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!!