Editorial

The Beeholder, January 2009.

A New Year, and with luck all our bees will have survived the winter.
Theoretically the weather over the Xmas/New Year period has been excellent for our bees. Cold, low wind and low rainfall. The bees will be balled up tight and not tempted out in search of non-existent nectar. The ideal situation is a hard dry winter and an early spring where the temperature rises consistently. We don’t want our bees flying when there is nothing to collect. Some beekeepers delight in a warm day in February when the bees dash out seemingly revelling in the sun. OK it is nice to see them after the long winter absence but on such a day the washing also goes out and is ruined by the mass defecation of the bees. Is there any scientific evidence that a mid-winter defecation is good? The bees return having collected nothing and expended valuable winter stores and irritated those in the family whose goodwill is needed for the rest of the year.

Controversies about the best strategy for overwintering bees seem to increase every year. Do we feed over winter and when? Do we treat small hives or Nucs any different from large hives? A few years ago we worried whether to treat for varroa, then it was a worry about which treatment to use. Then whether to treat for Nosema and now it is whether to drip Oxalic acid over bees as a varroa reducer.

Increasing I’m finding sympathy with the “when in doubt do nought” brigade. But I am reminded of The Bee Inspectorate’s stricture “Doing nothing is NOT an option”.
We are advised either to buy just one beekeeping book and stick with it or else buy 6 and choose from them a regime that fits into your life style. Somehow we should distinguish between controversy and confusion. And, in response to members’ requests the MBKA committee is working to have a training programme this year. This will obviously be geared to new beekeepers but will also allow some of us oldies to fill in the blanks of our knowledge. It will be a forum to discuss all the various theories in the text books.

Our attendance at the Welsh Food Fair last year was a matter of chance, we were offered a spare space and thought “why not?” . The success of our attendance at that fair has altered our whole outlook. This year we are being more pro-active (did that word even exist 4 years ago?) . As well as having a training programme , we are attending the Welsh Food Fair again and the Honey/Bee section at the Shrewbury Flower Show and we will also be at some of the village fetes around the county.

We have also been invited to talk to Schools by Powys County Council. MBKA has two observation hives as well as some publicity stands: we should make more use of them. We’ll need a team of volunteers for all this. Come on, Hands Up, don’t be shy.

And finally, remember that as an encouragement to turn up to the AGM on February 19th we have a free raffle of a new bee hive for all those members present. But the AGM meetings have always been fun without the bribe!

Happy New Year , Tony Shaw January 2009

New Members

The Beeholder, January 2009.

We welcome as new members :

Rev & Mrs John & Bridget Newbury, Llangurig; Mr Julian Kirkham, Berriew;
Mr Chris Leech, Old Hall; Ms Frances Blockley, Tylwch; Mr Lembit Opik, Newtown;
and David & Emma Ashley, Old Hall.

Not all have bees yet and maybe some don’t even want bees just yet BUT do keep these members in mind if you have a spare swarm. Neighbourly advice is always welcome and is more likely to be appropriate than that of a beekeeper 20 miles away in a different climate.
The Data Protection Act prevents me from publishing emails and addresses for members but I can recommend the local telephone directory.

Good luck in their Beekeeping or bee watching career

The plate

he Beeholder, January 2009.

The photo, left, is of a plate left at Roy Mander’s house during the apiary meeting there on July 27th . Will the owner please contact Roy to arrange collection.
Roy is our Swarm Co-ordinator contact him at
tel 01938 555834

Report on Meetings

The Beeholder, January 2009.

For the last two meetings we been having tea, biscuits and wine on the tables half hour before the meeting. It’s an experiment that seems popular It has certainly encouraged informal bee discussions before the main speaker. October’s meeting was an opportunity to examine bygone beekeeping equipment. The discussion was lead by our old friend from Shropshire, Brian Goodwin, who brought his considerable collection of classic beekeeping equipment for us to examine. We were lucky to have our own president Jim Crundwell in frisky form at the other end of the room giving another slant on some of the exhibits. It was a wonderfully humbling experience to be in the middle of these two titans of the beekeeping world. The new format allowed an easy exchange of individual experiences
of 2008 beekeeping.

