7:30am Saturday 29th May 2010
The main event during April is the ‘Spring Convention’ organised by the British Beekeepers Association and held over three days at Stoneleigh Park in Warwickshire.
This is the biggest annual gathering of beekeepers in the UK and this year it is expected to be especially well attended as the interest in all things apicultural continues to grow.
The public day is Saturday, April 17 when there will be trade stands selling everything beekeepers could possibly need.
There will also be lectures throughout the day at several venues and the line-up of speakers this year is impressive.
Many of the talks, not surprisingly, will be concentrating on research and aspects of bee health.
Sometimes it can be difficult for beekeeping families to attend this sort of event with youngsters in tow, so a new introduction this year is a crèche for three to seven year olds to be called ‘The Brood Box’.
Mums and dads will be free to enjoy some of the lectures knowing that their offspring are safe and having fun. There are limited places in the crèche so check the website www.britishbeekeepers.com for details and book early.
Martin Smith, newly elected President of the BBKA says: ‘Our membership has grown by nearly 40 per cent over the last year to more than 16,000’.
However trying to ensure that these new beekeepers receive adequate basic training has become a problem because of the sheer weight of numbers.
The BBKA have been busy working on a new education initiative. Details were still being finalised as I was writing this but all should be revealed at the ‘Spring Convention’ and I will be able to report on it in a later issue.
One of the talking points at the convention is sure to be Omlet’s new plastic bee hive called the Beehaus.
Most smallholders will already be familiar with the brightly coloured Eglu chicken houses available from Omlet which have become hugely successful.
Now Omlet have turned their attention to bees. The Beehaus comes in a modern shape and in a choice of bright colours: traditional white, grassy green, yolky yellow, posh purple or really red.
It will be interesting to hear how experienced beekeepers react when they see it.
What else is available?
If you are fascinated by what goes on in the colony but prefer to keep the bees at more than arm’s length then ‘The Honeybee’, a new wide screen DVD by Gill Sentinella will keep you glued to the screen for nearly 45 minutes.
It is the story of a bee colony which includes remarkable close-up shots of the queen, workers and drones in their everyday lives. Starting with the excitement of the swarm it follows the colony through the year showing communication within the nest, wax production, foraging, defence and much more. There are nice touches of humour and I particularly like the music used to accompany the waggle dance sequence.
The most amazing thing about ‘The Honeybee’ is that it is not made by a professional film maker. Gill Sentinella describes herself simply as ‘a beekeeper with a camera’. That hardly does her work justice. At around £10 this beautiful film is really good value for money. For more information or to obtain a copy go to wannabeefilms@hotmail.com or tel: 07950 798518.
Inspection Back to the real bees now and a warm day in April is a good time for the spring hive inspection. With the colony not yet at full strength it is an ideal time to find and mark the queen. It is always useful if you can tell whether the queen in the hive is the one that you expect to be there.
A coloured dot on her thorax or a clipped pair of wings will enable you to identify her. Sometimes a colony will replace their queen if she is not up to standard or if she is getting old.
This often happens later in the year without the beekeeper knowing it has happened. So if at spring inspection time there is a queen in the hive that does not have the coloured dot which you put on your queen last year, then you will know that you have a new queen (unless of course you didn’t let the paint dry properly and the bees nibbled it off).
Marking queens is a useful skill to learn. To make it easier there is a nifty new device which uses the tube and plunger technique to move the queen down the tube. The plunger can then be twisted, turning the queen into the best position for marking her. Practice on some drones first. The turn and mark queen cage costs less than £5 and is a useful new gadget from E.H.Thorne.
Queen bees are expensive to buy but don’t always give good results. Rearing your own new queens is another skill worth learning and with the price of queens these days it makes sound economic sense. Producing the queen cells is fairly straight forward but getting the queens properly mated is the tricky bit. You really need to rear more queens than you will finally need so that you can select the best ones.
Mini mating nuclei are ideal for this purpose, they are fun to use and only take a cupful of bees to set up. I particularly like the look of Thorne’s new stackable micro-mating nucleus which has a removable floor ventilator and adjustable disc entrance. Well worth a try at under a tenner.
We should all be on the lookout for small hive beetle, a foreign pest that if it reaches our shores will prove to be the next big challenge that beekeepers have to face. A simple device for trapping/monitoring purposes costs about £1 and every apiary should have one.
Also new this year are powder free nitrile disposable gloves and some new squeezy containers ideal for liquid honey.
There is also a new shape of hive tool from Germany which has a claw instead of a hook.
It is a combined scraper and frame lifter and looks strong enough to last several lifetimes. More info at www.thorne.co.uk Looking ahead there will be a new look to the next National Honey Show. The 2009 Honey Show was a great success with a 30 per cent increase in visitors.
For 2010 the show will be much bigger with a proper lecture theatre and a new hall for the trade stands as well. Put the date in your diary now October 28-30 2010.
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