipment and the details of the method would be provided. If when you read the protocol you decide not to do it then you can just return the materials.

Research shows that hygienic behaviour facilitates resistance to AFB and chalkbrood and they are trying to determine the geographic distribution of it and to correlate this with the incidence of EFB.

Contact Ruth Spinks 01904 462510 if you are willing to take part.

E-mail: R.Spinks@csl.gov.uk

This convention was very well attended by Gwent beekeepers. I think there were more there than we sometimes have at our own meetings! It was a good occasion to meet friends and exchange views and news - as I think George put it once. In fact talking about George he dropped a leaflet in my bag and said ‘this is the most interesting thing here today’ - (he may have said ‘only’). There were a group of beekeepers there from Prague, visitors of either the Lincoln or Leicester beekeepers, who had a stand selling novelties AND a ‘self-balanced reversible tangentially-radial extractor’. It was reported to me that George had been seen stroking it so I hot footed it over there to get the news hot off the press as it were.

It was a very large extractor, must take about 24 frames, so it was only for serious honey extracting, but it does as the description says. It is loaded as a radial but as it spins the frames, held securely on both sides, swing to the side so the extracting is almost tangential. It then reverses and spins the other way, the frames swing over so the other side is extracted. Tangential extraction is more efficient than radial but normally the extra work of removing and turning the frames makes radial more attractive. The price was probably very reasonable for what it was but at £1200 it was more than the average pocket would endure.

Dr. Jeff Pettis gave two lectures. He is a honeybee researcher from the United States Department of Agriculture - Bee Research Service and the President of the American Association of Professional Apiculturists. He described the small hive beetle which is about the size of the head and thorax of a honey bee and its devastating affects on colonies in Florida. It is not to be confused with the large hive beetle which looked to me like a dung beetle, is about 4x the size of a bee and can easily be excluded from hives if it becomes a menace. Aethina tumida is a native of Africa, and mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that the race in the US originated in South Africa. It first appeared in South Carolina in 1996 and is spreading. The beetles feed on a mixture of brood and pollen and can survive, but not reproduce, on just honey . They lay eggs on comb, the larvae hatch and as they feed they produce a great deal of slime which the bees avoid and seem unable to remove. When fully grown the larvae migrate en masse through gaps in the hive and make their way to the ground where they finish their life cycle in the ground as pupae. When the adult emerges it is able to fly very well and thus gets dispersed. It cannot survive the cold and spends the winters buried under the bees in the winter cluster!!! The bees cannot remove the beetles, they are too hard or shiny for them to get hold of, but they can contain a light infection by removing the eggs and pushing the beetles out to the periphery of the frame where it is cold.  Treatment is possible with organo-phosphates. The worst affected places are the honey houses where 1000s of supers are stored for extraction. The hopeful thing for us is that we have such a nice cold damp climate. The larvae like to pupate in sandy soil, so cold clay is probably advantageous, but the adults have to emerge and make their way to a hive in order to survive our winters.

There were other talks but I did not attend them.

Most of the suppliers of beekeeping equipment come to this convention to display their wares. There are many bargains to pick up, everyone seems to have one item that is cheapest from them !!! So if you are prepared to take your time and look at them all you can do well. It is definitely the place to go if you need to shop, and you should go once to see what it is like anyway.

Letter from France

Jan Beart-Albrecht

I see Laurence selling her honey at the market most weeks: long, blonde hair, talking and laughing with cus­tomers or other stallholders. But last week, when I went to buy some sweet chestnut honey, she looked serious. She and her fellow beekeepers have a problem, and they want the world to know about it.

Laurence is a third‑generation api­culturist, following in her grand­mother's and mother's footsteps, though it was originally her intention to go into sheep farming. "But if you don't already have a farm and land, it's expensive to buy. Beekeeping is a good solution, because you don't need land of your own. Our hives are placed on other people’s land, and we pay rent in honey, 5 kg of honey a year."

Laurence runs the business in the Limousin in central France with her husband Philippe and a younger business partner, Sebastien. Together they make up what is known as a Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun. Laurence and Philippe are not native to the Limousin, but bought the farmhouse after Philippe had fallen in love with the green and empty Haute Vienne département.

They make organic honey, which means adhering to a long list of restrictions, but it results in a high quality product. With about 800 hives, theirs is a good-sized business, and until recently the three of them made a comfortable living, having built up from the early days of market stalls only, to supplying wholesalers and confectionery manufacturers, and even exporting to Germany at one point.

That was until the bees started dying. Each hive contains tens of thousands of bees, and for the past five years Laurence has been losing 200 or 300 hives each winter. She shows me the empty hives piled up in their farm courtyard. Normally their occupants would be over-wintering, having built up enough energy and food supplies to get them through the lean times. She is not alone: since 1996 the number of hives in France has plummeted to 1m from 1.45m. So what is causing the bees to sicken and die?

Laurence knows the answer: this period of the past five years corresponds exactly to the time when French farmers began sowing seeds that are pre-treated with insecticides. These systemic products are designed to destroy aphids, in this case on sunflowers. The connection is clear: honey yield per hive is variable, about 20kg a year, but when Laurence was making sunflower honey it could be as high as 40kg a hive. “It was great for the bees, because sunflowers flower late in the year, so the bees were stocking up reserves in their bodies, and everything was fine for the winter,” she said. “If we don’t make sunflower honey, there is nothing in this region after the chestnut trees flower, apart from ivy in September/October, and that’s very hit and miss. And our fall in production was linked directly to the sunflower, so it is clear that’s where the problem was.”

The worst culprit is the chemical imidacloprid, found in Gaucho, among other products. According to the manufacturer, Bayer, Gaucho is no longer present in sunflower plants 60 days after sowing the treated seeds. But a confidential report last year on tests carried out by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique for the agriculture ministry reveals that it persists for up to 80 days after sowing, so it is present in the nectar and pollen collected by bees.

Not only this, but it affects the central nervous system of bees at a much lower dose than that claimed by Bayer ‑ three parts per billion, not 5,000 parts per billion. And the product remains in the soil for up to four years after it has been used, contaminating non‑treated maize and sunflowers sown in subsequent years.

The agriculture ministry has suspended treatment of sunflower seeds with Gaucho for two years; but that doesn't solve Laurence's problems. Sunflower and oil‑seed rape honeys, which had been included as organic honey until now, have been with­drawn from that category this year. Not only is Laurence's yield down, but she has to feed the bees through the winter with honey or sugar solution. And still they die. We went into the woods to see a group of hives, and sure enough, one hive contained nothing but a carpet of dead bees, even the queen. Buying in a new stock of bees to repopulate 200‑300 hives isn't cheap.

As Laurence puts it: "The death of bees is an alarm signal, because it is the only insect that is domesticated and it is closely observed by humans. So if bees die, we notice it. But there are all the other insects as well, of course."

And there are repercussions fur­ther up the food chain. These insect­icides stay in the sunflower seeds from which oil is made, and in maize that is ­fed to cows as silage, whose dairy pro­duce we consume. An alarm signal indeed.

From the Guardian Weekly, 26th April 2001

          (see comment on p4 of May’s BBKA News - Ed.

At the AGM of the BBKA Jill Chirnside was created an honorary life member in recognition of her work for them.

We are very proud to have her in our association and congratulate her and wish her well.