The anecdotes about 2008 continued at the November meeting before our speaker Nigel Jones started his talk about Solitary Bees. Nigel is a self taught amateur entomologist who has been collecting and studying hoverflies, various other families of flies, bees, wasps and various other insects for twenty years now. He emphasised that he was “Still learning!”
As well as describing a number of solitary bees that we could expect to see in our gardens Nigel showed us a number of beautiful specimens. His favourite was obviously the strangely named Hairy Footed Flower Bee. Next time we have a meeting like this we should arrange to have a collection of hand-lenses on each table. The 3 or 4 we had during the meeting were just not enough. Nigel also explained how to make homes (which he called traps) for these bees (see this item below) and where to place them. Our expectation is that people will make homes for solitary bees and put them in their gardens during the next few weeks.

Nigel is coming back to talk to us on 17th May at the Apiary meeting at Roy Norris’s place. During that meeting we’ll be examining Roy’s hives as well as the solitary bee homes Roy will have placed round his land. Anybody who makes a spare set of solitary bee nests can place them at Roy’s place during February/March and we could see which the bees prefer. Maybee a prize for the maker of the most popular bee home. To find out more about Solitary bees visit Nigel’s website www.insectpix.net

We should expect to rendezvous Hairy Footed Flower Bees in gardens in April and early May. In 2007 the Solitary Bee Unit asked Shropshire Wildlife Trust members to look for the Hairy Footed Flower bee in their gardens and they got quite a lot of sightings, once people knew what to look for they could find them. Nigel and his team would be delighted to get some records for this bee from Monty Beekeepers, as it has not been recorded in the county by the National Recording Scheme, but they are certain to be present in the county.

Maybe it’s appropriate to remind members that Honey Bees work harder the greater is the population of other pollinators in an area!!

Bees win Earth Watch debate

The Beeholder, January 2009.

Several Bee Keeping Associations, as well as our own, have noticed an increasing number of members who do not actually keep honey bees. Interest in the honey bee has become a way of expressing interest in the environment in general and an acceptance that the health of the honey bee population is an indication of the health of the environment. Confirmation of this can be gleaned from the annual EarthWatch debate held on November 20th 2008.

The debate discussed “Irreplaceable – The World’s Most Invaluable Species”, Bats, bees Fungi, plankton and primates each had their illustrious academic champions. Members of the audience had to make up their minds whether to vote with their heads or their hearts .. An initial vote put Professor David Thomas in the lead with plankton, followed by Dr. George McGavin representing bees; then the pair were each given another five minutes to win over support for their species - and everything changed.

Bees were declared the most invaluable species on the planet Dr. McGavin, won the day with his persuasive argument, explaining how one quarter of a million species of flowering plants depend on bees. He added that many species are crucial to world agriculture, and without them, we would lose not only flowering plants, but many fruit and vegetables. Personally I would have gone a lot further and pointed out that without bees there would be no soya or clover and without these two crops the whole of the dairy and meat industry would collapse. A world without Tofu and Hamburgers would soon galvanise the Vegans and Carnivores into uniting to save the bees.

Click onto www.earthwatch.org/europe/newsroom/science/news-3-result1.html where there’s an opportunity to listen to the speakers argue their case: and listen to the finalists battle it out between plankton and bees.

Honeybee sex mystery solved at last.

The Beeholder, January 2009.

Subtitle = Why we fail in Wales

The low population density of Montgomeryshire means that many of us find it easy to maintain genetically isolated stocks. Having the nearest neighbouring beekeeper more than 3 miles away theoretically means that we can select for certain behaviour traits. But research shows that unless we have genetically diverse drones then we may have weak or collapsing colonies. There is anecdotal evidence that in isolated apiaries 5 or fewer hives are not viable in the long term and that the introduction of a swarm from elsewhere seems to give a fillip to the whole apiary. Understanding the genetics of sex determination in the honey bee allows us to understand what may have been happening.

In honeybees males don’t have fathers, queens are promiscuous and bee breeders struggle to develop pure-bred animals – and now we finally understand why.

It was 1845 when a Polish parish priest named Johann Dzierzon discovered that male bees have no fathers . Unfertilized bee eggs, which we now know contain only one set of chromasones (haploidy), develop into males. Fertilised eggs , with two sets of chromasones (diploidy)), become females. Ants and wasps have the same sex determination system, but how it works has been a mystery.

Occasionally, however, it goes wrong, and a fertilised egg develops into a diploid male, whose offspring are sterile. It is these oddments that allow scientists to find the gene responsible. It’s called the Complementary Sex Determinator (csd), the gene works in a completely different way to anything geneticists have discovered before.

There are 19 different variations of the gene. Females have 2 copies whereas males have one. Although the precise mechanism is not yet understood, as long as two different versions of csd are inherited, a female developes from an egg. An unfertilised egg, with just one copy of csd, becomes male (Cell, vol 114, p 419). The system goes wrong when a fertilised egg inherits two copies of the same version of the csd gene. Instead of a female developing the result is a diploid male. Such animals are usually destroyed by the workers at the larval stage.

As beekeepers we try to breed for desirable traits such as, good behaviour, high productivity and disease-resistance but inevitably we are causing inbreeding and the chance that the number of csd variations being reduced. Thus fertilized eggs with two copies of the same csd variation are far more likely to occur. These eggs develop into sterile diploid males. And that means that inbred honeybee colonies quickly die out.

Females probably mate with many males to ensure that they encounter partners with different csd genes and thus avoid producing useless diploid males. Attempts by beekeepers to create pure bred lines have probably failed because there is not enough csd diversity in the strains we create. In the future, it maybe possible for breeders to screen stocks to ensure there is enough csd diversity to keep bees fertile. For further reading try Frontiers in Zoology 2006, 3:1 Single locus complementary sex determination in Hymenoptera: an "unintelligent" design?

Tony Shaw

Hey Bumblebees are Different

The Beeholder, January 2009.

Only solitary bees will use the kind of bee home described in the next two pages. The needs of bumblebees are very different - their nests consist of communal wax combs, which they construct mostly in holes underground or in long tussocky grass. Bumblebee boxes are available from many wildlife gardening outlets, and some are hugely expensive - yet bumblebees rarely take to them.

Beware wasting your money! Better to encourage the kind of flowery habitat, that bumblebees like, not over-manicured, and let them find their own nest sites. The website of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, has good advice about bumblebee nests, and how you can make inexpensive nest sites yourself. www.bumblebeeconservationtrust.co.uk My own way, which, I can thoroughly recommend, is to collect the waste bedding from mice or rat cages. Rags of cotton or wool are best, (the rats prefer these materials too rather than saw-dust) but if you can only find old ratsmelling sawdust (pet shops tend to be aesthetic rather than practical) then mix in some of the wool fibre festooning sheep fences.

This is probably why rheumatism died out in the 1920's.

How to Make Homes for Solitary Bees

The Beeholder, January 2009.

As well as bumble bees and honeybees (that live collectively) there are some 200 species of wild bees in the UK that are called 'solitary bees' because they make individual nest cells for their larvae. Some species nest in small tunnels or holes in the ground or in sandy banks, piles of sand, or crumbling mortar. Others use the hollow stems of dead plants such as brambles, or tunnels previously bored into dead wood by beetles.

Solitary bees are harmless and do not sting, they do not live in hives or build combs, and they do not swarm. If you find them (for example in old house walls) please leave them alone. Colonies are very faithful to their nest sites and may have been living there for many decades. They are part of the 'fine grain' of your local biodiversity - something to be cherished. A number of species are commonly seen in gardens, and they are very useful as they pollinate fruit crops. It is easy for gardeners to encourage them. By drilling holes in dry logs or blocks of wood it is possible to create artificial nesting sites for them.

Constructing the Homes

All you need is a series of holes in a piece of wood; a fence post will do. But make sure the wood is not treated with a preservative. A more elaborate scheme would be wooden box, open on one side, which is then fixed to a sunny fence or wall. You then fill it with blocks of wood or small logs in which you have drilled small holes. A variety of solitary bees will use these tunnels as nest sites. The box does not need to be deeper than 8ins, but must have an overhang at the top to keep rain off. You may already have a wooden box or a drawer from an old wooden chest of drawers that you can adapt for this purpose. If not, you can make one. But you don’t actually need a separate house a single drilled block can be placed anywhere where there is some shelter. Indeed if making more than one block of holes then you could experiment be placing them in different locations around you gardens. February is the best time for putting solitary bee homes in the garden.

Inside the shell of the bee house you stack dry logs or sections of untreated timber, up to about 7ins in length, into which you have drilled a selection of holes of varying diameters between 2mm and 10mm, but no bigger. [Note that the diameter of the holes in some commercially sold wooden solitary bee houses is too large, and the bees cannot use them!] Make sure that holes are drilled slightly upwards into the wood. This prevents rain water from collecting in the borings. Don't make the borings too steep though The open ends of these holes should face outwards, and must be smooth and free of splinters. If necessary use a countersinking drill bit to clean and smooth the entrance to each hole, as the bees will not enter holes with rough splintered wood around them.

Carefully clean away any sawdust, as this will also put them off. If you are able to obtain extra- long drill bits and can drill deep holes into the wood you can make your bee house deeper, and stack longer sections of drilled logs and timber in it.

The bee house must be positioned in full sun, facing south east or south, at least a metre off the ground, and there must be no vegetation in front of it obscuring the entrances to the tunnels. The bees are cold- blooded and rely on the sun's heat to warm them up in the morning, hence the need for a sunny site. They do not have furry coats to keep themselves warm like bumblebees do.

Bees Take up Residence

Different species of Mason Bees (Osmia) will occupy different diameters of tunnels. They will construct a series of 'cells' in each tunnel. In each cell they leave a block of pollen that they have collected from nearby flowers, lay an egg, and wall it up with mud they have collected from the ground nearby (see image below). In dry weather make a small mud patch for them. Later in the summer, Leafcutter Bees (Megachile) may also use the tunnels, lining their cells with circles of leaf that they cut from wild rose bushes. Include some holes of very small diameter (e.g. 2mm) and you will get various other small solitary bees using them. I suggest drilling some blocks just with very small diameter holes, or having a whole separate bee house of them.

Bee activity will cease by mid-September at the latest. You can then remove the occupied logs and tubes and keep them in a cold dry place during the winter, to protect them from winter wet, replacing them in the bee house in March. This is very important – winter wet, not cold, is their enemy. Do not store in a warm place – they need to be cold and dry during the winter. If your bee house has a good overhanging roof and is waterproof you can leave the tubes there. From April onwards, young bees that have over wintered in a dormant state inside the tunnels will emerge, and start the cycle over again.

A whole insect community

Various other sorts of parasitic solitary wasps and parasitic bees will find your bee house once it is occupied, preying on, or taking over, the nest cells of mason bees. Don't worry about them, they are all part of the fascinating community of insects.

Beware Birds!

If you notice Woodpeckers or other birds attacking the tunnels looking for bee larvae, fix a piece of chicken wire across the front of the bee house. This does not seem to deter the bees.

Bundles of dead stems

Bundles of bamboo canes, sawn into lengths about 8ins long just below a joint may also be occupied by solitary bees, as will bundles of rigid dried stems of various herbaceous garden plants, especially raspberries, brambles, teasels, and elder. Some species of bees prefer these stems and will not use drilled holes. The stems must be kept dry. Rolls of dried reeds (sold as portable screens in garden centres) can also be cut up and placed in your bee house will be used by very small species of solitary bees. If you make a larger bee house you will have scope to include all of these nesting opportunities.

Adapted from an article by Marc Carlton

Extracts from Ceredigion Notes

The Beeholder, January 2009.

We all get the quarterly Gwenynwyr Cymru, Welsh Beekeeper, as part of our MBKA subscription. Those of us who do not speak Welsh were missing out on the Welsh articles. But Welsh learner Margaret Franklin has submitted a translation from the Winter 2008 edition. Read her translation opposite and get inspired about what a learner can do. Margaret and husband Eric were the organisers of the MBKA raffles and were particularly good at getting good prizes and prizing money from our pockets.     (Ed)

Extracts from Ceredigion Notes by W. I. Griffiths

Translated from the Welsh by Margaret Franklin

This article was written after Mr Griffiths had seen the film ‘The City of the Bees’ and he compares the attitude of financiers who fill their own pockets to that of the bees who work solely for the survival of their colony.

The season this year has made me realise that I don’t know a lot about what’s going on in the hive even after half a century of experience. They or I have made the strangest mess this year. It started about the middle of summer after returning from holiday and learning from Meiron (the little helper) that there were several stocks preparing to swarm. My usual routine is to move the queens from those hives and if they are young to keep them in a nutshell queen cage. If they are old then destroy them between finger and thumb; no sentimentality in the world of beekeeping. While going through every stock I search in detail for queen cells and leave two that are open. I emphasize the open each time – ensure as well that there is a good larva maggot with enough queen food in each one. Make the survey, of course, without turning the frame upside down, so as not to drown the larva in it’s food. This is only part of the preparations. It is necessary to come back in six days to see that there are no other cells started or even closed. By now the queens in the two cells will be near to hatching and if everything is looking good then cut the weaker of the two cells out. The reason to make a second inspection of the queen cells after six days, is that there will be eggs and young larvae left in the hive after choosing the two original cells. The bees will often have prepared other queen cells by using these larvae and eggs. It is important to remember the ability of the hive to produce sealed queen cells within four days through using larvae three days old – so a stock can swarm within four days after losing a queen. This can happen often when cutting out cells is used as a way of restraining swarming. Perhaps the queens from these cells will not turn out very well – but who knows? Having done all of this very carefully I expected to see the queens laying after a fortnight – but nothing at all. Three times eggs and young larvae were put in a number of hives but with no result. Every time the stocks were opened they were complaining noisily – proving that things weren’t good. By mid-August they had weakened quite a bit. There was a little spring honey in some of them and I decided to take this before the other bees started to rob. It was impossible to clear the bees with Porter escapes and after brushing and brushing they were still sticking to the frames. I must confess they were in a bad temper – I have noticed that bees are always in a bad temper if things aren’t good in the hive.

Towards the end of August, one fine afternoon, one of the few we had, I noticed that a number of the queenless hives were busy carrying pollen from water balsam. After opening them I realised that each one had brood. The queens, raised secretly, must have taken over a month to mate and start laying. One even had a sealed queen cell and I couldn’t see anything wrong with the eggs or brood. I don’t know how good the mating and fertilizing of each one was – only time will tell.To crown everything a lot of them have got a problem with food for the winter. Hive after hive, specially the weakest are not prepared to take syrup. This is containing Fumidil B this year to lessen the problem with Nosema Ceranae. I must confess that this is a lot easier to mix than the one we had in the sixties and early seventies. A lot of us used it at that time as Nosema was a problem. We’ve had a fairly quiet period since then until this Ceranae has come recently. I don’t think that the Fumidil flavours the syrup but somehow or another the food is taken very slowly by a number of the hives – to make things worse, the chemical within a fortnight of being mixed, looses a lot of its strength. Candy fondant will have to be fed to those that are weak. ‘Book wisdom’ says that we shouldn’t feed candy but I don’t see any problem as nearly every nuke with five frames has worked well on it for years. To me the purpose of candy is to save winter food by feeding them from now until Christmas, rather than to use it to rescue colonies at the start of the year. If it is used now the weather is not too cold to collect water to soften it and this will save the little food that is in the hive for the colder weather in January and February. On the whole the bees don’t store candy as they do with syrup but rather use it from day to day. Because of this it’s important that the candy be placed as close as possible to the food (or the bit of food) that’s in the hive not on top of the crown board. The reason for this is obvious enough. While the weather is fairly warm the bees tend to collect around the candy but if the weather turns cold they will cluster in the place where the candy is but fail to use it because it is too cold to fetch water. If the weather continues cold for long they will often be too far from their natural food and thus fall between two stools.

In my opinion we need to rethink the time we feed before the winter. Most of us expected to start feeding in September and to finish in the course of one month. That was in a time when the temperature was a lot lower than nowadays. There were periods of frost before New Years Day with the ground completely solid until half way through March – and this without mentioning thick snow. By now the winters are open enough to feed throughout the period – perhaps as well as often the bees can’t live on stores that have soured because the syrup fed was too weak and so couldn’t be capped to keep it edible.

By now it is time to prepare the Society’s programme for the winter. Something that is getting harder and harder every year from what is heard from some secretaries of our societies. It is so important for everybody to be a Society member not only to learn from others but also to share their experiences with those who are learning. By now we need all sorts of drugs to keep bees healthy and we could save a few pennies by buying in bulk and then sharing out.

From Gwenynwyr Cymru, Gaeaf 2008

Bees keep Pests off Plants

The Beeholder, January 2009.

Bees can be good for plants in more ways than one. Researchers in Germany discovered that the flapping of bees' wings scared off caterpillars, reducing leaf damage. Many wasp species lay their eggs in caterpillars, and so caterpillars have evolved mechanisms to avoid them. The sounds of bees' and wasps' wings are similar.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, the scientists suggest this is an added bonus of having bees around, as well as the pollination they provide.

"Our findings indicate for the first time that visiting honeybees provide plants with a totally unexpected advantage," they write. "They not only transport pollen from flower to flower, but in addition also reduce plant destruction by herbivores."

The experiment used bell pepper and soybean plants, beet-armyworm caterpillars, and honeybees. Researchers set up experimental plots of the plants, added the caterpillars, and allowed the bees to enter some of the plots but not others. When the caterpillars had turned into pupae and buried away in the soil, the scientists went back into the cages and measured the extent of leaf damage - the amount of munching that the caterpillars had indulged in.

In plants that had not fruited, the presence of bees reduced caterpillar damage by about 60%. The researchers believe the caterpillars were sensing the bees' presence through the tiny hairs on their bodies, which enable them to detect vibrations in the air.

"These sensory hairs are not fine-tuned," said lead researcher Jurgen Tautz from the Biozentrum at Wurzburg University. "Therefore, caterpillars cannot distinguish between hunting wasps and harmless bees."

When plants had borne fruit, the caterpillars were able to hide in the fruit and the bees had much less effect.

from an article by Richard Black BBC’s Environment correspondent 22nd Dec 2008

In the BEEginning:

The Beeholder, January 2009.

the evolution of Hymenoptera (bees wasps and ants)

This is a long but interesting subject and will be
printed in stages in successive issues of the Beeholder.

Recently, fossils of what are thought to be the nests of solitary bees were found in 200-million-year-old petrified wood in Arizona. These are "trace" fossils meaning that only circumstantial evidence, like footprints, rather than fossilized parts of the organism itself were discovered-- so there is some doubt as to whether the galleries bored in the wood were made by bees or by some other insect. Much less questionable is the fossilized bee which was discovered in the late 1980's preserved in a lump of 80-million-year-old amber from what is now New Jersey. That means that the poor creature became mired in the (then) sticky tree sap at a time when the dinosaurs were galumphing about the future sites of Hackensack and Passaic. The dinosaurs played their parts and then faded from centre stage to become modern birds .Today, few people would have trouble distinguishing an archaeopteryx from a flamingo but even to the trained eye the 80-million-year-old bee is remarkably similar to existing species of bees.

Bees were already a well established part of the ecosystem during the hey-day of the dinosaur and had, by this time, developed the biological structures and behaviours necessary to successfully maintain the ecological niche which they still occupy. Although the aforementioned specimen represents the oldest known fossil bee, its highly specialized form indicates that, by the end of the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, bees were already seasoned travellers on the road of evolution (and had already developed sociality) and it is estimated that the first protobee appeared about 125 million years ago-- a time when flowering plants were assuming a more prevalent role in the global ecosystem.

To be continued next issue...

What do I need to start beekeeping?

The Beeholder, January 2009.

Print out these pages and give them to a friend
Obviously you need a hive with bees, but you need to make a decision on what type of hive and what type of bee. You also need some spare hive parts - indeed a whole spare hive is useful so that you can deal with swarms easily, a cheap second hand one would be fine.

The Complete (single walled) Hive:

• Roof
• Crown board
• Up to three or more (honey) super* boxes
• Queen excluder
• Brood box
• Floor

The Beekeepers Equipment:

• Bee suit and veil
• Suitable boots
• Bee gloves
• Smoker
• Hive tool
• Queen marking cage and pen
• A feeder to feed your bee’s sugar syrup
• A Porter bee escape (a one way valve for bees)
• ONE good book for reference (Better to have just one at first ...avoids confusion!)

How much time does it take up?

Beekeeping is a seasonal hobby therefore the time varies with the seasons. In the middle of winter there is practically nothing to do, except to occasionally check for physical damage or snow blocking the entrances. The busiest time is the early summer when each hive should be checked weekly to stop swarming and add supers. This need take no longer than a few minutes when you get the hang of it.

How much is it going to cost me to get started?

You can spend a small fortune if you buy everything new and buy everything possible and make the beekeeping suppliers very happy. In practice in the UK a second hand hive with bees cost around £50-70 and your local association might do you a good deal as a new member. A new bee suit and veil will be between £40-£100 the other bits and pieces if you buy new such as smoker, gloves etc should come to less than £100. The most expensive piece of equipment

you will want within a year or two will be an honey extractor and these start at around £150 up, most associations will allow you use of a shared extractor.

Do I need to belong to a local association?

This is to be highly recommended as your association will keep you in touch with local expertise, and local problems and conditions. They will often run training programs and undoubtedly have topical meetings, newsletters etc. In the UK most associations are affiliated with the BBKA which means you have joined two associations really. Your BBKA membership gives you third party and product (honey) insurance.

When & how should I start?

think of beekeeping as circle, it is locked to the seasons and you could start at any point in that circle but it is best to start by planning and reading and talking to beekeepers. So the best time to start that process is late summer or autumn by first joining your local association. You may not even need to join initially, most will allow you to attend as guest or visitor. Then go to their winter meetings usually monthly where you will meet real beekeepers and listen to talks and subjects related to the craft On the other hand you could use tea breaks during meetings of the Montgomeryshire BeeKeepers Association to ask around who has spare equipment and plead poverty or merely state that you could give the equipment a good home. That is how I got most of my equipment. I think beekeepers have a duty to pass on old equipment when they downsize.
Hey are you listening out there? Yes YOU...you guys know who I am referring to.

Fungus Foot Baths Could Save Bees

The Beeholder, January 2009.

One of the biggest world wide threats to honey bees, the varroa mite, could soon be about to meet its nemesis. Researchers at the University of Warwick are examining naturally occurring fungi that kill the varroa mite.

It is well known that bees world wide are suffering serious declines and one of the causes of that decline is the varroa mite, Varroa destructor. No natural insect or other enemies of varroa species have been identified on the varroa or on their bee hosts. Now Defra-funded studies by Warwick HRI, and Rothamsted Research have found some new natural enemies of varroa from other hosts.
University of Warwick researcher Dr Dave Chandler said: ”We examined 50 different types of fungi that afflict other insects (known as entomopathogenic fungi) to see if they would kill varroa. We needed to find fungi that were effective killers of varroa, had a low impact on the bees and worked in the warm and dry conditions typically found in bee hives. Of the original 50 fungi we are now focusing on four that best match those three requirements.” The fungi typically kill the Varroa mites within 100 hours . ( see picture next page below)

Although the fungi occur naturally the mites rarely encountered them inside hives because honeybees kept their homes so clean. So the challenge is to find a method of introducing a constant supply of the appropriate fungi into the hive . A number of approaches are being considered including having fungal footbaths at the main entrances to hives. However the complex environment within bee hives means that more devious means of application may be needed.

Dr Chandler said the aim was not to eliminate the Varroa mite, but to ensure that populations were kept to very low levels. The fact that the fungal controls kills Varroa by different methods could mean that the mites never develop the kind of resistance that is making pesticides less effective.

Listen to Dr Dave Chandler discussing his work here:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/audio/?podcastItem=chandler.mp3

Dr Chandler himself hosted the Society for Invertebrate Pathology’s international conference at the University of Warwick, in August 2008. In the corridors around the Special Session on Honeybee Health the rivalries between research teams from NZ , the USA and Great Britain surfaced. Finding a cure to the world wide Varroa problem is the Holy Grail of the bee health: whoever can get out the first patent for a successful cure will make some very serious money.

New Zealand scientists consider themselves in the forefront having discovered a Metarhizium fungus that kills Varroa but doesn’t affect bees or the honey. Initially it was effective in the lab only, but now HortResearch have developed a delivery system that has shown a 95% kill rate against Varroa in the field. HortResearch is now working with Becker Underwood, an international company based in Australia, to commercialise the product for the beekeeping industry to use.

All research teams are looking at the footbath method of delivering the fungus into the hive. It is this link between Varroa and fungus that can be most easily be patented. However researchers have to be careful not to fall foul of an existing patent on bee footbath. Strangely this patent was (is) for infecting the feet of bees as they leave the hive. “Bee footbaths were originally designed so that bees would take beneficial fungi to flowers”, explains Joseph Kovach, Associate Professor of Entomology at Ohio State University who has a patent on the apparatus. “This idea is the reverse, with spores going into the hive. It is an efficient way to inoculate a hive…the footbaths[allow the bees to carry] the spores on their legs and disseminate them throughout the hive.”

The patented footbath is attached to the entrance of the hive and has been found to be so easy and effective that researchers into bee health are taking out licences to use the method to induce fungi (sometimes with a electrostatic charge) into the hive.

In public most academics deny that there is any holding back of information about bee health but in private most accept that a strong rivalry and secrecy between research teams is holding back the release of an effective cure for varroa. However, we beekeepers should be able to buy an effective fungus based anti-varroa treatment within 5 years ..maybe 10..maybe...

Tony Shaw

Volunteer craftsman please

The Beeholder, January 2009.

The observation hive for honey bees shown below would require a skilled craftsman. Having one of these to take around schools would be a great boon to the teaching of biology in Montgomeryshire. The hive when filled with comb and bees shows how bees live in their “natural state”.